Sacramento and Japanese Internment

 

We are reading part of the memoir Kiyo's Story for my citizenship class.  About a couple that came from Japan and built a very successful fruit farm (mostly strawberries) outside of Sacramento.  She writes of the farm and her childhood mentioning locations that sound familiar.  In 1942

Why?  Because I grew up in Sacramento; my parents moved there when I was a preschooler, around 1955.  A mere 13 years later.  They were part of the aeronautical engineers who came to work for Aerojet.  They lived in the sunny suburb, Arden Park and Wilhaggin near the American River.

I went to school there, graduating from a segregated high school in 1970.  Did I know it was segregated?  Nope.  Never occurred to me.  My parents wanted 'good schools' which meant 'white schools'  

I knew about the Japanese internment.  Now anyway.  But it never occurred to me until now that it was going on right under my nose just a short time previous.  It was NEVER mentioned in school.  People NEVER talked about it.  Kinda like water politics, it undergirded the place but never never spoken of..  I wasn't born when it happened and I moved there as a very young child.

But with their prosperous little farm not far from Folsom Blvd?

Kinda like 9/11; people don't talk about.  I was going to say kinda like the Holocaust but that won't do, that went universes further in its evil.

CORRECTION: The family in the book went to the Pinelake Assembly Center near Fresno. Which looked much the same. Then onto the Poston Internment Center in the Arizona dessert.