Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain : Networks, Power, and Everyday Life

By Saara Kekki. On August 8, 1942, 302 people arrived by train at Vocation, Wyoming, to  become the first Japanese American residents of what the U.S. government  called the Relocation Center at Heart Mountain. In the following weeks  and months, they would be joined by some 10,000 of the more than 120,000  people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens,  incarcerated as “domestic enemy aliens” during World War II. Heart  Mountain became a town with workplaces, social groups, and political  alliances—in short, networks. These networks are the focus of Saara  Kekki’s Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain. Interconnections  between people are the foundation of human societies. Exploring the  creation of networks at Heart Mountain, as well as movement to and from  the camp between 1942 and 1945, this book offers an unusually detailed  look at the formation of a society within the incarcerated community,  specifically the manifestation of power, agency, and resistance. Kekki