Uprooted: Japanese American Farm Labor Camps during World War II (review)

The recent surge of federal travel bans and the detention of undocumented immigrants in the United States has revived public interest in the nation’s history of mass incarceration. The federal government’s registration, evacuation, and detention of 120,000 people of Japanese descent in the western states during World War II is a touchstone in the twenty-first-century debate over immigration control and national security. Uprooted: Japanese American Farm Labor Camps during World War II debuted in 2014, before the current immigration crisis. Still, the exhibit’s themes speak directly to the question of how far the state should go to suspend the civil liberties of both citizens and noncitizens in the name of promoting domestic safety.

Uprooted illuminates the relatively unexplored topic of Japanese American detainees who labored in agriculture during World War II. Like all detainees, these men, women, and children involuntarily evacuated their homes in 1942, and the federal government forcibly relocated them to temporary assembly centers and internment camps. Critical wartime labor shortages in the agricultural sector presented some of the detainees with the opportunity to live outside the internment camps and to earn wages. The federal Farm Security Administration (FSA) met the agricultural labor shortfall by recruiting willing workers in the internment camps, transporting them to the rural West, and establishing tent colonies and barracks to house them. Many of these farm workers cultivated sugar beets, an important source of both household sugar and industrial alcohols necessary for the wartime manufacturing of rubber. Altogether, the FSA issued around thirty-three thousand seasonal labor contracts to Japanese Americans who worked on farms across the Pacific Northwest, the Rocky Mountain West, and the Great Plains.

Entry to the Uprooted exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, California. (Photo courtesy of Morgen Young)

Most of the exhibit consists of forty-five framed photographs from the Library of Congress together with extensive captions. The images are the work of Russell Lee, a white FSA photographer who documented the internment experience and farm labor camps. They depict Japanese American farm laborers at work in the fields, at home in tents and barracks, and interacting with fellow workers in communal camp kitchens, laundries, and recreation areas. All of the photographs come from four specific labor camps in the Pacific Northwest: Nyssa Camp in Oregon, and the Twin Falls, Shelley, and Rupert camps in Idaho. Three large text panels, reproduced in English, Japanese, and Spanish, present visitors with the background context on the internment process, the need for wartime agricultural labor, and the recruitment of detainees to the labor camps. A monitor with attached headphones plays a fifteen-minute video in which internment survivors recount their experiences with forced relocation, incarceration, and fieldwork.

Some Japanese American detainees during WWII were able to escape the internment camps by agreeing to work as agricultural laborers in western states. These men, who worked at Oregon’s Nyssa Camp, helped alleviate wartime farm labor shortages in the sugar beet industry and earned wages during their detention. (Library of Congress)

The exhibit is a production of the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission and was curated by Morgen Young, a public historian and at the time owner of Alder LLC. Uprooted is intended as a compact, mobile installation that can travel easily, fit into the limited gallery space of smaller venues such as public libraries and historical societies, and is adaptable to a variety of space configurations. When it appeared at the Special Collections and Archives Research Center at Valley Library on the Oregon State University campus in 2017–18, it filled two large glass-fronted display cases and an overflow “bonus” display case in the library’s main lobby. Although splitting the photographic display may not have been the ideal arrangement initially...