This year’s annual UC Santa Cruz Night at the Museum celebration will highlight Sowing Seeds: Filipino American Stories from the Pajaro Valley, a community-driven exhibition that uplifts stories of Filipino American migration and labor in Watsonville and the greater Pajaro Valley of the Central Coast.
This celebration and symposium will take place on Wednesday, June 5, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History in downtown Santa Cruz. The event is free and open to the public.
Several of the most prominent thinkers in Filipino American history will present their insights and findings on the role of archives, the work of preserving memories, and the histories of Filipinos in the United States.
This panel discussion will feature Catherine Ceniza Choy, a writer, historian, and professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, Richard “Rick” Baldoz, a third-generation Filipino-American whose research focuses on race, immigration law, and the politics of citizenship, and Rudy Guevarra, Jr, Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University.
Sowing Seeds: Filipino American Stories from the Pajaro Valley will run through August 4 at the MAH. Four years in the making, this long-awaited exhibition tells the story of Filipino migration and labor in Watsonville and the greater Pajaro Valley of Central California from the 1930s to the present.
The exhibition is the result of a prestigious $75,000 Public Humanities Projects: Exhibitions Planning grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to Watsonville is in the Heart (WIITH). Housed in The Humanities Institute at UCSC, WIITH is a community-driven public history initiative dedicated to preserving and uplifting the stories of Filipino migration and labor in the city of Watsonville and the greater Pajaro Valley.
Advance registration is strongly encouraged.
