Internment fiction better than truth?
New movie to spotlight Gallup’s Japanese support

Hershey Miyamura of Gallup receives the Congressional Medal of Honor from President Dwight D. Eisenhower Oct. 27, 1953. [Photo courtesy of Rex Museum]

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — In the weeks following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the internment of the country’s Japanese residents, sparking fears of homegrown spies and enemy collaborators.

“Thousands upon thousands of men, women and children whose only crime is their Japanese ancestry are wrested from their homes in cities across the country and transported by the Army to these glorified stockades until World War II can run its lengthy course. Virtually alone among America’s communities, one city discerns that the president’s order is unreasonable and unjust, even unconstitutional, and refuses to surrender its Japanese-American populace.”

That city, says Robert Singer, was Gallup,.

Some locals vehemently dispute that version of the city’s past. Even so, it’s the premise of a $20 million movie that could start shooting here early next year.

Singer, an Albuquerque lawyer who specializes in entertainment law, is the secretary and general counsel of Coyote Cinemedia Corp., the company behind the movie, simply called “Gallup.” The quote above is from the official synopsis.

Backed by some of the most attractive state incentives for movie making in the country, Gallup has been making a strong push lately to pull more productions its way. Though the area has had many a brush with the industry, city officials would love to make it a staple of the local economy.

If this film comes to pass, said Lisa Rodriguez, Gallup’s liaison to the New Mexico Film Commission, “it will give quite a shot in the arm for this area.”

When a production company comes to down, she said, “they eat there, they buy gas there, they buy merchandise and services, and then they leave ... It only benefits to have a film crew come because the services they use are ours.”

Singer says the film is still in preproduction, the time when all the groundwork is laid for the actual shoot, everything from finding financial backers to securing the crew to casting the leads. A draft of the script is being ironed out.

It’s too early to tell just how much of an economic impact the film will have on Gallup, where Singer expects at least 60 percent of the shooting to take place. Most of the indoor scenes, he said, will likely be shot on an Albuquerque sound stage. Before the cameras start rolling, though, the production company will have to provide the state with an economic impact statement.

A lot can happen between now and then. The city has watched projects further along than this one slip through its fingers before. But Rodriguez feels good about “Gallup.”

“(Singer) is very serious about it,” she said.

Singer believes the interest is mutual. He’s been touching base with city officials for the past eight months.

“Overall,” he said, “Gallup has been real enthusiastic about this.”

According to Singer, the film was something of an accident.

“We were researching something for a totally different project and we came across this wonderful story ,” he said, “and we thought, ‘This is a really wonderful story.’”

Singer sees in that story more than an inspirational history lesson. With its parallels to today’s “war on terror,” he said, it has a thoroughly modern theme.

“This is very ripe for retelling because of all the paranoia present today,” he said. “In that sense, it’s a very timely story.”

A timely story, but true? That depends on whom you ask.

A stickler for facts, local historian Martin Link’s blood boils at the mere suggestion that the Gallup City Council ever passed a resolution supporting its Japanese-Americans or defying the president’s internment order. It may make for a heart-warming story, he said, but not a true one.

“It’s the biggest scam that’s been ever perpetrated on the people of Gallup,” he said. “For the Gallup City Council to tell the Roosevelt administration to go stick it would have been an effort in futility to say the least.”

According to Link, Gallup didn’t have to bother, because Roosevelt never tried to inter the city’s Japanese. Roosevelt, for that matter, left most of the United States alone. His order, in fact, applied strictly to a narrow strip down the Pacific coast and along the bottom of Arizona. While other states, including New Mexico, hosted internment camps, none of their own Japanese residents ended up in them.

But it’s a gratifying thought, that Gallup stood “virtually alone among America’s communities” in defying the internment order. So gratifying that when the city commissioned a handful of public murals a few years ago to honor Gallup heritage, some suggested making it one of the themes.

Betty Kelley, who sat on the project’s planning committee, thought they ought to have some proof of the mythic council resolution first. But when she started looking for some, scouring old newspapers at the local library, she found none.

“I’m sure it would have made the paper ... and there was nothing,” she said.

An end note about the resolution made it into a book — Silent Voices of World War II — about New Mexico’s role in the war. Co-author Nancy Bartlit said the background for the note came from Sally Noe, another local historian. But during an interview with The Independent at about the time Kelley was doing her own research, Noe said she had no hard evidence of the resolution, just what she’d heard from others.

Not even the Japanese families who lived here during the war remember any effort to round them up, let alone a citywide campaign to stop one.

From what June Kauzlarich can remember from those days — she was in the third grade when the war broke out — Gallup’s racists here were few and far between.

“You got a few,” she said. “There are always some people, you know?”

But for the most part, Kauzlarich said, she and the rest of Gallup’s Japanese melted seamlessly into the local fabric. At Gallup High School, their peers were electing class presidents.

“I think it’s because we were born and raised here,” she said. “That’s why we weren’t treated different from anyone else.”

“There was no talk of anyone talking bad about us or treating us bad,” said another Japanese American born and raised in Gallup who asked not to be named. “I had a friend, he said, ‘I didn’t know I was Mexican until I left Gallup,’ and that’s exactly how I felt.”

Kauzlarich said she thought the movies was a good idea and hoped it would stick to the facts, whatever they be.
“The truth is the truth, “ she said.

Cinemedia is sticking with the Gallup that stood up to Roosevelt. As with any fictionalized account of real events, the film will take its liberties, Singer said, “but the spirit of the resolution is there, and we’re trying to portray it in a neat and entertaining way.”

The company already his an opening day in mind.

“We’d like to have it released, and this is just a wish, on Dec. 7, 2008,” Singer said.

That will be the 67th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. If all goes according to plan, shooting will begin in April.