her Japanese surname. Both were American citizens. After President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, Arthur was ordered to report to the temporary detention center at the Pomona Fairgrounds. Estelle faced a decision – stay with her husband of 13 years and be incarcerated or remain in Los Angeles alone. She was informed that if she chose to go with her husband, she would not have any privileges due to her race and would have the same status as the Japanese American prisoners. On May 10, 1942, Estelle chose to report for incarceration, and began sketching the series of events that followed. Estelle and Arthur were first held at the Pomona Assembly Center, where over 5,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated. During her time at Pomona, Ishigo joined a staff of 19 residents to create the camp newspaper, the Pomona Center News. In August 1943, the Ishigos were sent to Heart Mountain Relocation Center, which held over 12,000 prisoners in Wyoming. During their time at Heart Mountain, Estelle continued to use her artwork to document their lives. Ishigo immersed herself in camp life. She joined the Heart Mountain Mandolin Band and a camp theater troupe. She sketched and painted and felt accepted into the Japanese American community. Ishigo later wrote, "Strange as it may sound, in this desperate and lonely place, I felt accepted for the first time in my life. The government had declared me a Japanese and I no longer saw myself as white. I was a Japanese American. My fellow Heart Mountain residents took me in as one of their own." She chose charcoal sketches and pencil drawings as her main media because she found watercolors to be "too clean and untroubled" to capture the experiences of camp. Many of her paintings and drawings depicted the cruel weather of Wyoming, documenting the wind and snow. Although the Ishigos never had children, much of Estelle's work involved depicting children within the camps, illustrating young Japanese American youth playing while behind barbed wire. Estelle took a job in the Documentary Section of the Reports Division for Heart Mountain and was paid $19 a month for her work (the maximum wage available for prisoners). Post war and death The War Relocation Authority (WRA) closed the Heart Mountain concentration camp in November, 1945. Like most other prisoners, the Ishigos had nothing to come back to. The couple was each given $25