The Re/Collecting Project and Rethinking Archives and Archival Practice

Abstract

31 Interface Grace I. Yeh The Re/Collecting Project and Rethinking Archives and Archival Practice Before I even knew places like San Luis Obispo, Lompoc, or Pismo Beach existed—much less that they existed as nodes on the migrant labor trail for Filipinos here as U.S. colonial subjects—I had read Carlos Bulosan’s ([1946] 2014) America Is in the Heart. It turns out that the pivotal point in the novel, when his eponymous protagonist Carlos discovers the power of writing and of giving voice to voiceless Filipino workers, was set in San Luis Obispo, where I teach Asian American and ethnic studies. Carlos ’s experience organizing labor begins with the pea pickers in Pismo Beach and quickly fans out. With a certain amount of naïveté, I thought there must be great primary source materials in the local archives that would help support or elaborate on some of the narratives and political contexts covered in Bulosan’s text, which also includes some of the experiences of Mexican labor and Japanese growers. Alas, very little of the pre–World War II Filipino community’s own perspectives and voices was accessible—until, that is, I found the right people to ask, who were willing to share their collections and recollections.1 I was given this opportunity when I was invited by a local historical society to codirect an exhibit called Routes and Roots: Cultivating Filipino American History on California’s Central Coast (2010). Because relevant assets were scarce in the museum’s holdings and other institutional repositories, our first task was to find contacts in the community. These individuals opened up for us an archive hidden in their memories and in their homes. Their garages, attics, and closets held story materials about people who, with their labor, made possible the transformation of agricultural industries at the beginning of the twentieth century and who built networks of support to help them feel at home in a place that 32 Interface was, at many times, unwelcoming. We were able to gather photographs, artifacts, and oral histories from local community members to build the exhibit, which we organized around themes that reflected the community ’s own sense of itself and its history. But once the exhibit came down, so did public access to these community stories and story materials. Thus, in 2012, I initiated the Re/Collecting Project (Re/Co Project) as an “ethnic studies memory project of California’s Central Coast,” mustering the human and material resources of a state university to support the digital preservation of and access to little-known community stories. The project’s aims are to digitally preserve and make accessible digital-only historical materials pertinent to the study of race and ethnicity on California’s Central Coast; to create opportunities for student–faculty–community research; and to share with the community best practices for preserving its original artifacts and documents. All of the original items are still held by individuals or by small institutions with limited resources to make their collections findable . For each of the items digitized, we interview the donor to create metadata (e.g., location, date, names, and description) that are embedded in the assets. These interviews about the materials donors provide for digitization are recorded, in addition to the more traditional oral history interviews. This digital archive is particularly important in a place like the Central Coast, where the demographics have been shaped by a long history of racial stratification, even exclusion. It is a region that has been formed by agricultural industries that rely on racialized labor and, before that, by the dispossession of Native American and Mexican lands. Thus, although the Central Coast has a complicated and rich history of diverse communities , the public documents tend to reflect the perspectives and experiences of those who wielded political and economic power. To build this archive of stories and story materials, digital assets were created through a few different methods. The inaugural digital collections were created through organizing “Re/Collecting Days,” one-day events through which my students and I invited community members to recollect their stories to be recorded and to collect their story materials to be digitized. I turned to the...