Photo: GENERAL ARCHIVE OF THE NATION / Courtesy
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 who then lived in Aztec lands.
This is the old Temixco hacienda, located about 100 km south of Mexico City, where some 600 people were detained who could thus be controlled by the Mexican authorities at the express request of the United States.
pink uranus It was one of the inhabitants of the field. She arrived when she was only 6 years old with Yashiro, her Japanese father; María, her Mexican mother; and her two brothers. Today, with 87 years, He still remembers 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 that as soon as the war was over we were going to return. And with that idea we came, ”he tells BBC Mundo while walking through the old farm that became his house for about three years.
The one in Temixco was not a Nazi extermination camp or one of the internment camps in which the US confined thousands of citizens of Japanese origin at that time and from which they were totally prohibited from leaving.
“The entrance to Temixco, on the other hand, was guarded by members of the army, but let’s say that it was lax surveillance. Here they could go out to the vicinity after reporting, although to move out of the city they had to first request and obtain a permit, ”he explains to BBC Mundo Sergio Hernandez, Mexican historian expert in Japanese migration in the country.
Despite everything, the memory of many of these people of Japanese origin who arrived in Temixco as adults, forced to leave behind their lives and years of integration in other areas of Mexico, is of absolute sadness at the clear injustice committed against them.
forced to concentrate
Following 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 the pressure from the North American government to transfer them, but unlike other Latin American countries, I decidedió do not send them to US fields rather, he concentrated them in Mexico itself.”
The main US interest was to keep them away from the area near their border, considering that their presence there could pose a danger to their security and a risk of espionage.
Fearful that they might end up being taken to US 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. the 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 that were arriving. The address where they would stay while the war lasted it was registered, one by one, by the Mexican Ministry of the Interior.
But after abandoning their lives in other parts of the country, many of them did not have the resources to survive in their new destinations, so it became necessary to find a place where they could support themselves.
In the municipality of Tala, in Jalisco, a field was set up on a ranch for those who arrived in Guadalajara. For his part, with money provided by the Embassy of Japan in Mexico, the kyoei-kai he acquired a much larger former hacienda (about 250 hectares) in Temixco for those relocated to Mexico City.