The train was busy with worried faces and quiet voices. Soon, the people would get on the train and leave their lives behind. Over 110,000 Japanese Americans were being sent to prison camps. Most would be incarcerated for the rest of WWII. The people did not want to leave but they were forced to. I wasn't supposed to be at the train station in the first place, but I volunteered to go to the prison camp. I was the only non-Japanese American who volunteered to live in the internment camp .I was born to Mexican American parents in a black hospital in Los Angeles in 1924, a time when segregation based on skin color also extended to Latinos. I saw other discrimination on a Native American reservation in Arizona, where I lived and went to school briefly during his childhood. The neighborhood I lived in was home to all sorts of nationalities and ethic identities. I watched in horror as my friends were discriminated against for the way they look.
When I was in high school I read the evacuation orders in the newspaper. After that I saw one of my neighbors selling his items because he couldn't bring anything with him so they were selling everything. That experience was fresh in my mind when a Japanese American friend playfully asked him what he’d do without all of his buddies and suggested, “Why don’t you come along?” So I did.
Manzanar was one of the 10 prison camps where Japanese Americans spent the war. Located at the base of the Sierra Nevadas, it was prone to dust storms that swept through the flimsy barracks. I would come to hate the brutal summer heat and the frigid winter temperatures there.
The camp offered very little to no food beds and a place to live, but some of my friends were there. I attended school and got a job delivering mail around camp. I also forged lasting bonds with Issei (first generation Japanese) internees, who looked after me until I moved into a friend’s barracks. At Manzanar, I studied Japanese, threw parties for my friends, planted trees and even became class president.
In August 1944, after two years at Manzanar, I was drafted into the Army. Though my goal was to attend the Military Intelligence Language School, an Army Program that taught Japanese to second-generation Japanese soldiers and trained them to use their language on the ground as translators and intelligence workers, I ended up fighting in the Pacific Theater instead. And my story made the national papers. “I did not believe that my friends of Japanese ancestry were disloyal to the United States,¨ I said. Over the years, I maintained My close ties to the Japanese American community—and My conviction that internment had been a mistake. “Internment was immoral,” I said. “It was wrong, and I couldn’t accept it.”
The camps changed me and it showed me that everyone is equal and should be treated the same. I was one of just 10 donors to give $1,000 or more to the lawsuit that kicked off the years long movement for redress for those interned during the war. Eventually, people of Japanese ancestry who had been interned in the camp were paid $20,000 and given a letter of apology by the United States.