Dan Kwong spent years restoring a dirt baseball field at Manzanar, the California concentration camp where 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during the second world war. His mother and aunt were among the prisoners. What began as a living-history project became, in Kwong's words, "a call to arms" as the second Trump administration launched its own mass detention operations. The project transformed from memorial to direct political confrontation. Last weekend, hundreds of spectators watched a double-header at the restored field, featuring players from California's Japanese American baseball league in 1940s-era uniforms. Kwong, 71, played for the Li'l Tokio Giants — his team for 54 years — and then in an all-star game. Between games, he delivered a speech connecting Trump's MAGA movement to the "premise of domination and supremacy" that produced the original incarceration. Ann Burroughs, chief executive of the Japanese American National Museum, was blunter: "The racism, xenophobia and cruelty that made what happened here possible are once again unfolding before our eyes." The logistics reveal the friction between civic memory and federal authority. The National Park Service, which maintains Manzanar as a historical monument, imposed restrictions on parking, shuttles, and construction standards — and the site superintendent was conspicuously absent during the speeches. Kwong said he was told to be careful about what he said as a volunteer at a government site. The Park Service itself has lost 25% of its workforce under Trump-era cuts, creating an institution that is simultaneously the custodian of this history and afraid to acknowledge its present-day relevance. Kwong's project was essentially a one-man operation. He made the 225-mile drive from LA repeatedly over three years, clearing foliage and tumbleweeds, excavating outfield posts, building a fence and bleachers. A federal government shutdown scuppered his 2025 plans. A windstorm destroyed the fence. He rebuilt. Volunteers, a Hollywood prop shop, a Connecticut seamstress specializing in vintage sportswear, a Berkeley-era activist, and several professional baseball teams contributed labor, materials, and money — but the organizational burden fell on Kwong alone. At least five men in their 90s or older who had been imprisoned at Manzanar attended. Masayoshi Morioka, who arrived at the camp as a nine-year-old, came to watch his grandson Mason play in the all-star game. "I have to go, for the last time in my lifetime," he said. The intergenerational chain — prisoner to player — is the project's most powerful structural argument: memory transmitted through the body, through sport, through presence on the same ground. The historical resonance is precise. Baseball in the camps was not recreation — it was a loyalty performance. As prisoner Takeo Suo put it: "Putting on a baseball uniform was like wearing the American flag." The wartime internees played to prove their Americanness to the country that had locked them up. Kwong's revival inverts that dynamic. The game is no longer a plea for acceptance but an assertion that the constitutional violations of 1942 are recurring, and that the affected communities will name it plainly. Manzanar itself carries a layered history of extraction. The site was once thriving farmland — apple and pear trees — until Los Angeles bought up Owens Valley land and drained the water to fuel its own growth in the early 20th century. The government then requisitioned the desiccated land for the camp. The ground where Kwong's players now chase fly balls into the sagebrush has been taken twice: first its water, then its freedom. The baseball project doesn't resolve that history. It stages it, publicly, with the dust still rising.
