Internment Camps and Repatriation

Internment Camps and Repatriation

During the 1930s, tens of thousands, and possibly more than 400,000, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were pressured — through raids and job denials — to leave the United States during the Depression after the stock market crashed in 1929. This deportation was enforced without due process. Officials staged well-publicized raids in public places. For example, on Feb. 26, 1931, immigration officials suddenly closed off La Placita, a square near Olvera Street and about 1.4 miles north of Azusa Street, and questioned the roughly 400 people there about their legal status. With time, Mexican-Americans were granted repatriation, but in the 1940s with the outbreak of the Pacific War, all people of Japanese descent living on the West Coast were removed from their homes, had their properties and businesses seized, and incarcerated. Half a mile from Azusa Street, the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple in Little Tokyo became a roundup point for the Japanese Americans who were sent to “assembly centers.” From March to August in 1942, over 92,000 Japanese-Americans were booked at these “assembly centers” and transported to internment camps. These two travesties share two common themes. First, their cultural meeting spaces were used against them, defiling the peaceful, community-building activities which take place at La Placita and Little Tokyo. And secondly, the train became a recurrent force of removal, as both groups were forcibly relocated and stripped of their rights by the symbol of mobility, progress and development.

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