Community in Conflict: The Santa Fe Internment Camp Marker (film)

Documentary film on the contentious effort to build a historical marker at the site of the Santa Fe Internment Camp in the late 1990s.

Filmmaker Claudia Katayanagi tells the story in a largely chronological manner, starting with the efforts of Colonel Joe Ando, a local Japanese American veteran, whose father had been interned at Santa Fe. Along with other supporters, Ando put together a local committee to build a historical marker at the site and drew support from local officials. However, a City Council resolution to build such a marker drew strenuous opposition from segments of the community, particularly the many survivors and descendants of the Bataan Death March in the area. The film examines the conflict that culminated in a contentious City Council meeting in 1999—reenacted by the New Mexico Japanese American Citizens League Players—at which the marker was ultimately approved. The film ends with the memorial dedication, a 2022 pilgrimage to the site, and the healing aftermath of the marker. Most of the key figures involved in the project are interviewed, with the exception of then Mayor Larry Delgado (who had passed away by the time the film was being made), who cast the deciding vote in favor of the marker.

The second film of filmmaker Claudia Katayanagi's trilogy, Community in Conflict follows A Bitter Legacy (2016), on the Moab and Leupp Isolation Centers and the events leading up to them. The third film, Exiled , will focus on the enemy alien detention camps such as Santa Fe that held Issei community leaders separately arrested and interned in the days and weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Might also like The Merced Assembly Center: Injustice Immortalized (2012); The Empty Chair (2014); Relocation, Arkansas: Aftermath of Incarceration (2016)