ARTISTS
Sowing Seeds: Filipino American Stories From The Pajaro Valley
Sowing Seeds: Filipino American Stories from the Pajaro Valley explores Filipino labor and migration to the Pajaro Valley from the 1930s to the present. The exhibition brings together oral history, archival materials, and contemporary works of art to feature multidimensional narratives across four themes: labor, gender, conflict, and memory. Sowing Seeds celebrates 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 (鈥渙lder brother鈥� and 鈥渙lder sister鈥�) 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 views these memories as key sites of historical and artistic research. By featuring family photographs, heirlooms, and recorded interviews, the exhibition highlights the stories that descendants seek to memorialize. Sowing Seeds also investigates 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.
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Sowing Seeds: Filipino American Stories from the Pajaro Valley explores Filipino labor and migration to the Pajaro Valley from the 1930s to the present. The exhibition brings together oral history, archival materials, and contemporary works of art to feature multidimensional narratives across four themes: labor, gender, conflict, and memory. Sowing Seeds celebrates 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 (鈥渙lder brother鈥� and 鈥渙lder sister鈥�) 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 views these memories as key sites of historical and artistic research. By featuring family photographs, heirlooms, and recorded interviews, the exhibition highlights the stories that descendants seek to memorialize. Sowing Seeds also investigates 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.
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