CRYSTAL CITY, Texas – The Crystal City Pilgrimage Committee, a group of Japanese American and Japanese Peruvian incarceration survivors and their descendants, are preparing to open the first permanent exhibit dedicated to their experiences in Texas during World War II.
Between 1942 and 1948, the little-known Crystal City U.S. Department of Justice site held thousands of Japanese and German nationals, along with their U.S.-born family members. The camp also imprisoned thousands of Latin American families of Japanese ancestry who were extradited from 13 countries in Central and South America as part of a prisoner-of-war exchange program.
The Crystal City detention center exhibit, titled “America’s Last WWII Concentration Camp” and funded by the Tomoye & Henri Takahashi Charitable Foundation, will open during the Crystal City Spinach Festival next month. It will be housed at the My Story Museum — The Story of Us: Tres Historias en Crystal City.
Located in South Texas two hours southwest of San Antonio, Crystal City is currently home to a population of approximately 6,500 who identified as over 95% Hispanic on the 2020 U.S. Census. Known as the “Spinach Capital of the World” and home to the nation’s largest spinach-growing operation, Crystal City also played a significant role during the Chicano Movement as the site of numerous student protests in 1969 that led to school reform and election victories by working-class Mexican American farm laborers who became leaders of the progressive political group The Raza Unida Party.
My Story Museum is the brainchild of former city manager Diana Palacios – herself one of the 1969 student protest leaders, who helped organize a series of school walkouts in response to the unequal treatment that Mexican Americans were receiving at that time. Palacios imagines the museum as a way to bring local history to life for both local residents and out-of-town visitors.
Exhibits will feature topics related to Crystal City’s role in the Chicano Movement, the history of Zavala County, a wall honoring local veterans of foreign wars, and the WWII internment camp.
“By sharing our nation’s hidden histories and the powerful stories of survivors, we can begin to undo the historical amnesia that allows our government to harm children and families today,” said Crystal City Pilgrimage President Kaz Naganuma, whose family was forced to leave a flourishing laundry business in Peru and travel for three weeks by boat and train before being imprisoned in Texas.
One of three core exhibits in the museum, “America’s Last WWII Concentration Camp” is a photographic display compiled by Hector Estrada, a retired plumber and Crystal City native who has devoted his retirement years to telling the story of the camp. In 2000, Estrada visited the Japanese American Museum of San Jose, where he first learned about Crystal City’s WWII prison camp.
“I was shocked and angry that I was never taught this history,” said Estrada in an interview. “I vowed to bring this history back to Crystal City. People need to know the terrible injustice that happened.”
Estrada’s temporary exhibit first debuted at the 2012 Crystal City Spinach Festival and has since been displayed in 2019 and 2023 at the Crystal City Pilgrimage, a semi-annual event that organizes group visits to the former prison site by incarceration survivors and their descendants.
The inclusion of Estrada’s exhibit in the museum is the latest result from years of collaboration between Crystal City leaders in the Mexican American community and Japanese American organizers located throughout the country.
In 2023, town officials helped the Crystal City Pilgrimage Committee to create a memorial monument placed at the former site of the camp swimming pool where two Japanese Peruvian girls, Sachiko Tanabe (13) and Aiko Oyakawa (11) drowned in 1944. In support of the effort, Crystal City municipal workers built a shelter to protect the monument from the sun and renamed the adjacent street “Calle Aiko y Sachiko” in their memory.
Local resident Ruben Salazar is one such leader who has proven instrumental in this ongoing collaboration among communities. Having graduated from Crystal City High School in 1973, Salazar is a social studies teacher who has been teaching and coaching for the last 42 years. After witnessing the photo exhibit that Estrada produced during the 2012 Spinach Festival, Salazar asked if he could be caretaker of the photos.
Struck by the similarities in civil rights abuses faced by both communities, Salazar recalled, “We were treated the same way as Japanese Americans in the ’50s and ’60s. I was called a ‘greaser,’ told to go back and punished for speaking Spanish in school.”
Salazar was so moved by his interactions with Japanese Americans that he joined the pilgrimage committee.
Childhood incarceration survivor and member of the Crystal City Pilgrimage Committee Hiroshi Shimizu notes, “The most gratifying result of our collaboration with the Mexican American community of Crystal City is the solidarity we have developed. We have become one voice, one sensibility, going forward toward the preservation of the history and memory of the Crystal City Family Internment Camp.
“We have worked together on two pilgrimages, a memorial monument near the site, the naming of a street for the two young Peruvian Japanese girls who drowned in the pool in 1945, and a huge effort to preserve the site for future generations.”
My Story Museum will host its grand opening on Saturday, Nov. 9, from 4 to 8 p.m. CT. On Sunday, Nov. 10, from 12 to 2 p.m. CT a panel discussion will be hosted at the museum. Former internees Naganuma and Shimizu, alongside Crystal City community leaders Palacios and Salazar, will explore the shared connections between the Japanese and Mexican American communities that have allowed this project to flourish.
My Story Museum – The Story of Us: Tres Historias en Crystal City is located at 224 E. Zavala Street, Crystal City, TX 98839.
On the Web: www.crystalcitypilgrimage.org