The Idaho camp where Nora Zavala Gallion harvested sugar beets in 1968 felt like a prison because it had been one – for Japanese Americans in the second world war
My mother, Nora Zavala Gallion, was 11 years old when she first set foot inside the farm labor camp in Caldwell, Idaho. It was 1968, and her family had traveled over 2,000 miles by car from Texas’s Rio Grande valley to harvest sugar beets as migrant laborers.
While my family had worked numerous crops across the country for decades, the girl who would become my mother sensed something very different about this location. The camp’s small, dilapidated wooden living quarters were called “barracks” and featured open, latrine-style bathrooms and showers. Somehow, my mother knew this place had a troubling past.
