For Sowing Seeds, the Watsonville is in the Heart team set out to achieve eight objectives: 

• To increase knowledge and understanding of an Asian community that migrated to the U.S.
• To reflect on the communal activities that cultivate camaraderie, kinship, and a sense of belonging. 
• To learn how women can play an integral role in forming immigrant communities’ notions of identity.
• To consider how notions of race and class in an immigrant enclave may shape one’s own experience of belonging.
• To widen visitors’ grasp of the historical legacy of anti-Asian violence and one community’s ongoing response to that legacy.
• To contemplate how community-generated memory-preservation can interrupt canonical historical narratives.
• To empower visitors to collect their own local and family histories.  
• To utilize methods such as archival research, oral history, and art to deepen understanding of the history of Filipino Americans. 

One way to evaluate the effectiveness of the exhibition in meeting these goals came from our student-led tours. At the end of our tours, we distributed physical surveys to both student-participants and to their instructor-chaperones.  For the student survey, questions were demographic in nature; asked students’ opinions of the exhibition and its displayed objects and images; and requested feedback on how to improve our student-led tours.  Most of our survey respondents (41%) came from UC Santa Cruz, located a few miles from the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and this is where our most effective outreach took place. Students from other campuses (62%) took part in this tour as well–including those from middle and high schools and community colleges–but a number of factors (transportation and school district coordination) limited their attendance.  

Some limitations of our survey was that out of the approximately 6,000 total visitors of the Sowing Seeds exhibit, an estimated 150 students participated in a tour, and of this figure, 124 were able to complete the survey. So as a result the responses we received are not a reflection of all the viewership of Sowing Seeds. 

With that being said, we had a wide variety of responses from different schools and age groups. Our first set of responses came from middle school students based in Santa Cruz, with an average age of 12 years old. In these responses, we discovered that 80% of the students had at least some familiarity with the history presented in Sowing Seeds.  However, when asked what new information students gleaned from the exhibition,  most shared that they were unaware of family and marriage dynamics and women’s roles in the Pajaro Valley. Considering that these topics comprised a significant portion of the exhibition, we were satisfied that these respondents left with such new knowledge. These students also wanted more interactive activities to take place during their tour (64%), which could have looked like more time for questions or games in the gallery. Our survey also asked students to share their favorite item from the exhibition, and 64% of middle school-aged respondents named the film, Dear Watsonville. Of all of the age groups surveyed, the film resonated the most with this younger population, giving us insight into the effectiveness of animated, moving images for this type of exhibition. 

The next age demographic was high school students, whose responses varied considerably from those of the middle school-aged tour attendees. Most notably, high school students were less familiar with Pajaro Valley Filipino American history (73%), and a relatively smaller proportion of the respondents found the exhibition material relatable, even if a good number of participants hailed from the Pajaro Valley themselves (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: High school-aged responses to the question of relatability.
Answers ranged from “0” (“Not relatable”) to “5” (“Very relatable”)

Of all the sections in the exhibit, it seemed that the first section of the tour– “It was sincere camaraderie” on manong labor and leisure–resonated with them deeply. They were engrossed in the history of the manong generation, learning about the trials and tribulations that this generation of Filipinos had to face such as the 1930 race riots and horrible working conditions. 

High school students were more evenly spread in the media that most resonated with them, they enjoyed not only the film but also the art, objects, and photographs. One comment that stood out came from a student aged 18 who attended Watsonville High School stated, “The film really spoke to me because my family has had similar experiences to the ones in the film.” Another comment that the WIITH team felt to be significant came from a 17-year-old student from Watsonville High School, who was drawn to Strawberry Fields Forever by Connie Zheng, a layered multimedia art piece depicting individuals working on farmland. We valued how students, some non-Filipino identifying, found the history displayed in Sowing Seeds relatable to their own experiences, and the various media facilitated these connections well. 

Most high school students seemed to be more inspired to document their family history (73%) than middle school students after viewing Sowing Seeds. This is significant because it hit one of our main audience goals which was to “empower visitors to collect their own local and family history.” But similar to the middle school students, the high school students also wanted more interactive activities (61%). 

Nearly half (41%) of our respondents attended UC Santa Cruz at the time of their tours.  The majority of the college students found the information in Sowing Seeds relatable (79%), and only a small portion of the students were not familiar with any of the information (21%). These students walked away from the gallery impacted by a number of themes, most especially interracial relations.  Students also made connections to their own histories with one student from UC Santa Cruz noting that, “During the tour, I learned just how intertwined my hxstory as a Mexican-American is with the hxstory of Filipino Americans in the Pajaro Valley.” We saw this type of connection critical to heightened understanding of histories in the Asian American diaspora (once again, another objective of ours) and their similarities to aspects of the Latinx immigrant experience.  

Figure 2: College students who felt inspired to document their family history.
Answers ranged from “0” (“Not inspired”) to “5” (“Very inspired”)

Another important figure to note was the fact that 98% of college students said that they felt inspired to document their family history (see Figure 2). This figure moves us to consider how we may have more effectively (though, inadvertently) curated the exhibition to address the objective of empowering viewers to document their histories with older audiences in mind. Finally, college students more evenly appreciated the varied media in the gallery but on the whole were partial to Dear Watsonville. 

The final feedback we received came from instructors who also participated in the tour. One instructor shared constructive insight: 

I think 30-40 mins tops of talking. I think they [students] should be allowed to look in any gallery when they’re done – if you want to increase the chance of them visiting the [Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History] a second time in their lives. My students knew about the riots in Watsonville, but I think if students don’t know you could add 1-2 historical anecdotes to really show how severe the exclusion and oppression was. We were told briefly about the Salinas strike – and that’s history I don’t think any of us knew. A better explanation would have been nice. A museum is a good place to share a little racist history – because they’ll believe it and process it as they walk around. 

For future exhibition work of this kind, we intend to take this feedback seriously and will aim to give audiences more time with our exhibitions (and venue spaces) to instill more curiosity during their museum-going experience. We may also reconsider the length of our tours and the types of anecdotes we share to emphasize the historical importance of our material. 

The same instructor also conveyed, 

It was perfect. Students in my ethnic studies class now assume anyone from the past who isn’t Mexican in Watsonville was Filipino I teach art classes too – so the combo of art and ethnic studies was great. There was talk of struggle, and of overcoming it and building a nice community. Students related lots of little things to their classes and personal lives…. During the [tour they] were really engaged. I heard students who don’t really seem to try hard in school talking about their social studies classes. Everyone was really into the other exhibitions at the MAH and really enjoyed the opportunity to try something new.

The instructor’s comments assured us that we facilitated new connections for students–ones that they could make in their own community. Also, the format of an art and history exhibition seemed to resonate well for this instructor, suggesting that we met our final exhibition objective; that is, to utilize methods such as archival research, oral history, and art to deepen understanding of the history of Filipino Americans.