RURAL CALIFORNIA THROUGH THE LENS · INDEPENDENCE NEWS
INDEPENDENCE, Calif. — Six miles south of Independence, the barracks at Manzanar’s Block 14 are reconstructions. They help show how the U.S. government confined thousands of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. The people who lived there also left accounts of the hours between meals, the work they found and the families they cared for. Five videos offer different ways to approach that history before stopping along Highway 395.
Start with the people who were held here
Remembering Manzanar combines archival material with recollections from former incarcerees and others. A separate 2002 interview transcript in the Densho archive records Sue Kunitomi Embrey’s account of daily life. She recalled the long stretches between meals for people without jobs and the contrast with the working hours many families had kept before removal. She also distinguished that experience from the days of people caring for children and doing laundry. The park’s oral history collection offers more accounts.
How the site is interpreted today
Doug McConnell’s OpenRoad segment, first broadcast in 2019, is a separate introduction to the historic site. For an in-person visit, the National Park Service’s self-guided route connects Block 14 with the cemetery monument, rock gardens, orchards and the foundations of the Children’s Village. These stops help put individual accounts in the places where people lived.
Land and water in the Owens Valley
The trailer for Manzanar, Diverted: When Water Becomes Dust introduces a film that connects Japanese American incarceration with Indigenous displacement and later conflicts over water. These are distinct histories that intersect in the Owens Valley. The park’s account of its orchards identifies surviving traces of an earlier agricultural landscape. Down the valley, Keeler News has covered Owens Lake and the work at Keeler Dunes.
What to know before turning off Highway 395
Where They Wander visits Manzanar on an Owens Valley road trip. Sidetrack Adventures places it between the Alabama Hills and Independence, with the Manzanar chapter beginning at 36:20. The travel videos help place the turnoff. Check current park hours before leaving. The grounds and driving route have different hours from the visitor center and Block 14.
For nearby coverage, see Independence News and Lone Pine News’ feature on the Alabama Hills.
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