America’s Last Concentration Camp: Crystal City
America’s Last Concentration Camp: Crystal City
Exhibit Dates: May 20 – July 22, 2026
J-Sei Gallery, 1285 66th Street, Emeryville
Gallery Hours: M Tu Th Fr 2-5 pm, or by appointment: 510-654-4000
About the Exhibit
The Crystal City Pilgrimage Committee will premiere its national traveling exhibit, based on their permanent exhibit at the My Story Museum in Crystal City, Texas. Additional interpretive panels will depict stories of the individual families who were incarcerated at Crystal City. Crystal City Family Internment Camp, as it was called during the war, administered by the Department of Justice, held thousands of Japanese, Germans, and Italians in addition to Latin American residents of Axis nationalities.
Created as a family reunification center for immigrants arrested under the Alien Enemies Act in 1942, Crystal City remained open until 1948, long after WWII ended. Several hundred families were moved to Crystal City after their applications for reunification were approved. Several hundred families were moved to Crystal City after their applications for reunification were approved. In some cases, families waited a year or more to be reunited with their husband or father.
Crystal City was also used as a detention facility for individuals awaiting deportation in a prisoner of war exchange with Axis countries. The State Department devised a secret program called “Quiet Passages” to exchange prisoners held in DOJ prison camps for US civilians held behind enemy lines. Some prisoners went willingly, others were forcibly deported to Axis war zones. This included some children with US birthright citizenship whose parents were ineligible for naturalization, and Japanese Latin Americans who were kidnapped and brought to the US.
“By sharing our nation’s hidden histories and the powerful stories of survivors, we can begin to undo the historical amnesia that allows our government to harm children and families today,” said Crystal City Pilgrimage President Kaz Naganuma, whose family was forced to leave a flourishing laundry business in Peru and travel for three weeks by boat and train before being imprisoned in Texas.
Exhibit Programs
Opening Program
Saturday, May 23, 2 pm
The opening program will include a panel presentation with survivors Kaz Naganuma, Hiroshi Shimizu, Heidi Gurke and the showing of the short documentary, Then Becoming Now.
Then Becoming Now (2019, 24 min.), directed by Emiko Omori, follows the journey of three men who went from incarcerated children to social activists. Seventy-seven years ago Hiroshi “Shim” Shimizu, Kaz Naganuma, and Hiroshi Fukuda met as toddlers in the Crystal City Family Internment Camp. Today, their childhood experiences motivate them to join the protest of current immigration policies of detaining and separating families.
The Poet and the Silk Girl
Based on lies and wartime propaganda, during WWII the U.S. government forcibly removed and incarcerated more than 125,000 innocent Japanese Americans in ten American concentration camps, solely because of their race.
Barbara Takei is a public historian and a leading authority on the history of Japanese American resisters who were incarcerated at the Tule Lake Segregation Center. Her family was incarcerated at the Tule Lake and Amache concentration camps, and the Griffith Park and Fort Bliss Army internment camps. She has served on the Tule Lake Committee board for over two decades, working to honor the stories of Japanese American grassroots resistance and to prevent government desecration of the Tule Lake site. Her introduction to Asian American political organizing began in the 1960s as a member of The Detroit Asian Political Alliance. She is the co-author of 
Circling Back: A Retrospective of Artwork by Ruth Yoshiko Okimoto