03/27/2026
The Ecotone (an AAPI EHEJ Scholarly Forum Series) Presents: Between the Pajaro Valley and Ilocandia: Developing a Transnational History of Migrant Agrarian Life with Dr. Meleia Simon-Reynolds and Dr. Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez | Wednesday, 1 April 2026 11:00-12:00 PM in the Center for Korean Studies Auditorium
The 1930 anti-Filipino race riots in Watsonville, California, are often considered a watershed moment in Filipino-American history. The five days of rioting across the Pajaro Valley by hundreds of white vigilantes that culminated in the murder of Fermin Tobera, a Filipino farmworker, have long informed, if not overshadowed, what we know of the historical Filipino enclave that was Watsonville and the number of Filipino communities that called it home.
In 2021, descendants of the first wave of Filipino migrants to settle in the valley partnered with researchers at UC-Santa Cruz to form Watsonville is in the Heart (WIITH), a community-initiated, student-engaged research initiative that aims to document and uplift stories of life, labor, and migration through oral history interviewing, digital archiving, curriculum development, and exhibition curation.
In this sharing, WIITH team leaders discuss the initiative’s core research principles and methods. WIITH operates on a model of co-creation, inspired by oral history practice, and of student-engaged experiential learning. The speakers will highlight two projects: 1) a digital map documenting the 1930 riots and Filipino community formation over the twentieth century; and 2) Saritaan, a recently launched partnership between WIITH and Pangasinan Polytechnic College in Lingayen, Philippines, to investigate the history of migrant-sending communities from the Ilocos region, the top labor-sending region in the Philippines in the early twentieth century. These projects bridge Asian and Asian American studies and intervene in literature long bifurcated by area studies versus diaspora concerns.
