Joanne De Los Reyes-Hilario still lives in Watsonville, in the house she was raised in.
Now 51 years old, she says it wasn’t a coincidence that her dad, who is Filipino, chose the city.
“Their little town where he grew up [in the Philippines] until he … came here was right on the water,” De Los Reyes-Hilario said. “There's a reason why they settled in Watsonville. Not in Bakersfield, or inland, or any of those other places.”
Like her father, many of the first Filipinos immigrating to the United States made their home in Watsonville in the 1920s and ‘30s. They’re part of what’s called the “manong generation,” after an Ilokano word that means elder.
Because much of the manong generation worked in the fields, De Los Reyes-Hilario says the lineage of Watsonville Filipinos begins in the ground.
“I remember my dad coming home and just smelling the fresh dirt, just the way he smelled in his flannel, and the dust,” she said. “We came from dirt.”
Her family story is now part of a new exhibit at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History that opened this month, called Sowing Seeds: Filipino American Stories from the Pajaro Valley.
The idea to showcase Filipino histories grew out of calendars created by her childhood friend, Roy Recio. Now in its fourth year, each month in the calendars features photos and an essay written by a different Watsonville family — De Los Reyes-Hilario’s family story is on the February 2020 page.
“I wanted to do something to honor and dignify their generation, or the manongs coming to Watsonville in that era,” Recio said.
This early collection of stories served as “a bottle of wine” for the community, he said.
“When you look at photos, you could see, ‘Hey, my dad's with your dad working in the field,’ or ‘ Hey, they're playing cards at the Philippine Gardens,’” he said. “It really brought people together to have conversation … that conjured up memories from the past … and now we can recreate a community.”
Recio mounted an exhibit called Watsonville is in the Heart — after nominal Filipino American novel America is in the Heart — at the Freedom Branch Library in 2020. Though it was cut short by the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the gathered stories seeded a digital archive of Filipino oral histories and family photos with the same name, which became the foundation for the Sowing Seeds’ exhibit.
Curator Christina Ayson-Plank credits Sowing Seeds to the work Recio and the community had already been doing.
“That we even jump-started this project was also because of their stories that they want to tell,” she said.
Community members and researchers working together to create this archive and exhibit reflects the long history of Filipinos preserving their own stories as they built a life in the Pajaro Valley, despite the racism and prejudice that manifested in the 1930 anti-Filipino race riots.
“To do our aunties and uncles right”
The launch party at the museum felt a little like a family reunion: A dining table set with porcelain. Framed family photos mounted on shelves. Childhood Maria Clara dress sleeves hanging on the walls.
Oral histories from Watsonville is in the Heart feature prominently — a quote from six separate interviews anchors each section of the exhibit. Their influence is evident in eight commissioned art pieces, as artists worked with families to convey their stories.
"There was some discomfort, but I just ignored it, because we were supposed to dance and I liked doing the dances," she said. The sleeves are based on dresses she and her mother wore.
And instead of a chorus of museum docents’ voices, snippets from fourteen oral histories are part of the exhibit’s audio guide. Including one from 67-year-old Dan Fallorino, a retired electrical engineer who lives with his wife in Watsonville.
“I've had people come up to me and go, ‘I could, I could feel that. I could see it. And you know, my family has gone through the same thing too,’” he said at the launch party.
Also on display in the museum: A braided crop of garlic from Fallorino’s father’s personal garden — the last he harvested before passing away.
Fallorino managed to hang on to it for years, only remembering it was in his garage when the researcher conducting his oral history interview asked if he still had it.
“Even though he worked out in [the] fields, he still had a garden at home, because he was able to plant the things that he wanted to,” he said. “So he likes to plant garlic.”
Fallorino’s father wasn’t the only Pajaro Valley farmworker to grow a personal garden for himself. That’s part of why the exhibit is called Sowing Seeds, said Ayson-Plank, who in addition to curating the exhibit is a PhD candidate at UC Santa Cruz.
“Their gardening practice was their way of taking back the narrative,” she said.
While gathering oral histories for Watsonville is in the Heart, Ayson-Plank and her fellow researchers asked themselves, “Why would this group of farmworkers who worked several hours of their day, doing this intensive labor, want to come back home to garden?”
“[They’re] saying, ‘This garden that we've created is for us, and we are doing this for our community,’” she explained.
Ayson-Plank says the title of the exhibit, Sowing Seeds, is multifaceted. It reflects the predominantly agricultural community, and it’s a metaphor for the exhibit itself, which sows seeds for future research.
But it also represents how the Filipino American community has been “recording, preserving and developing all of these amazing research and histories that are just waiting to be told,” she said.
