The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a prestigious $75,000 Public Humanities Projects: Exhibitions Planning grant to Watsonville Is In The Heart (WIITH). Housed in The Humanities Institute at UCSC, WIITH is a community-driven public history initiative to preserve and uplift stories of Filipino migration and labor in the city of Watsonville and the greater Pajaro Valley.
Collecting oral history accounts, photos, personal records, and material culture objects, the WIITH team has created a new archive documenting the plight, struggles, vitality, and resilience of Filipino migrants–the manong generation who first settled in the Pajaro Valley in the early twentieth century and their families.
WIITH is an interdisciplinary initiative supported by three different divisions on campus: Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts. Team members hail from the different divisions, and each has been responsible for advancing some part of the project. THI provides the most infrastructural and administrative support.
The NEH funding will support Sowing Seeds: Filipino American Stories from the Pajaro Valley, an art and history exhibition that is set to open at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History in April 2024. Sowing Seeds will bring together original oral history interviews, archival research, and contemporary works of art that present insightful and sometimes conflicting narratives of belonging, community formation, and memory preservation. Acclaimed artists such as Jenifer Wofford, Johanna Poethig, and Binh Danh will take part in this display of visual storytelling.
UCSC Humanities Dean Jasmine Alinder spoke of the importance of public humanities grants funding high-impact community-engaged research projects such as WIITH and Sowing Seeds. “Humanities research can center the histories of people who have been marginalized and overlooked,” Alinder said. “WIITH and Sowing Seeds are projects that put stakeholders at the very center, sharing the history and voices of the Central Coast Filipino American community, offering insight into collective memory and resilience.”
“Sowing Seeds exemplifies the type of critical public humanities work THI is dedicated to advancing,” said Irena Polić, managing director of The Humanities Institute. “The exhibition and educational resources that the WIITH team will create will share a vital part of U.S. history and provide new understandings of Asian American migration. In the face of continued anti-Asian violence in the U.S., this initiative could not be more important.”
Steve McKay, UCSC associate professor of sociology, director of the Center for Labor and Community and co-principal investigator of the Watsonville is in the Heart Research Initiative, said the project grant will help the initiative, community members and partners preserve and share a vital history. “The labor and family history of Filipinos in the Pajaro Valley has for too long remained invisible and un-recognized and I am so proud that our collaborative project is helping bring that inspiring history to a broad, national and international audience,” he said.
WIITH’s co-principal investigator, Kathleen “Kat” Cruz Gutierrez, assistant professor of history at UCSC, spoke of the origins of Sowing Seeds and how far the project has come from its humble beginnings.
“It’s hard to imagine that we started as a series of phone calls, emails, and Zoom conversations in 2020, only to be awarded such a prestigious honor this year,” Gutierrez said. “Our community partners have propelled this initiative from the start, and I’m so glad we can help materialize their vision. The documented history of Filipinos in the Pajaro Valley was once unacceptably slim, and our campus-community research initiative has been addressing that. This recognition is a promise for more meaningful work ahead.”
“It is an incredible honor to have our art and history exhibition recognized,” said Christina Ayson Plank, PhD candidate in Visual Studies at UCSC and head curator of Watsonville is in the Heart. “This award validates what we as a team have known from the beginning—that community-engaged research is rigorous, dynamic, and vital. With this award, we will be able to continue collaborating with the Filipino community in the Pajaro Valley to curate traveling versions of the exhibition.”
As an emerging scholar and curator, Ayson Plank sees the award as an opportunity to further expand on WIITH’s historical and art historical research.
“With the NEH award, our team will have the privilege to continue working to fulfill our community partners' goals to amplify Pajaro Valley Filipino American history,” said Meleia Simon-Reynolds, co-director of the WIITH digital archive. Simon-Reynolds, a Ph.D. candidate in History researching Filipino labor, migration, and photography at UCSC, also leads WIITH's oral history project and its work to develop educational resources on local Filipino American histories.
“It goes to show that hard work and dedication can overcome many challenges,” said Dioscoro “Roy” Recio, founder of the Tobera Project, a grassroots organization and WITH community partner that brings together Filipino community members in Watsonville and the greater Pajaro Valley to uplift their history and culture.
WIITH has its origins in The Tobera Project. Recio, along with other community members, mounted an exhibition entitled 'Watsonville is in the Heart' in early 2020 on Filipinos in the Pajaro Valley. Recio reached out to UCSC faculty and graduate students to form a partnership for extensive historical preservation. WIITH launched formally in early 2021. The Tobera Project is WIITH’s conduit to oral history narrators and archive contributors, and helps to organize and promote events.
“I am proud that we have maintained a strong sense of community awareness and participation: with the people, by the people and for the people,” Recio said. “I think our ancestors would be very honored.”
WIITH was also honored with another prestigious award this week - the 2023-24 Engaging Humanities Grant from the University of California Humanities Research Institute, which facilitates experimental, interdisciplinary humanities scholarship through partnerships, research initiatives, and competitive grants.
This grant will enable WIITH to partner with UC Berkeley to create an interactive digital source that will map the locations most significant to the 1930 anti-Filipino race riots. The map will draw from archival sources at the Bancroft Library, the archives of the Filipino American National Historical Society, among others, and WIITH's own growing collection to highlight the refuge Filipino communities sought and built, and their summary refusals by society at large during this tumultuous history. Meleia Simon-Reynolds will be the lead graduate student researcher on this grant. Simon-Reynolds will work alongside UC Berkeley graduate student Josh Acosta and two undergraduates, one from UC Santa Cruz, the other from UC Berkeley, to ensure that the map can launch by the 2024 exhibition and be available for inclusion in high school ethnic studies curricula.
