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This dissertation is the first comprehensive study of Filipino American history in the Pajaro Valley. The region has been a key node for Filipino American history since the early twentieth century, serving as a home and stopover for laboring migrants along the Pacific seaboard. However, Filipino presence in the Pajaro Valley has been narrowly documented, long overshadowed by the historiographical linchpin that is the 1930 anti-Filipino Watsonville race riots.Using analytical methods at the intersection of Asian American history, oral history, public history, visual studies, and critical archival studies, I argue that Filipinos in the Pajaro Valley create personal, familial, and community alter-narratives that transform historical knowledge. I define alter-narratives as individual and collective accounts that are consciously crafted to reflect different audience contexts. I use it to encompass a multitude of ways and degrees to which Filipino migrants and their second-generation descendants delineate their personal and historical experiences. I examine novel archival sources collected during five years of collaboration with the Tobera Project— a grassroots organization made up of descendants of the first Filipino settlers to the region—and Watsonville is in the Heart (WIITH), a community-engaged partnership between the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Tobera Project.In addition to centering the Pajaro Valley as a nexus for Filipino American history, this dissertation makes three more historiographic contributions. First, with its focus on photographic and archival alter-narratives created by Filipino migrants who arrived in the US between the 1920s and 1940s, I bring light to everyday tactics of survival and self-fashioning in the face of racism and exclusion. Second, I highlight the second-generation descendants— a group who has been elided in most public and scholarly accounts of Filipino American history. Through discussion of their archival, public history, and advocacy work, I show that descendants actively shape historical understandings of their relatives and their community. Finally, my interdisciplinary approach and my use of community-engaged research methods offers an innovative model for historical inquiry into migrant communities in the United States. I show that Filipino migrants and their descendants remake common narratives of the Pajaro Valley and Filipino America.

Watsonville is in the Heart (WIITH) is a community-driven, public history initiative to preserve and uplift stories of Filipino transpacific migration and labor in the greater Pajaro Valley—an agricultural region located on central California’s coast. The WIITH team is creating a novel archive documenting the resilience of Filipinos who navigated the intersections of colonialism, migrant labor, and racism during the early twentieth century. The archive includes Filipino experiences documented through oral histories, photographs, personal records, and material culture objects. Significantly, WIITH’s archive reveals transpacific connections between the Philippines, Hawai‘i, and the Pajaro Valley that have yet to be examined by scholars. The initiative’s value sits at the intersections of art, oral histories, and histories of Filipino migration. It will culminate in an exhibition at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Watsonville is in the Heart: Philippine Migrant Labor in the Pajaro Valley, that will bring the WIITH archive and the Bay Area artist community together. This essay provides an overview of WIITH’s archival development, methodology, and historiographical intervention thus far.