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While research on Asian Americans has typically been directed towards port cities like San Francisco and New York City, the Southwest too has long been important for Asian Americans. For instance, early Chinese American and Japanese American communities are known to have formed in Arizona, creating pioneer sites of community settlement and contributing to the history and diversity of the area. However, Arizona's significance for the growth of Asian America has not been only as a location for permanent settlement, but also as a place and space in the larger regional economy of the U.S. West. Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans who settled in Arizona in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were a segment of a larger pool of Asian American workers that circulated throughout the region in search of work, whether in agriculture, on the railroads, or in other industries that dominated the emerging regional economy.1
In this article, I will undertake an analysis of one Asian American community that sprang up in Arizona in the early 1940s as a result of World War II: the War Relocation Authority camp on the Colorado River Indian Tribes Reservation, commonly known among the Japanese Americans who resided there as "Poston." During World War II, thousands of Japanese Americans from California, along with a smaller number of Japanese Americans from Arizona, were sent to the Colorado River Relocation Center. The site became the third largest "city" in Arizona during that time.2
Despite its brief history, the Colorado River Relocation Center provides us with an opportunity to assess how people's participation in the regional economy of the Southwest was shaped by federal intervention, as well as by race and ethnicity. In addition, these issues speak to central topics concerning Arizona's economic development during World War II, as well as offering us an additional avenue to consider the relationship of Arizona to its neighbor to the west, California. Reflecting on this history allows a more expansive view of how community formation was affected by, and had an effect upon, this part of the Southwest. Hence, although the Arizona residence of most Japanese Americans at the Colorado River Relocation Center was transitory, it demonstrates that the relationship of Asian Americans to a particular place is not determined...