Building a Community Archive: Preserving and Uplifting Stories of Filipino Labor and Migration

In April 2022, Watsonville Is in the Heart (WIITH), a research initiative based at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), launched a new digital archive that preserves histories of Filipino American migration, labor, and community in the Pajaro Valley region of California’s Central Coast. This article describes WIITH’s partnership between UCSC, The Tobera Project, and the descendants of the first Filipinos to settle in the Pajaro Valley. It outlines our methods for critical community-engaged archiving. It also shares the multiple ways in which the WIITH Digital Archive has significantly impacted project stakeholders in the university and the community.

The photograph portrait of Clemente Florendo, Sr., (Figure 1) features a twenty-one-year-old Clemente Florendo, Sr., a manong who traveled to Seattle in 1931 and later resettled in Watsonville in 1942. Before he left the Philippines, Clemente visited an unknown photo studio, where he took this photograph. As a migrant laborer who traveled up and down California to follow the seasonal crop cycle, he often left his family for long periods. He gave his daughter, Mary Florendo Perry, this photograph as a token of remembrance when he was away or when she traveled to Mexicali to visit her mother’s family. Mary remembers holding and kissing this photograph during nights when she longed for her father. The creases, stains, and fingerprints on the photograph are remnants of this longing.

Figure 1.

Portrait of Clemente Florendo, Sr., date unknown, Watsonville is in the Heart: A Community Archive and Research Initiative. Accessed March 29, 2023, https://wiith.ucsc.edu/items/show/186?collection=7.

Reprinted with permission.

This photograph is just one example of the many objects and stories that are preserved on the Watsonville is in the Heart (WIITH) Digital Archive, a digital repository of oral history interviews, family photographs, family heirlooms, letters, correspondences, and newspaper clippings. These objects document the stories of the “manong” generation (Ilokano/Tagalog for “older brother”), the first wave of Filipino farmworkers to settle, among many other US sites, in the Pajaro Valley at the beginning of the twentieth century. Working collaboratively with descendants of the Pajaro Valley manong generation, the WIITH Research Initiative—a community-engaged research initiative based at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC)—created the first digital archive to document histories of Filipino American labor and migration in the region. Despite a long and vibrant history, there is no monument or adequate public acknowledgment of the Filipino American presence and contributions to the Pajaro Valley. For many years, descendants of the Pajaro Valley manong have advocated for the representation of Filipino American history in their hometown. The WIITH Digital Archive achieves its goals through a process of co-creation, shared authority, and mutual partnership. We have developed an archive that influenced the university’s archiving practices, created undergraduate and graduate student opportunities in decolonial research methods, uplifted grassroots historical documentation, and dignified the Filipino American community.

The WIITH Research Initiative seeks to preserve and amplify the histories of the Pajaro Valley manong and to expand on narratives that often center male-migrant laborers and racial violence to include memories of community formation and leisure; interracial relationships and mixed-race experiences; community conflicts and class dynamics; and women’s labor and migration. WIITH partners with The Tobera Project, a Watsonville community organization founded by veteran community organizer Dioscoro “Roy” Respino Recio, Jr., The project team is composed of community researchers, UCSC professors, and UCSC graduate and undergraduate students with expertise in various disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and arts. Our team is led by Dr. Kathleen “Kat” Cruz Gutierrez and Dr. Steve McKay; graduate students Christina Ayson Plank and Meleia Simon-Reynolds; community researcher Olivia Sawi; Tobera Project coordinator Amanda Gamban; and many UCSC undergraduate students.

In 2020, Recio and other descendants of the Pajaro Valley manong curated an exhibit titled “Watsonville is in the Heart” at the Watsonville Public Library. For Recio and his collaborators, the goal of the exhibit was to honor their parents and raise awareness about vibrant regional Filipino American histories. Alongside the exhibit, The Tobera Project created and sold calendars that highlighted a local Filipino American family, organization, or event each month. Both the exhibit and The Tobera Project calendar were collaborative efforts led by community members and featured photographs, heirlooms, and pieces of historical writing provided by local families. Recio sought to ensure that the documents and stories collected by The Tobera Project would be preserved in perpetuity. He reached out to UCSC with the goal of partnering to develop an archive. From those initial conversations, the WIITH project was born. In early 2021, the WIITH team began conducting oral history interviews with descendants of the Pajaro Valley manong, collecting photographs and other objects, and building the digital archive website. The ethics of co-creation embodied by The Tobera Project’s grassroots historical documentation efforts have since served as the foundation for WIITH’s university–community partnership.

Approach and Methods

Since the WIITH Digital Archive’s public launch in April 2022, we have collected over 1,000 objects across twenty-five family collections. The rapid success of the project is a result of the strong and mutually beneficial partnership between UCSC, The Tobera Project, and Pajaro Valley community members. By understanding our stakeholders’ motivations and desires to participate in a university–community partnership, we can access essential resources, leverage skills and expertise, balance multiple goals, and highlight different perspectives. Through university funding, infrastructure, and workforce, we have been able to actualize the community’s vision to create a publicly accessible, long-lasting archive. However, we are also aware of the historically unequal relationships between marginalized communities and academic institutions.

