Extending Apologies: Memorializing the World War II Japanese American Incarceration at the Tanforan Assembly Center

Abstract: “Extending Apologies”, focuses on the future memorial for the Tanforan Assembly Center –a former Japanese American Incarceration Camp in San Francisco, California– and the demand of victims and their families to extend the official apology, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, beyond mere words. A series of on-site historic plaques and an exhibition of Dorothea Lange’s incarceration photographs at a nearby train station serve as background to study the development of the new memorial. The design and iconography of the future Tanforan memorial –a figurative bronze surrounded by a landscaped memorial plaza– are analyzed alongside the motivations of the main actors that have shaped it: a group of memory activists, a transit agency, and a shopping mall developer. “Extending Apologies” argues that these past and future commemorative interventions reveal the tensions between an unsettled memorial landscape and the Japanese American community’s ongoing demands for apology.

Bio: Valentina Rozas-Krause received her Ph.D. in Architecture (History, Theory & Society) from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an architect with a Master’s Degree in Urban Planning from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Her field of study encompasses architecture, urbanism, and landscape from the nineteenth century to the present, with particular research and teaching interests in memory, postcolonialism, preservation, public space, social justice, and gender. Valentina has published two books. The first, Ni Tan Elefante, Ni Tan Blanco (Ril, 2014), is an urban, architectural, and political history of the National Stadium in Chile. The second is the co-edited volume Disputar la Ciudad (Bifurcaciones, 2018) which deals with spatial strategies of oppression, resistance, memory and reparation within varying urban contexts. These join peer-reviewed articles in History & Memory, e-flux, Latin American Perspectives, Anos 90, ARQ, Revista 180, Cuadernos de Antropología Social, and Bifurcaciones alongside a chapter in the edited volume Neocolonialism and Built Heritage (Routledge, 2020). Her research has been supported by numerous fellowships and grants, including a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Townsend Center for the Humanities Dissertation Fellowship, a John L. Simpson Research Fellowship in International and Comparative Studies from UC Berkeley, a DAAD Dissertation Research Grant, and a Becas Chile Grant. Valentina is currently working on a book project titled Memorials and the Cult of Apology, which examines how contemporary memorials aim to atone for past injustices. In effect, apologies are being materialized into memorials, a phenomenon of global importance, which presents a major shift in national self-representation.