Local History Collections & Exhibits

Shades of Watsonville

Special Photo Collection

We all have them in our homes - family albums, shoe boxes and trunks filled with pictures both new and old of people and places we may no longer recognize. To preserve these photos - to document the lives of the people and events depicted in them is the goal of the Shades project.

Digitization of Photos - Now Online

The Shades of Watsonville photo collection was digitized in 2019 through California Revealed, a project of the California State Library. All of the photos supplied by our community members are viewable online. 

Grant Program

Early in 1999, the Watsonville Public Library received a grant from the California State Library for a program called Shades of California: Exploring Our History Through Family Photographs. This program, which we call Shades of Watsonville, provided for the copying and documentation of family photographs from preservation at both the State Library and in our own library collection.

Photo Day

This project consists of two parts. The first, a Photo Day, was held on August 1, 1999. On that day, community members brought photographs to the library for copying. A group of trained volunteers selected images for inclusion into the Shades of Watsonville archive.

Photo Exhibit

The second part of the project is the Shades Photo Exhibit. A representative fifty photographs have been selected from over 250 images copied on Photo Day. These pictures have been mounted and put on display at the library at various times.

The images in the Shades of Watsonville exhibit represent the cultural diversity and history of the wonderful place we live. We hope you will enjoy taking a look back into the history of the remarkable community of Watsonville.

Collection of Photos

Binders containing all 250 of the photos copied on Photo Day are available from this special collection for historical research purposes at the library. For more information, contact Carol Heitzig at 831-768-3409.

This project is supported by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provision of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian.

Stories from Residents of Watsonville

Placida Alvarez de Carrillo and Interviewer Margarita Cortez on Storycorps.org

Watsonville is in the Heart

The “Watsonville is in the Heart” exhibit is a collection of artifacts and photographs of Filipino immigrant families of the manong generation in the Pajaro Valley. 

The exhibit was curated by Dioscoro Recio, Jr., founder of The Tobera Project. Major contributions came from Eva Monroe, Juanita Sulay Wilson, and other Filipino families whose parents and grandparents settled in the Pajaro Valley in the 1920s. 

“Watsonville is in the Heart” came to the Watsonville Public Library in February of 2020. We intended on displaying the exhibit through March, culminating on March 28, 2020 with a screening of A Dollar a Day, Ten Cents a Dance, a documentary on Filipino migrant labor in the early decades of the twentieth century to California’s agricultural fields. Unfortunately, like everything in 2020, our plan was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to statewide and national lockdowns, which forced the library to close to the public, the exhibit drew many visitors from Santa Cruz County and beyond. 

With so much interest in the history of Filipino immigrants in the Pajaro Valley, the Watsonville is in the Heart Virtual Exhibit grew out of a desire to share this collection with a wider audience, to further document and preserve the experiences and contributions of the manong generation of Filipino immigrants to the Pajaro Valley, and to enhance the oral history archive being presently developed by faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates of UC Santa Cruz.

The virtual exhibit has been made possible with support from the following partners: The Tobera Project, The Humanities Institute, Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County, the Ow Family Foundation, the Filipino Community Center of Watsonville, California Humanities, the UCSC Committee on Research New Faculty Research Grant, the UCSC Arts Research Institute, and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History.

Special thanks to Dioscoro Recio, Jr., Eva Monroe, Juanita Sulay Wilson, Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez, Steve McKay, Meleia Simon-Reynolds, Christina Ayson Plank, Wyatt Young, Toby Baylon, Nicholas Nasser, Olivia Sawi, and Amanda Gamban.