Looking to “critical community-engaged” methods, we endeavor to address apprehensions regarding university researchers appropriating and manipulating the histories of marginalized communities. We position community members as expert researchers and leaders who direct every step of the project.¹ In an attempt to work against prevailing power structures within academia that center on a single or omniscient authorial voice, a notion that many archives are built upon, we commit to an ethics of co-creation and dialogue. WIITH builds on Asian American, ethnic studies, and critical archiving pedagogies that privilege community perspectives and ways of knowing.² We look to existing methods of grassroots historical documentation found among our community partners—such as genealogical research, scrapbooking, family-curated collections, and crowdsourced historical information—that are already in practice. These methods inform every step of WIITH’s archival process. This includes the crafting of archival descriptions and metadata (or explanatory information such as titles, descriptions, locations, and dates); the structure and organization of the digital archive site itself; and the digital archive team’s collecting and documentation processes.

The team utilizes two primary methods for collection and documentation. The first entails collecting items for the archive at individual community members’ homes. The second method includes the hosting of large-scale “archive drives,” an open call-out for community members to bring their collections to a public location (Figure 2). During both these intimate meetings and community events, community members curate their items based on the narrative they seek to share. WIITH team members digitize these items and conduct interviews to gain background information on items and family collections. The information and stories gleaned during individual meetings and archive drives inform the metadata and descriptions of collections and objects featured. As a result, community members’ perspectives are integrated into archival standards—in the case of WIITH’s archive, the Dublin Core standard for metadata—that are utilized by other libraries and academic institutions. These methods also provide community members and WIITH team members the opportunity to mingle and share stories and meals. Forming relationships is essential to our practice of building trust and kinship. This is a central tenet of the WIITH university–community partnership and is what makes the project successful.

Figure 2.

WIITH team members, Amanda Gamban and Christina Ayson Plank, collecting photographs and heirlooms from community contributor, Elizabeth “Liz” Tana at Moreland Notre Dame School in Watsonville, CA, at our community Archive Drive on August 28, 2021. The photograph taken by Dr. Steve McKay.

University, Community, and Personal Impacts

The WIITH Digital Archive profoundly impacts both university and community stakeholders. Within UCSC, the WIITH Digital Archive serves as a model for other public history and community-engaged archiving initiatives on campus. Significantly, it influenced the development of a new community archiving program housed in UCSC’s Special Collections that is focused on preserving the local histories of groups often left out of university archives. The WIITH Digital Archive project is committed to “community-initiated student-engaged research (CISER)” in which students are positioned as knowledge producers and their agency is prioritized.³ We provide undergraduate and graduate students with opportunities to lead projects in collaboration with community members. Acquiring hands-on experience building the digital archive has inspired our team members to pursue higher education and careers in community archiving, library science, and public humanities.

The WIITH Digital Archive project has also impacted communities beyond the campus and our immediate partners in significant ways. Due to WIITH’s successful relationship with The Tobera Project and the university, several Filipino American communities outside of the Pajaro Valley have expressed interest in replicating our model of community archiving. In addition, non-Filipino American communities in the Pajaro Valley have sought to build relationships with UCSC. This interest has led us to present our methods at conferences, facilitate advisory meetings, and produce resources on building mutually beneficial university–community partnerships and guides for creating a digital archive.

In tandem with The Tobera Project’s grassroots community organizing, our archival work supports efforts to increase public attention and memorialization of Filipino American history in the region. Recently, this has led WIITH to support Recio’s and The Tobera Project’s plans to build two public monuments that will commemorate local Filipino American history. This includes a large mural project in partnership with Watsonville Brillante, a public art organization, on the facade of the Civic Plaza parking garage in downtown Watsonville and the naming of a low-income housing project after the prominent Filipina business owner and community leader, Rosita Tabasa. WIITH’s culminating project is a public art and history exhibition at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History called Sowing Seeds: Filipino American Stories from the Pajaro Valley, set to open in April 2024. Sowing Seeds draws on the archival research we have conducted and is co-curated with our Filipino American community contributors. Our university partners will help fundraise for the exhibition to make the community’s vision materialize. The exhibition is a testament to WIITH’s ethics of collaboration and strong partnerships with community and university stakeholders.

In our estimation, however, it is the families and community contributors who have been most meaningfully affected by the WIITH Digital Archive project. WIITH has provided an opportunity for families and friends to reconnect through memories of loved ones and shared experiences. For example, old high school classmates have reunited after decades apart, and relatives from across the Pacific have connected for the first time. Included in the WIITH Digital Archive is a collection of letters belonging to the Florendo family. These letters were sent between Clemente Florendo, Sr. and his relatives who lived in the Philippine province of Isabela. In their correspondences, they expressed their desire to be together after being separated for many years. After the launch of the WIITH Digital Archive, Clemente’s daughter, Mary, posted about her family’s participation in the project on Facebook. To her surprise, two long-lost cousins from the Philippines, whose grandfather corresponded with Clemente, reached out to her. They also commented on the Florendo Family Collection via the WIITH website (Figure 3). They expressed excitement that their shared family history was documented and happiness that the reunion that their grandfather envisioned could

Figure 3.

Screenshot that shows comments made on April 26, 2022 by Divina Estilong Florendo-Ago and Tomas Florendo on the Florendo Family Collection page on the WIITH Digital Archive website. Accessed March 29, 2023, https://wiith.ucsc.edu/collections/show/7.

finally arrive. These moments affirm our mission to cultivate connections with families and communities in the Pajaro Valley and beyond. We are excited by the potential for more meaningful connections to emerge through the Filipino American stories preserved in the WIITH Digital Archive.