Storytellers of the Pajaro Valley

Antoinette DeOcampo-Lechtenberg holding a framed photograph of her father, Paul “Skippy” Tabalan DeOcampo, (right) and a once known companion (left) (Photo courtesy of Mitchell Plank and Christina Ayson Plank).

On a sunbaked day in June of 2021, Antoinette DeOcampo-Lechtenberg, a former college administrator and practicing herbalist based in California’s Pajaro Valley, showed a team of us researchers and our kin around her hometown of Aromas and through stretches of agricultural fields. In the early twentieth century, the Pajaro Valley served as the landing ground for thousands of migrant Filipino farmworkers, who would come to be known as the manong generation. Antoinette, a child of Manong Paul DeOcampo, a foreman who worked in apple orchards for fifty years, recounted stories of life on the land, as we gazed across the rolling foothills that cradle the coastal valley.

Swayed by the hot summer wind, and with the aroma of plump strawberries kindling our senses, we had no doubt that the land we were standing on could tell countless Filipino American stories. Through Antoinette’s full-hearted narration, we got a glimpse into these diverse narratives. As scholars with intellectual and personal paths that led us to these agricultural fields, we—Christina Ayson Plank and Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez—are driven by the storytelling that continues to expand what we know of Filipino American labor and migration in the early twentieth century.

Together, we are part of Watsonville Is in the Heart (WIITH), a campus-community research initiative composed of faculty and students of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and members of The Tobera Project, a grassroots organization based in Watsonville, the Pajaro Valley’s longstanding Filipino enclave. Founded by veteran community organizer Dioscoro “Roy” Recio, Jr., The Tobera Project honors the memory of Fermin Tobera, a manong who was murdered during the brutal anti-Filipino race riots of 1930 of which Watsonville was the epicenter.

Yet, despite Filipinos’ long history in the region and the historical wound left by the riots, no public marker exists to register Filipino presence in Watsonville or in nearby towns. To rectify this, WIITH has worked as a team to preserve local manong history; broadcast the stories of their descendants; shed light on the integral labor of the manang, Filipina migrants as well as the non-Filipina women who married the manong; and demonstrate the multidimensionality of Asian America to broad audiences.

WIITH team members at the August 2021 “Archive Drive” at Moreland Notre Dame School in Watsonville. During our Archive Drives, community members are invited to digitize their family archival materials while sharing stories of their provenance and context. From left to right: Olivia Sawi, Meleia Simon-Reynolds, Christina Ayson Plank, and Amanda Gamban

Since forming in early 2021, we have wanted to build upon the colorful “Talk Story” sessions originally organized by The Tobera Project: public conversations between manong descendants on their experiences growing up in the Pajaro Valley. To do so, we set out to conduct oral history interviews and to date have approximately 2,424 minutes of recorded material.

Among the recordings are tales of Manong Modesto Tuzon and his musicality and passion for the bandurria; memories of the Filipino Women’s Club, a social organization established by Manang Rosario “Nena” Alminiana; and vivid childhood accounts of growing up of mixed Filipino and Mexican heritage, like those shared by manong descendant Mary Florendo Perry. Alongside scanned photographs, family artifacts, and documents shared with us by our interviewees, these recordings and many more live in the Watsonville Is in the Heart Digital Archive that we launched in April of 2022. We will continue to expand the digital archive as more stories are shared and recorded.

Manang Angelina Fallorina and once known co-laborer in the Reiter Berry fields, photograph, c. 1965. (Photo courtesy of Dan Fallorina)

Since launching our archive, we have continued to advance the practice of storytelling by working on K-12 curriculum resources. Under the leadership of WIITH team member Meleia Simon-Reynolds, we intend to debut classroom tools that are responsive to California’s ethnic studies mandate. These tools will incorporate primary source material from our archive, clips from interviews, and instructional aids for teachers and students to conduct their own oral histories. We hope that these resources will encourage young scholars and students to learn and connect with their family histories. 

What’s more, we are excited to publicly celebrate our work through a major art and history exhibition, Sowing Seeds: Filipino American Stories from the Pajaro Valley. Slated to open on April 12, 2024 at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Sowing Seeds will highlight the very stories we first set out to collect. We will bring together original oral history interviews, archival research, and contemporary works of art to feature insightful–and sometimes, conflicting–narratives of belonging, community formation, and memory preservation. We have invited acclaimed artists, including Jenifer Wofford, Johanna Poethig, and Binh Danh, to offer new avenues of visual storytelling on manong and manang history.  

WIITH has worked to fulfill the vision of The Tobera Project, of our oral history narrators, and of the archive contributors we have come to know. We remain inspired by people like Antoinette, a community steward who understands the power and importance of her stories and those of her father and mother. She reminds us that storytelling is the stuff of history–and that history begins with small acts of story preservation.

This Filipino American History Month, we encourage you to pull out that voice recorder, share a meal with a loved one, and capture their stories. In our experience, that story may very well be a gift to history.

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Christina Ayson Plank is head curator of Sowing Seeds and Digital Archive Co-Director of WIITH. She is completing her Ph.D. on Filipino contemporary art and migrant labor at UCSC. Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez is co-Principal Investigator of WIITH and Assistant Professor of History at UCSC.