Fences of War: WWII, Lived Landscapes, and the Long Afterlives of the Home Front

World War II on the Home Front is our focus today but…

…the origins stretch back in time and the afterlives of the infrastructures stretch forward.

“Behind Barbed Wire – Enemy Alien Files Online Exhibit.” 2022. National Japanese American Historical Society: The Enemy Alien Files, Hidden Histories of WWII, October. https://njahs.org/enemy-alien-files/online-exhibit/behind-barbed-wire/.
Missoula Camp, 1942

FENCES

Concertina wire provides a secondary barrier between the U.S. and Mexico where the border between the two countries meets the Pacific Ocean at Border Field State Park on January 23, 2019 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

CONNECTIONS

Goals

1. See World War II landscapes differently

Places shaped by boundaries that lasted long after the fighting stopped

2. Fences are more than physical barriers

Also a metaphor for social and bureaucratic fences

3. Small, personal stories deepen public history and our understanding of place

See narratives of home front and ‘home coming’ in more complex and interconnecting ways

OVERLAPPING FENCES

Three Overlapping and Interrelated Forms of Fences

Concertina wire provides a secondary barrier between the U.S. and Mexico where the border between the two countries meets the Pacific Ocean at Border Field State Park on January 23, 2019 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Literal Fences

  • Barbed wire
  • Base perimeters (domestic and abroad)
  • Internment boundaries
  • Controlled Zones

Symbolic Fences

  • Class and labor status
  • Citizenship
  • Community and cultural background
  • Who is “in” and who is not
  • C

Administrative Fences

  • Paperwork
  • Laws and acts
  • Eligibility rules
  • Access to benefits
  • Housing, education, and employment

Shifts how we might answer two important questions:

If two people who were part of the same war effort return to the same place in 1945 (and after), are they returning to the same space?

“From the Archives: V-J Day. People celebrate V-J Day on Aug. 14, 1945 in San Diego.” San Diego Union Tribune, 14 August 2024. https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2024/08/14/from-the-archives-vj-day/

If we think of history and lived experience as layered like geography, instead of linear, what surprising connections and afterlives emerge?

“San Diego Remembers World War II, 70 Years After Japan Surrenders,” by Maureen Cavanaugh. KPBS. 13 August 2015. https://www.kpbs.org/news/midday-edition/2015/08/13/

FOLLOW THE FENCES

U.S. BORDER PATROL AND THE MILITARY RAN THE JAPANESE INCARCERATION CAMPS

“Behind Barbed Wire – Enemy Alien Files Online Exhibit.” 2022. National Japanese American Historical Society: The Enemy Alien Files, Hidden Histories of WWII, October. https://njahs.org/enemy-alien-files/online-exhibit/behind-barbed-wire/.
Missoula Camp, 1942

SURVEILLANCE, INCARCERATION, AND VIOLENT POLICIES

The tactics, the violence, and the construction materials were reused and “refined”

“Behind Barbed Wire – Enemy Alien Files Online Exhibit.” 2022. National Japanese American Historical Society: The Enemy Alien Files, Hidden Histories of WWII, October. https://njahs.org/enemy-alien-files/online-exhibit/behind-barbed-wire/.
Missoula Camp, 1942

SAME FENCES

The U.S. Border Patrol used many of the same building materials to build containment spaces and “camps” that continued the immiseration and labor abuse of braceros when the program became formalized with the U.S. entry into WWII and even more robust with the Korean War.

Leonard Nadal, “Clothes hang over the fence behind the living quarters of the Gondo Labor Camp near Watsonville, California,” 1956, Smithsonian, https://www.si.edu/object/nmah_1354728

MAGONISTA REVOLT IN TIJUANA, BC, MEX

Magonistas controlled Mexicali and Tijuana in 1911, building revolutionary coalitions. On June 22, 1911, the U.S. Army aided in suppressing the revolts.

The Magonista Revolt in Baja California, Lawrence Crawford, 1999.

MAGONISTA REVOLT IN TIJUANA, BC, MEX

Magonista revolutionaries were held captive in U.S. Army run prisoner camps along the California-Baja California Border after surrender on June 22, 1911.

The Magonista Revolt in Baja California, Lawrence Crawford, 1999.

