courtesy Gail Okawa / Matsuura Family Collection
Artistic rendering of the Santa Fe Internment camp.
An early-spring walk at Frank Ortiz Dog Park keeps your eyes trailing the blooming wildflowers as dogs of all sizes dash about off-leash sending petals twirling. If you scan the field from the parking lot, eventually you’ll see an out-of-place boulder overlooking the park from a hillside. As a historical marker, its bold, bronze headline is unmistakable: Department of Justice Santa Fe Internment Camp. Yet this marker, meant to remind future generations of a dark chapter in Santa Fe history (a chapter SFR has looked into before), met a flurry of resistance before it was dedicated in 2002.
“It taught me there needed to be healing and understanding,” Gail Okawa tells SFR. “My grandfather was a congressional minister on the Big Island. He built his own parsonage and preached to the plantation workers. Then he was picked up on December 7, 1941, and the rest of it became a mystery to us.”
Courtesy Gail Okawa, from her collection
Okawa was a major force behind the historical marker, which denotes the land which once hosted an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. Okawa is Sansei, that is, a third-generation Japanese-American, and she had a vague idea her late grandfather, the Rev. Tamasaku Watanabe, was relocated from his home, but not much more. He was Issei, first-generation, and he reportedly rarely spoke about his experiences during the war. Okawa was already familiar with New Mexico from various trips when she came across a photo of her grandfather in an internment camp. Therein, a curious yet decidedly Southwestern element caught her eye: Her grandfather and his fellow internees stood before a building with prominent vigas. She knew she needed to do more.
Even as men were still trapped inside burning hulls at Pearl Harbor on Dec 7, 1941, the long path leading Okawa’s grandfather to the Santa Fe Internment Camp had already begun. Decades later, Okawa uncovered through both state and federal archives, a long period of pre-war planning by the US Government, including military intelligence reports as early as the 1920s targeting Japanese residents. While FDR’s infamous Executive Order 9066 is largely believed to be the genesis of the internment camp program, it was, in actuality, a stamp of approval for a plan the military had already put into motion.
“This is one of the big things I learned in my research, which really was me trying to uncover the story behind this photo,” Okawa continues. “[Relocation] didn’t start with EO 9066. It started on December 7. The military had been planning for this for a long time. The size and location of [the interment camp] make Santa Fe unique. Whereas most camps were kept in rural isolated locations, the camp bordered the town.”
Okawa captured the history of the camp in her 2020 book, Remembering Our Grandfather’s Exile, and it remains one of the few detailed examinations of Santa Fe’s involvement in the program. The idea came to Okawa for a 2002-granted sabbatical project from Ohio’s Youngstown State University, where she taught English lit. It took 18 years of research to get her passion project to print. She travels to Santa Fe occasionally to help steward the camp’s memorial marker and with events related to the SFIC.
In her book, Okawa addresses Santa Feans’ fading memories within a suspicion-filled town. Then-children or their descendants describe listening for approaching trains filled with internees. Some subjects describe how the internees would sometimes toss candy to children from the trains. One interviewee recalls that that he knew the internees only as “the enemy,” and in Okawa’s book describes hurling cacti over the camp fence in hopes of hitting someone inside.
Fast forward to 2002, when the camp’s marker was officially dedicated at Frank Ortiz Park. It did not go up without pushback. Okawa notes that those who voiced opposition those 20 years ago likely felt pain and confusion over the concept of marker-versus-monument (kind of similar to the Plaza obelisk, no?) and New Mexican lives lost during WWII. Most painful for locals, perhaps, were memories of the young men from Northern New Mexico who became victims of the 1942 Bataan Death March at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army.
courtesy Gail Okawa / Matsuura Family Collection
“So much of the secrecy led to confusion,” Okawa explains. “This was one of the few camps administered by the Department of Justice, not the military. Residents didn’t know who were being held there, and there was an assumption they were war prisoners, not the men they actually were—young men and fathers, some of whom had sons fighting in the 100th Infantry Battalion [a Japanese-American military unit which became one of the most decorated army units in American history]. I realized this was needed because it was about healing. That boy who threw the cactus attended an event for healing in California, where he got a chance to apologize.”
Along with the New Mexico History Museum, members of the New Mexican Japanese-American Citizen League hope to keep such memories alive as they commemorate the marker’s 20-year anniversary on April 23. The museum is scheduled to host a symposium with Okawa and other speakers, including David Inoue, executive director of the Japanese-American Citizens League and Victor Yamada, project lead for Confinement in the Land of Enchantment at Fort Stanton Historic Site. The program also includes short films and dancers, and concludes with a pilgrimage to the site itself.
There’s an oft-told rumor when it comes to the marker, Okawa says, and it pertains to the flowers and trees that grow nearby. Area residents wonder, she says, whether the camp gardens cultivated in the 1940s still impact what grows in abundance to this day.
“A girl who used to wait for trains sits on her sister’s porch in Casa Solana, thinking about [the camp] with all the flowers and trees in bloom,” she recalls. “It’s kind of rare beautiful thing left behind a place with a lot of suffering.”
Stories, Memories, and Legacies: The Santa Fe Internment Camp and its Historical Marker 20th Anniversary Commemoration: 10 am Saturday, April 23. $7. New Mexico History Museum, 120 Lincoln Ave., (505) 476-5200.
Marker Pilgrimage: 5:30 pm Saturday, April 23. Free. Frank Ortiz Dog Park, 160 Camino de Las Crucitas.
