My Story Museum, Crystal City Texas
Since August 2024, Rob has been working with the Crystal City Pilgrimage Committee to open a permanent local history museum in South Texas at the site of the former Department of Justice prison camp where Japanese Americans, Germans, Italians, and Japanese Latin Americans were held during WWII. Called My Story Museum: Tres Historias en Crystal City, work on the museum is being done in collaboration with the local Mexican American community who comprises approximately 95% of Crystal City’s current population. The museum not only tells the story of wartime incarceration, but also the Crystal City school walkouts of 1969 that played a pivotal role in the Chicano Movement and led to political victories by progressive third-party La Raza Unida.
The museum opened in November 2024 during the annual Crystal City Spinach Festival. Rob is currently managing the phase II expansion project of the museum’s core exhibit titled, America’s Last WWII Concentration Camp. The expanded exhibit is expected to be completed in time for the October 2025 pilgrimage.
For more information visit: www.crystalcitypilgrimage.org/my-story-museum
In November 2024, a few days after the US presidential election, we traveled to South Texas to open the museum. We were welcomed by a crowd of 250 local residents who attended the ribbon-cutting and opening panel discussion where two childhood incarceration survivors of Japanese American and Japanese Peruvian backgrounds shared their accounts of daily life in the prison camp. They were joined by local resident Ruben Salazar and Crystal City native Hector Estrada, both Mexican Americans, who saw aspects of their own struggles in the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. Our communities have come together in an organic way by sharing these parallel stories of oppression, and in doing so, continue to build solidarity with one another through this public history exhibit.