the train to crystal city by jan jarboe russell

Years later, Isamu Taniguchi built a Japanese garden near downtown Austin that is dedicated to peace and is still there. The Taniguchi family lived at Crystal City for the duration of World War II and stayed in the area when it ended. His father, Isamu Taniguchi, was a Japanese immigrant who had an apricot and almond farm in California that he lost when the FBI arrested him in 1942 for charges that were never clear because he was never given an indictment or a trial.

There were other internment camps, but Crystal City was the only family camp. There was a 10-foot barbed-wire fence around it, and the penalty for escaping was death. In 1942, the Immigration and Naturalization Service began transporting “dangerous enemy aliens”-immigrants from Japan, Germany and Italy whom the United States government considered to be a threat to national security-to the Crystal City Enemy Detention Facility. Many of the migrant workers who picked the spinach lived at a 290-acre worker camp owned by the Farm Security Administration. In the first half of the 20th century, it was the self-proclaimed “spinach capital of the world” and even had a fiberglass statue of the world’s most famous spinach eater, Popeye.

“How did you get to Texas?” she asked architecture professor Alan Taniguchi.Ĭrystal City is a small town situated 120 miles southwest of San Antonio near the Mexican border. Russell, who grew up in rural Texas, was curious enough about the first Asian-American she had ever seen to ask him where he was from. Jan Jarboe Russell first learned about Crystal City in 1971 when she was an undergrad at the University of Texas at Austin.

The train to crystal city by jan jarboe russell