Los Angeles Times Features Exhibit on Santa Anita Assembly Center

November 9, 2009 — Gann Matsuda

Santa Anita Park during its days as an Assembly Center where Japanese Americans were temporarily imprisoned before being shipped off to permanent American concentration camps during World War II.
Photo courtesy Bancroft Library via CALISPHERE

In their Sunday, November 8, 2009 edition, the Los Angeles Times published a story about an exhibit at the The Ruth and Charles Gilb Arcadia Historical Museum about the assembly center at Santa Anita race track where about 19,000 people of Japanese ancestry, the vast majority native-born American citizens, were temporarily imprisoned before they were moved to more permanent concentration camps located in the most desolate parts of the United States.

The exhibit, titled Only What We Could Carry: The Santa Anita Assembly Center, opens on November 10 and runs through January 16, 2009.

Museum curator Dana Dunn told the Los Angeles Times that the museum decided to create the exhibit because so many in the local area had no idea about this dark chapter in the history of the track, not to mention the history of the United States.

To read the full story by Alison Bell, click on Santa Anita Racetrack Played A Role In WWII Internment.

UPDATE: On November 16, Pacific Ties, the Asian Pacific newsmagazine at UCLA, wrote a blog entry about the exhibit. You can read it at: “Santa Anita Race Track Japanese Assembly Center.”