JAPANESE INCARCERATION CAMPS, 1942-1946

Using fences, barbed wire, and U.S. military run incarceration camps to confine perceived threats is a pattern in the U.S. West.

Bracero program, 1942-1964

The architecture of the Incarceration Camps were rebuilt and repurposed for an expanded and more deeply codified Bracero Program.

The last time I came as a bracero, I was in San Diego. There I worked for a Japanese grower named Suzuki, a good man. During the war they had put him into one of the camps. He talked a lot about it. He told us, “I know what your life is like, because we lived that way too, in concentration camps. They watched over us with rifles.” So he got papers for all of us. He fixed us up, and told us to come work with him.

THAT WAS THE LAST CONTRACT I WORKED.

STRUCTURES

Executive Order 8802

June 25, 1941

Japanese Incarceration Camps, 1942-1945

January 1942

Bracero Program is Federally Established

August 4, 1942

bracero-agreement-1942

California and American West Big-Ag Capitalists Plea for More Exploited Bracero Labor

April 23, 1942

https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7459462

Executive Order 9981: De Jure Full Desegregation

July 26, 1948

Public Law 79: Bracero Program is Solidified

July 16, 1951

https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7459462

LIVES

Minnie Spotted-Wolf

Tried to enlist in the US Army in 1941, but was told by the recruiter “war wasn’t for women.” Joined UCMC Women’s Reserve in 1943 and served at Pendleton and other bases in California and Hawaii.

Mary Fierros

Not just “Rosie the Riveter,” but a Union, Labor, and Civil Rights Organizer

Eva Romero Jacques

Am

Army Air Corps Staff Sergeant

“Two eagles embedded in his heart: one Mexican, the other American”

Silveria Arizona Ballaron, “My Papa the Bracero,” Bracero History Archive, https://braceroarchive.org/items/show/3070.

https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7459462

SAN DIEGO

Tony Webster from Portland, Oregon, United States, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Parque de la amistad
Friendship Park

1250 Monumental, 92154 Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico
1250 Monument Road, San Diego CA 92154

“Friendship Park was dedicated by First Lady Pat Nixon on August 18, 1971, as a symbol of Friendship between the U.S. and Mexico. After planting a commemorative tree, Mrs. Nixon instructed her security detail to cut the wire so she could enter Mexico to greet an adoring crowd. “I hope there won’t be a fence too long here,” she said.”

https://www.buildthatpark.org/the-inauguration

WHY SPACE?

Major historical events that are part of national and international narratives, like World War II, are entangled in structures of nation building, power, and capitalism that reinforce geographic, temporal, and racial boundaries.

These boundaries are made real by fences real and imagined (but no less enforced).

By focusing on the people whose material realities were drastically impacted by those structures and following the historic contexts outside of “seminal events” that impacted their realities as well as their human connections, those barriers and fences begin to break down to the benefit of us all.

FRAMEWORKS

El Jefe

Angel David Nieves, PhD

Apartheid Heritage(s): A Spatial History of Soweto

Multi-disciplinary “Remix” Scholarship

Importance of materiality, lived experience, and the human capacity to forge unique geographies to better uplift the agency, urgency, lived experiences, and humanity of communities who endured great violence. More complete understandings of space, place, and history critical part of building a better world.

Our modes of remembrance are intricately intertwined with the various scales against which they are constructed.”

Feldberg, Olya. 2023. “From Dinosaurs to Nuclear Fallout: Multiple Temporalities of Scale in Memory Studies.” Memory Studies 16 (6): 1594–1608. https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980231204202.

Local/micro scales “can be used to question the trajectory of the often uncritically assumed metanarrative[s]” (219). “Micro” methods can serve as potent reminders that localities “flourished both because and in spite of the connections that shaped” the world (224).

Gerritsen, Anne. 2012. “Scales of a Local: The Place of Locality in a Globalizing World.” In A Companion to World History, edited by Douglas Northrop, 1st ed., 213–26. Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118305492.ch14.

Immense appreciation and gratitude are extended to everyone who organized this series and gave me this wonderful opportunity.

Meghan Hillman

Stephanie Rowe

Emily Kambic

Jason Ockrassa

Turkiya Lowe

Jessica Baloun

Thank you!