Sowing Seeds: Filipino American Stories from the Pajaro Valley was on view at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History from April to August 2024. It explored Filipino labor and migration to the Pajaro Valley from the 1930s to the present. The exhibition brought together oral history, archival materials, and contemporary works of art to feature multidimensional narratives across four themes: labor, gender, conflict, and memory. Sowing Seeds celebrated the perseverance of a Filipino American community to transform the Pajaro Valley into a home in the face of racism and exclusion.

The migration of Filipinos to the United States occurred at the dawn of U.S. colonization of the Philippines in the early twentieth century. The U.S. government appealed to Filipino farmers to travel to the U.S. and fill low-wage agricultural jobs. Roughly 100,000 Filipino men and women traveled across the Pacific to labor in fields. This generation of migrants is known as the manong and manang (“older brother” and “older sister”) generation. The Pajaro Valley was one major agricultural center where Filipinos worked and where some stayed.

Unfortunately, many of the manong and manang have long passed. Their stories live in the memories of their descendants. Sowing Seeds viewed these memories as key sites of historical and artistic research. By featuring family photographs, heirlooms, and recorded interviews, the exhibition highlighted the stories that descendants seek to memorialize. Sowing Seeds also investigated how and what memories are remembered as a way to further explore diversity, difference, and multidimensionality. Eight California-based contemporary artists were invited to interpret these memories in order to visualize the social complexities of this Filipino American community.

The artists featured in Sowing Seeds include Minerva Amistoso, Binh Danh, Ant Lorenzo, Sandra Lucille, Johanna Poethig, Ruth Tabancay, Jenifer Wofford, and Connie Zheng.

The exhibition featured archival materials from 17 family collections found on the Watsonville is in the Heart Digital Archive: Alminiana Family, Asuncion Family, Asuncion Family, Bersamin Family, Bosque Family, Cawaling Family, Deocampo Family, Fallorina Family, Florendo Family, Irao-Ibao and de los Reyes Family, Lopez Family, Mariano Family, Millares Family, Recio Family, Reyes Family, Sales Family, Sulay Family, Tana and Tabios Family, and Tuzon Family

The exhibition culminated a four-year research initiative between community members, UC Santa Cruz students, scholars, and curators called Watsonville is in the Heart (WIITH). WIITH collaborates with The Tobera Project, a grassroots organization based in Watsonville, CA. In 2020, Dioscoro “Roy” Recio Jr. initiated a partnership with UCSC to confront the unevenly documented history of Filipino Americans in the Pajaro Valley. With his leadership, the initiative has expanded to include several projects including oral history interviewing, digital archiving, and K-12 curriculum development.