Farewell to Manzanar

Who belongs, and who decides? We are going to examine the voices proving that California identity is precarious, it's multilayered, and it is strictly an ongoing present tense struggle.

Let's start with the darkest example of unmaking citizenship, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston's 1973 memoir, Farewell to Manzanar.

This is a quietly devastating book.

It details the Wakatsuki family being forcibly removed from their home in Ocean Park, California, and taken to the Manzanar Incarceration Camp in the Owens Valley during World War II.

Okay.

We talked about Muir inventing the idea of the mountains as these sacred public freeing spaces that define the California soul.

Well, Farewell to Manzanar has taught generations of students exactly what those majestic mountains looked like when you were forced to stare at them from inside a barbed wire incarceration fence surrounded by guard towers.

The context completely shatters the myth of the free wilderness.