Dog Park - Santa Fe Interment Camp

The Dog Park, along with our neighborhood, has a darker history. During WWII, many Japanese-Americans were interned - imprisoned without due process - in American camps. While many of these camps are listed on the Japanese American Memorial in D.C., many others existed. The boundary of one is only a few houses down from my home. The memorial marker is in the dog park. One can see my house from it; it is in the photo below.

The public reminder of the official mistreatment of law-abiding residents - many of whom had served the US in WWI - is comforting, for this is not a thing to forget. Nancy Bartlit has investigated and written extensively about the experiences of the men at the Santa Fe Interment camp; I can highly recommend her book "Silent Voices of WWII". It is available at Amazon and not only tells the story of the Santa Fe Interment camp, but of other distinctly southwestern experiences in WWII - the death march of Bataan, which heavily decimated the National Guard of New Mexico; the Code Talkers, Navajo volunteers who fought discrimination at home to provide an unbreakable secret code for the fight in the Pacific; and the Manhattan Project of Los Alamos just forty miles up the road, whose story is probably best known, but it gives a new perspective to consider that its members and materials passed within yards of an American interment camp.