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| The socializing between the Filipino workers and White women angered White men and led to the Watsonville Anti-Filipino Riots in the 1930s. |
Filipino American history is being virtually archived in California's agricultural Pajaro Valley under the guidance of the University of California at Santa Cruz.
About 300 people gathered April 9 at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History to celebrate the launch of the Watsonville is in the Heart Digital Archive, which preserves documents on the first wave of Filipino immigrants (the Manong generation) that came to America during the 1920s and 1930s as low-paid agricultural labor.
”Filipinos who came in the 1920’s struggled quite a bit and had to suffer a lot of issues with racism,” said Steve McKay, University of California Santa Cruz faculty co-organizer of the “Watsonville is in the Heart” research initiative.
“Filipinos have been in Watsonville since that time, but today there isn’t a single historical marker that Filipinos have played a role in Watsonville,” he told the Pajaronian.
The Pajaro Valley, widely known for its rich soil and agricultural products, was the site of the Anti-Filipino Race Riots in the 1930s when white mobs hunted the Filipino workers and shot at their bunkhouses because they felt the Filipinos were taking their jobs and the White men resented the farm workers socializing with White women.
One worker, Fermin Tobera was fatally shot during the weeks-long violence against the Filipinos.
Several of the Filipinos at the launch were descendants of the manong generation, including founder of the Tobera Project, Dioscoro “Roy” Recio, Jr., whose parents were descendants of the Filipino farm workers. The Tobera Project will be incorporated into the archive.
The archive will include family photos, family heirlooms, correspondence and oral histories. From the archive, a curriculum will be developed for local school districts.
“The UCSC team has done a wonderful job," Recio said of the archiving work thus far. "They’ve been very diligent, very professional, and very true to the mission and vision of the project, and they’ve been working hard to make the archive lively, enchanting, and engaging. We’re making excellent progress.”
The digital archive has been made possible with support from UCSC’s The Humanities Institute, Institute for Social Transformation, McHenry Library Special Collections, and California Humanities.
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| Local newspaper clippings will be part of the archives. |
“The UCSC team has done a wonderful job," Recio said of the archiving work thus far. "They’ve been very diligent, very professional, and very true to the mission and vision of the project, and they’ve been working hard to make the archive lively, enchanting, and engaging. We’re making excellent progress.”
The digital archive has been made possible with support from UCSC’s The Humanities Institute, Institute for Social Transformation, McHenry Library Special Collections, and California Humanities.
The Watsonville archive is the second one established in California this year. Earlier, an archive was established at San Diego State University.
The UCSC archive is now viewable online and features oral history recordings, original documents, family photos, and newspaper clippings.
The UCSC archive is now viewable online and features oral history recordings, original documents, family photos, and newspaper clippings.
“We are so honored to be able to share such intimate stories that people tell us about their families and that they trust us with that,” said McKay. “The families I’ve talked to have been thankful that there’s going to be an archive so that their family stories aren’t lost. That’s really important, and we feel a lot of responsibility around that. It’s something that we can give back to them.”
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