Her digital archive co-director and fellow PhD student Meleia Simon-Reynolds says the project has been deeply personal. Having grown up in Santa Cruz and wanting to research Filipino American history, she jumped at the opportunity to work on the archive and exhibit.
For her, the title evokes two things: People mentioning their gratitude for their parents’ hard work to build the foundation for a good life. And “the way that the community wants to sow seeds for future generations to learn about their histories.”
Recio, who started the calendar, said he “felt like the legacy of my parents’ generation is just fading away without much fanfare.”
He was already involved in community organizing throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, but after his mom passed away in 2018, he wanted to recognize the community he grew up in. Inspired by friends and community organizers in Stockton’s Little Manila, another major Filipino enclave, he started compiling Pajaro Valley Filipino stories.
A quote from his oral history interview is one of six that anchors the sections in Sowing Seeds, which are geared around themes of labor, gender, conflict and memory: "We're here to do our aunties and uncles right."
Simon-Reynolds said that quote is among those that guided her work.
“I really resonate with that quote, because I feel like I've gained a lot of new aunties and uncles through this project," she said. "So I feel like I have to do them right by working on this exhibition, and making it really special.”
While the exhibit and archive are backed by several institutional partners, from the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History to UC Santa Cruz’s Humanities Institute, historian Dr. Kathleen Gutierrez, one of the principal investigators for Watsonville is in the Heart, says the ethos of the work has been that of co-creation with community members.
“Those [archive] descriptions were co-written with community partners in mind, with them actually seeing the descriptions, or with them telling us the stories of how these descriptions needed to be written,” she said. “It’s always been a really good reminder of … the work that we need to do to also try to make sure that the community can put their trust in us as well.”
Recontextualizing the history of Filipinos in the Pajaro Valley
While the exhibit rests on over four years of archival work, Filipino Americans in the Pajaro Valley have recorded and preserved their own stories for decades. Before Roy Recio even thought of making the calendars, he self-published a zine in 2000 chronicling some Watsonville history.
When he started collecting family stories, he christened his work the Tobera Project, after Fermin Tobera.
“Tobera is the man who was killed in the 1930 anti-Filipino race riots,” Recio explained. “Therefore, I feel like I needed to commemorate his life, even though it was short.”
While anti-Filipino race riots broke out across the Central Valley in the 1920s and 1930s, some of the worst happened in Watsonville — a product of racial tensions caused by immigration restrictions and the Great Depression. The riots scarred the manong generation.
Former Watsonville mayor Manuel Bersamin recalled visiting Watsonville Plaza in the 1980s.
“You’d see older, retired Filipino males sitting on these benches,” he said. “But I have to say, not one of them will talk about the Watsonville riots. And I know they remember them.”
It was only in 2020 that Watsonville passed a resolution apologizing to its Filipino community. The Monterey County Board of Supervisors followed suit last year, apologizing for jailing Filipinos across the Pajaro River.
“That moment gets very, very much cemented in Asian American history, Filipino American history, even U.S. history as really, this kind of incredible shame,” Gutierrez, the UC Santa Cruz history professor, said.
But the Sowing Seeds exhibit shows a window into a fuller history of the Filipino community growing in the midst of racism and prejudice.
The exhibit and archive address two issues, according to Gutierrez: The overshadowing of the 1930 riots of the over the long century of Filipinos in the Pajaro Valley, and the absence of those same voices sharing their own stories.
“We’re not actually even hearing from Filipino Americans themselves here, about not only that event, but other aspects of that history,” she said.
Many people mentioned going to the beaches, or their parents fishing and foraging — something distinct from other agrarian Filipino enclaves in California like Delano, Stockton and Bakersfield.
“I feel like in Santa Cruz and in the Monterey Bay, we’re associated a lot with the beach and surfing — this fun image and history of this counterculture,” Simon-Reynolds said. “But when I hear those stories, they’re very white-focused. And I think it's really unique to be able to hear stories of people of color, Filipino Americans, who were also enjoying and making use of the ocean here.”
That includes Joanne De Los Reyes-Hilario — the Watsonville resident still living in her childhood home, who credits her being an avid fisherwoman to her father’s love of fishing.
She said she hopes this archival work helps her daughter understand her lineage.
“This is a gift that I’m gonna leave for you,” she said, tearing up. “This is gonna be forever. It’s gonna be there — once I’m gone, if you miss my voice, you can go back and hear my voice. If there's anything that you can leave behind, it's the stories that you tell, and it’s things like this.”
The exhibit is on display through August, and the Watsonville is in the Heart archive is viewable online. And the family histories that made both possible will carry on long after.
