Japanese American incarceration during World War II

Japanese American incarceration during World War II is invoked as part of Los Angeles’s continuing history of racialized removal and land use. Tariq Khalil recalls that Japanese residents of South Central were sent to camps during the war, after which Black residents moved into the neighborhood; decades later, Tariq’s community faces displacement for Channel View Estates. The reference makes the new development legible not as an isolated real-estate project but as another turn in a city’s succession of people being moved from valuable land.

The wartime removal and its aftermath

Tariq compresses the history into a blunt sequence: before the war, much of South Central was still a Japanese neighborhood; Japanese residents were sent to camps, and Black residents then moved in. His account identifies wartime incarceration as the rupture that opened space for another community, rather than treating the neighborhood’s demographic change as a natural or voluntary transition. The phrase about becoming the next Japanese people marks the handoff as an inheritance of displacement: one group arrives in a place emptied by state action, only to encounter a later power poised to move it again.

The novel supplies no fuller account here of the incarceration itself, its legal machinery, or individual Japanese American characters. Its importance lies in the brief recollection’s place within Tariq’s argument about the land beneath Los Angeles: the past is not safely past when its effects persist in who can occupy a neighborhood and who is made to leave.

From South Central to Channel View Estates

Tariq’s recollection leads directly to the threatened clearance of his own neighborhood for Channel View Estates. The novel sets this development against other Los Angeles transformations: Mexican families were displaced from Chavez Ravine for Dodger Stadium, American Indians were swept from Bunker Hill for the Music Center, and Tariq’s neighborhood is being bulldozed aside for a housing development promoted as “A Michael Wolfmann Concept.” The examples differ in their sites and outcomes, but together they turn redevelopment into a recurring mechanism for transferring land from established communities to institutions and private interests.

Doc sees the material setting of that change when he drives to Channel View Estates. Signs guide visitors from Artesia to a landscape of model homes near the road, completed houses farther in, and the skeletons of further construction beyond them. The streets are not yet paved where he parks, while newly installed street signs already name the future corner of Kaufman and Broad. Black pedestrians appear at the edges of his windshield, seeming, in Doc’s perception, to be looking for the old neighborhood. Their presence connects the development’s expanding footprint to the lives displaced beyond the sales signs and finished façades.

A recurring geography of removal

The wartime episode resonates with the broader property history Aunt Reet knows lot by lot, from the desert to the sea. Her knowledge encompasses not only deeds and contracts but also family histories, old hatreds, water and the ways it used to flow. In that context, land is more than a neutral surface for construction: its official records may register ownership and mortgages while leaving out the human histories that explain how a parcel became available in the first place.

The novel’s later confrontation with Crocker Fenway sharpens the conflict between the language of public benefit and the interests sustaining ownership. Crocker describes the struggle as one between residential owners and developers, and invokes environmental preservation against high-density housing; Doc answers that the dispute is about property values. Crocker’s own defense ends in the language of permanence and possession, naming real estate, water rights, oil and cheap labor as things that have always belonged to people like him. Set beside Tariq’s account of South Central, the exchange exposes how claims of being “in place” can obscure the repeated removals that secured that place for someone else.

Narrative significance

The reference to incarceration is brief, but it changes the scale of the Channel View dispute. Tariq’s neighborhood is not simply one more area caught in the path of construction: his account places its displacement in a longer sequence in which wartime confinement, postwar settlement and later redevelopment shape who can live on the same land. The narrative moves from the history of a community to the streets and unfinished houses of a present-day development, giving urban change a visible geography as well as a historical memory.

That history is also placed alongside the novel’s depictions of anti-Black hostility. In Gordita Beach, an earlier attempt by a Black family to move into town ended in a white mob’s burning their house; the lot remained empty until it was turned into a park. At a weapons display, Art boasts that his arsenal will keep Black people off his land, and a participant in the Channel View raid compares the alleged bikers to Black people as a measure of threat. These episodes do not equate distinct histories of violence. They show how racial exclusion and the control of land recur in different forms, making Tariq’s account of Japanese American incarceration part of the book’s wider examination of who is permitted to belong, who is expelled, and who profits when a neighborhood is remade.