The concentration camp that Mexico opened during World War II under pressure from the United States

Not many Mexicans know that what today houses a large water park in their country was during World War II a concentration camp for Japanese people living in Aztec lands at the time.

It concerns the old Temixco hacienda, about 100 km south of Mexico City, where about 600 people were kept under control by the Mexican authorities at the explicit request of the United States.

pink uranus It was one of the inhabitants of the field. He arrived when he was only 6 years old with Yashiro, his Japanese father; María, his Mexican mother; and his two brothers. Today, with 87 years, He remembers well when the family received the news that they had to leave their home in the Mexican state of Veracruz.

“My parents were very sad, but he always said we would come back as soon as the war was over. And we came up with that idea,” he tells BBC Mundo as he walks through the old hacienda that was his home for about three years.

The one in Temixco was not a Nazi extermination camp or one of the internment camps in which the US imprisoned thousands of citizens of Japanese descent at the time and from which they were totally forbidden to leave.

“The entrance to Temixco, on the other hand, was guarded by members of the military, but let’s just say it was a lax guard. Here they could go to the neighborhood after notification, although to get out of the city they had to apply for and obtain a permit first,” he explained to BBC Mundo. Sergio Hernandez, Mexican historian, expert on Japanese migration in the country.

In spite of everything, the memory of many of these people of Japanese descent who arrived in Temixco as adults, forced to leave behind their lives and years of integration in other parts of Mexico, is of absolute sadness at the obvious injustice done to them.

forced to concentrate

After Japan’s attack on the US base at Pearl Harbor in late 1941, Washington began rounding up Japanese migrants for close surveillance and asked other countries in the region to follow suit.

According to Hernández, “The Mexican government accepted pressure from the North American government to hand them over, but unlike other Latin American countries, decided not to send them to the American fields. rather, it concentrated them in Mexico itself.

The main US interest was to keep them away from the area near their border, as their presence there could pose a threat to their security and a risk of espionage.

Fearing that they would eventually be taken to American camps, the Japanese in Mexico had no choice but to leave their homes and businesses and agree to move to Mexico City and Guadalajara on their own, as required by Mexican authorities .

Their compatriots who already lived in these cities organized themselves in the kyoei-kai (Mutual Aid Committee) to receive them and support the hundreds of families who arrived. The address where they would stay for the duration of the war it was registered one by one by the Mexican Ministry of the Interior.

But after giving up their lives in other parts of the country, many of them did not have the means to survive in their new destinations, so it became necessary to find a place where they could make a living.

In the municipality of Tala, in Jalisco, a field was built on a farm for those arriving in Guadalajara. For its part, with money provided by the Embassy of Japan in Mexico, the kyoei-kai he acquired a much larger former hacienda (about 250 acres) in Temixco for those who had moved to Mexico City.

It was an old sugar farm that, given the weather and the presence of a river, offered optimal conditions for growing products such as rice and vegetables.

“The presence of water was the most important thing to choose this place because most of those who arrived were previously engaged in farming in the north of Mexico, so they could grow enough,” he tells BBC Mundo. Tooru Ebisawa, Mexican of Japanese descent who spent years documenting and researching this part of history.

Before and after Temixco’s exhacienda

Memories of eight decades ago

Walking with Mrs. Rosa Urano through Temixco’s ex-hacienda is like stepping back in time thanks to her vivid memories. Without a moment’s hesitation, he points to the area where the kitchens were, the stream where his mother used to wash the pots, or the area with small wooden bedrooms built by the camp’s residents themselves.

Remember, the whole family slept on a mat on stage. They had no kitchen, as they all ate in the communal dining room attended by their mother and the rest of the women at the hacienda.

“My mother always told us to go to the kitchen early. so that we could eat a small piece of meat in the afternoon, because it was rationed. If we arrived later, it was already pure broth with vegetables,” he says.

Kids like them went to the public school on the edge of the camp. They also had the opportunity to attend the course installed in Temixco, which was taught in Japanese.

The men, for their part, were in charge of the early morning work in the fields in long working days during which they grew food for their consumption and for sale, and for which they were paid four pesos a week (US$0.21 at current exchange rates).

Urano says that this money was used by his family to buy soap for bathing. To buy some clothes, his mother sold raspados de frutas (ice slurry) on the edge of the camp.

Protests over working conditions

These employment conditions and the coordination of whom by the kyoei-kai as administrator of the camp, Takugoro Shibayama (who lived with his family in a stone house in different conditions from the small dormitories of the rest) motivated the protests of some of the prisoners.

One of them was Seiki Hiromoto, who worked as a doctor on the ranch and where he married a young Japanese woman.

according to his grandson Kenji Hiromoto, who has been studying his family’s history for years, his confrontation with the administrator resulted in him being reported to the Mexican authorities and sent to the Perote prison camp in Veracruz for six months. Italians and Germans were also concentrated there under much stricter conditions and supervision.

“He jumped over the fence of the farm at hours no longer allowed to heal the locals of the town, who paid him with chickens or eggs that served him to complete what they sowed in the field, because there wasn’t enough for everyone. Until they surprised him and falsely accused him of being a spy,” he told BBC Mundo.

“I can say that my family didn’t have a good taste of what they experienced here: there was exploitation, injustice and privilege on the part of those who ran the farm, curfews, food rationing… My grandmother always said they had suffered enough.” he adds based on conversations he had with his grandparents and his grandfather’s brothers who lived in Temixco.

“In the interviews we conducted, there were different versions of the farm manager. His function was to bring order and it is said that he was very strict, so those who were sent to Perote did not like him,” said Ebisawa.

No apologies from the authorities

In Rosa Urano’s childhood memories, her experience at Temixco was, unsurprisingly, different. “I can’t say they were sad years because I had someone to play with and I didn’t care about other things,” he says.

Of course, his parents’ opinion was very different. “When we asked my father if he had been happy here, he always said no He came from Japan to suffer here. But I didn’t want to go there anymore.”

When the war ended, the Japanese in Temixco were once again free to come and go as they pleased. Many, like Urano’s family, decided to stay in the area after years away from what had been their home before the conflict.

The grandfather and father of Fernando Alvarez, current co-owners of the land, they bought the farm in 1949 to dedicate themselves to rice processing and, two decades later, to become the current theme park. But his bond with the Japanese community is always present.

“Many years ago, three Japanese, two men and a woman, came here. They asked me if they could come in because they had lived here. And it turned out to be members of the Shibayama family, They were his children.” recalls Álvarez speaking to BBC Mundo.

The historian Hernández is particularly critical of the persecution in Mexico, not only by the Japanese, but also by those around them.

“The wives of some Japanese, who were Mexican, also suffered a terrible violation of their rights, forcing them to concentrate here. And it also affected Japanese who were already naturalized Mexicans. It was clearly racial harassment.” guarantees.

For that reason, the expert defends that the Mexican government owes them “an apology”. these people. However, many of those affected “do not feel sad compared to those who lived in the American concentration camps. Rather, they are grateful to Mexico for taking them in,” he emphasizes.

An example of this is Rosa Urano herself, for whom the decision to join the Japanese in Temixco was not something negative.

“What I do recognize is that so far I don’t know why they did it. Because we all had a beautiful house that stayed there, in a different place. I think we have to have a reason for that decision,” he reflects as he walks towards the exit of the old hacienda, leaving years of memories behind him.