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TI: So your father was a skilled machinist, he's in Clovis, can you describe kind of his job in Clovis?

RE: My father repaired the locomotives in the roundhouse. The roundhouse, as you know, the westward movement occurred because of the railroad, from Texas into New Mexico, and ultimately into Arizona. So the roundhouse was built in Clovis simply because they had to repair the locomotives before they made that climb, the upward climb, about, I guess it was upward of a thousand feet from Clovis to Albuquerque. And so it was his responsibility to make sure these locomotives were fit to make those grades, sent up these grades.

TI: And so was he kind of like in charge of a crew of Japanese workers?

RE: Yes, uh-huh.

TI: And you mentioned that he got started because there was a strike.

RE: Yes.

TI: And so what happened when the strike was over?

RE: When the strike was over, my dad didn't, in today's terms, he and his Japanese cohorts were scabs. They were the scabs, of course. And once the strike was over, they achieved the seniority and all these coworkers who were on strike lost the seniority. And so they were not well-liked for many years.

TI: And when you say coworkers, so how large a facility, I mean, how many other workers were there?

RE: I would say there were upwards of two hundred reasonably skilled people, and upwards of two to three hundred laborers.

TI: And how many of those were Japanese?

RE: There were, there were only seven to eight other Japanese railway workers along, working along with my dad.

TI: And so a pretty small minority, like five percent.

RE: Right. And so in this enclave that was allowed by the Santa Fe, since the townfolks would not allow non-whites to live within the town, we had to, they built this little compound, it was called "Jap camp" or whatever people used to call it, was built in the, on that property. They were sort of self-sustained.

TI: So describe that. Describe this --

RE: Oh, it was rather interesting. It was just like a small mini, mini village, so to speak. I know Nishimoto family, the Yoshimura family, the, and our best friends, the Kimura family, who had seventeen kids, we chummed around with them. So we pretty much kept to ourselves before we were in, when we were preschoolers, yeah. And we played around with American Indian, Mexican American kids here and there. We spoke Spanish and Japanese because of that.

TI: And the living quarters, describe that.

RE: It was like the barracks that you saw in the relocation center except that there was always an overhang that whenever a torrential rains come, it would drop down into these little barrels where they would save the water.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.