Poston was one of the larger relocation centers, located on the Colorado River Indian Reservation in extreme heat. The family lived there under conditions of forced confinement while the farm they had built sat unworked. Tad eventually obtained an Indefinite Leave Clearance — a process that required signing a loyalty questionnaire — which allowed him to leave Poston and work in Colorado, where he could support the family financially during the incarceration.
To prevent the farm from being seized or lost during the family’s absence, Tad negotiated lease agreements with Gonzalo Mendez. The first one-year lease was signed in December 1944 and the second in August 1945. These arrangements gave the Mendez family agricultural income while allowing the Munemitsus to retain the legal ownership that was the foundation of whatever economic recovery would be possible after the war. The August 1945 lease included specific provisions: the Munemitsus would have the right to use the farm buildings as dwellings when they returned, and Gonzalo would provide them work at prevailing wages during the transition period.
Seima was reunited with his family in 1944, and the family left Poston in September 1945, returning to find their farm being worked by the Mendez family. Through the summer of 1946, they worked alongside Gonzalo Mendez on the land they had built — an arrangement that speaks to both families’ pragmatism and to the specific form of displacement and recovery that Japanese American incarceration produced.
Sylvia Mendez has noted in her public accounts that the farm’s history matters to her family’s story — that they lived on land and drew income from a situation created by the wartime displacement of another family. The Munemitsus did not lose their farm, as many Japanese American families did. They recovered it, and worked on it alongside the family that had managed it. But the connection between the two families’ histories in this period is part of the larger story of race and property and wartime injustice in California.