California Registered Historical Landmark no. 850
Karin Higa

Figure 1, Karin and Kevin Higa in front of Manzanar memorial, 1973		Figure 2, Dorthea Lange (1895-1965) #C784 Manzanar Relocation Center, Manzanar, California, June 30, 1942 War Relocation Authority caption "More land is being cleared of sage brush at the southern end of the project to enlarge this War Relocation Authority center for evacuees of Japanese ancestry" 9.5x 7.5 inches. Vintage gelatin silver print, Gift of Peter Norton Family Foundation, Japanese American National Museum (2003.129.11)

When I was a kid, in the early 1970s, my family would pile into our Ceylon yellow VW Bus and make the drive to Manzanar. The five-hour trip took us through the San Fernando Valley, past the strange grids of Palmdale and Lancaster—steets running perpendicular to the highway, along which no houses had yet been built—and into the vast expanse of Death Valley. There wasn’t much to see at Manzanar. Just a stone-and-concrete sentry post off of Highway 395, and beginning in 1973, a small bronze historical plaque that read California Registered Historical Landmark no. 850.

Sometimes we would go as part of the official Manzanar Pilgrimage organized by the Manzanar Committee, an ad-hoc group of former internees whose primary aim was to fight for recognition that the incarceration of Japanese Americans had taken place right there in the Owens Valley. This was a radical goal in an era when public discussion about internment was still taboo. At those early pilgrimages, people would convene at Manzanar, some arriving by bus, others in their own cars. It was a decidedly community affair, a hybrid picnic, memorial service and clean-up project, the last of which was in the interest of keeping the cemetery neat and tidy[figure 1]. In cleaning up trash and debris, beer bottles and tumbleweeds, a spirit of volunteerism and unmanaged, organic collaboration arose. While adults in work gloves tired themselves working in the dust and heat, the few kids who’d been brought, including my brother Kevin and me, would go hunting for lizards and horny toads, or wander around the desolate plain looking for signs of human habitation, until it was time for lunch.

We were all scavenging for history there, and we did it with our heads down, focusing on the land. There were no barracks, only piecemeal remains of concrete foundations, an occasional shard of thick, white, institutional pottery or bits of rusted metal. These fragments were the evidence in our archeological search for truths. We knew that something had happened at Manzanar, and despite the absence of barracks, the traces on the ground gave credence to a history that was not part of official narratives of American history. We didn’t learn about Japanese internment at school; we learned about it at home, and it seemed to me, as a child, a secret that Japanese American families kept among themselves. The trips we all took to Manzanar, a vast expanse of nothing, was proof of its elusiveness, as if the government had tried to sweep it all away.

Ten thousand Japanese Americans were incarcerated at Manzanar. It was one of ten War Relocation Authority camps, though not the largest or most populous. The internees who spent the duration of World War II there came primarily from Los Angeles, with a smattering from San Joaquin County, in California’s Central Valley, and Bainbridge Island, Washington. The official Manzanar contractor was Los Angeles-based Griffith and Company, which initiated work on the site within a few weeks of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s infamous February 19, 1942 Executive Order #9066, the presidential decree that authorized the forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese Americans [figure 2: Dorothea Lange].

In a short time, Manzanar became a mini-city in the desert. Comprised of 500 residential barracks arranged in a grid of 36 blocks, it was the most populated community between Los Angeles and Reno, with the requisite institutions of a shared public sphere. More as the result of internee’s initiative than through government mandate, a camp infrastructure developed. Barracks were utilized for such functions as newspaper printing press, a church, a temple, a photography studio, a sign shop, and cooperative store. Small gardens flourished around the residential barracks, and internees created two large “public” gardens: Merritt Park, which had over a hundred species of plants, several ponds and a Japanese teahouse, and Cherry Park, a grove of cherry and wisteria trees donated by a nursery.

