The Local as Ethnic Studies Curriculum

Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

WHO: Riley Alinsug, Aamir Asadi, Christine Hong, Lucy Lui, Keiko Utsumi

WHAT: The goal of this project is to ground local ethnic studies curriculum in Santa Cruz’s occluded histories, focusing on migrant labor, land dispossession and exploitation, and histories and realities of freedom and unfreedom. This project positions the team as community-collaborative researchers, enabling them to apply ethnic studies methods to the area that most–for a time–call home. They, along with our community partners, will contribute to a digital archive of local histories by taking part in the recording of community oral histories, identifying relevant documents in the Museum of Art and History archives about early Santa Cruz (and reading such documents against the grain), investigating and collating ephemera from student organizing at UC Santa Cruz, digitizing historical traces, and presenting their findings in a public forum.

WHAT'S NEXT: This project’s current focus is the struggle for ethnic studies, or the formerly revoked Community Responsive Education program in Pajaro Valley Unified School District.