Stockton event honors Japanese Americans once detained at WWII assembly center
In Stockton, a day of reflection was held inside an old building at the San Joaquin County Fairgrounds. It's the site of a World War II detention facility that once housed thousands of Japanese Americans from California's Central Valley.
Organizers said the gathering's intent was to right a wrong. Mixed emotions filled the air inside the Stockton Assembly Center.
During the height of World War II, the federal government began to detain people of Japanese descent under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066.
Like most Japanese Americans, Allyson Aranda's grandparents complied with those orders.
"[My grandparents] ended up getting married right when the evacuation orders came down so that they wouldn't be separated," she said.
Aranda grew up knowing their hardship.
"It's very heartwarming to see all of these people, but also it's very infuriating thinking what happened to them," she said.
The Stockton Assembly Center was one of 13 temporary detention sites built in California. It housed an estimated 4,200 Japanese Americans from San Joaquin County before they were sent to internment camps.
Susan Wong's dad once owned land along the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
"When Executive Order 9066 was issued, Dad had to hurry and sell the land," she said.
Wong also shared how her parents got married at the Stockton Assembly Center and wonders what life was like for them.
"It's kind of painful in a way that," she said. "It's painful for me to think about what pain they went through."
Saturday's event is the work of Okagesama, a community-based project that aims to restore the site and turn it into a Japanese American interpretive center.
Wong hopes that sharing her family's story can stop history from repeating itself.
"It's not just the Japanese Americans' story," she said. "It's every minority's story."
In total, 120,000 Japanese Americans were held in internment camps. It would take nearly 50 years for the U.S. to formally apologize when President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.