Despite Manzanar’s perceived prosperity, it is important to remember what was lost in the incarceration: homes, businesses, relatives, friends, and freedom. How do we reconcile the vitality of a community with the loss of freedom and autonomy that engendered it? The desolate locale that Manzanar became after the war’s end provides a kind of answer. In assessing an upheaval so massive and complex as the removal of all persons of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast, the tendency is to focus on the material conditions, the inventory of individuals, families, their personal belongings. Arguments have been made about the tremendous “success” of internees to create lives in the confines of the camp, evidenced by the schools, churches and factories. Such arguments emphasize either that Japanese Americans triumphed in the face of adversity, or that the experience of incarceration was “not so bad.” But at the war’s end, Manzanar was gone—every last bit of it. At the margins of its absence, it becomes possible to parse the abstractions, such as how a government incarcerated its own people; how race could have been equated with loyalty—or with treason. And what the internment and its violation of civil liberties imply about the limits of American justice.

Manzanar’s absence, and the issues and question that lurk at its margins, serve as a starting point for Andrew Freeman’s (Manzanar) Architecture Double. What happened to the 500 residential barracks? Freeman’s photographic survey provides a complex response to this seemingly simply question. Serial, deadpan photographs of former Manzanar barracks bear little surface resemblance to their original function. Like the Japanese American internees who transformed the military-style camp environs into a mini-city rising from the desert brush, the new owners of these barracks coax new functions, and new meanings, from the residue of the wartime experience. There’s a barracks that now houses the Lone Pine Rifle Club. A residence in Pangborn serves as a spacious single-family home, while the barracks that are now the Lone Pine Budget Inn exude a more forlorn aura. The disjunction that Freeman’s photographs emphasize between these structures’ former use and their rehabilitation, their relocation from Manzanar to sites of “regular” human habitation, lead us to wonder how it is that traces of history can be represented by physical structures, and whether the barracks serve or obscure various truths. Although these buildings can each trace its origin to Manzanar, the buildings don’t, and can’t, serve to explain the Manzanar experience.

(Manzanar) Architecture Double relates to the tradition of late 19th and early 20th century photographic surveys intended to catalogue vast tracks of land in the American West. In this spirit, as a formal photographic and quintessentially Western investigation, Freeman’s component photographs subtly and collectively comment on the contested history of the region and its legacy of visual representations. The barracks that serve as an office on the Lone Pine Indian Reservation hint at the confluence of settlers there, though the current tribe’s relationship to the indigenous Paulite Indians who seasonally inhabited the land before their capture and dispersal by the U.S. military remains unclear. Freeman’s panoramic triptych of the broad expanse of the Owens Valley, its dry lakebed and serpentine aqueduct carrying water to Los Angeles, invoke the failed narrative of the first Manzanar, a farming community of fruit orchards founded in 1910 and abandoned when the city of Los Angeles purchased its water rights in the late 1920s. In Freeman’s image of a barracks converted to an airplane hanger in Bishop, foreground darkness emphasizes the exquisite late-afternoon light of the mountains behind, an evocation of Ansel Adams’s surveys of the Eastern Sierras and his project Born Free and Equal (1945), which documented Manzanar and its internees. In its incidental splendor, Freeman’s image deflates the exuberant majesty of the grand photographer, while paying homage to the still-majestic mountain range.

The convoluted Manzanar narrative took another twist when its land was formally transferred from the city of Los Angeles to the federal National Parks Service in 1997. The plan was to complete the transformation of Manzanar into a National Historic Site, a status that was officially granted in 1992. Many in the Japanese American community had fought fervently for such recognition. On April 24, 2004 the park was officially opened. Thousands attended to the roar of Taiko drumming. Japanese American World War II veterans, and members of the Lone Pine Veterans of Foreign Wars (whose headquarters are non other than a former Manzanar barrack) carried flags. A comprehensive historical interpretation was unveiled in the partly restored, partly recreated Manzanar auditorium. For all the pomp and circumstance, the success of finally having the United States government’s official acknowledgement of Manzanar’s tragic and tragically ignored history, it wasn’t without a certain ironic resonance that a National Parks Service ranger cheerfully intoned, as people arrived at the event, “Welcome to Manzanar!” A greeting that seemed to imply that the place itself was new, and newly receiving visitors. Some of us, of course, had already been.