George Kagiwada Library was first established in the early 1990s. The library namesake was chosen in honor of George Kagiwada’s legacy as the first director of UC Davis’ Asian American Studies department in 1970 as well as a testament to their tireless dedication to student and community activism. A year prior to the pandemic, Department Chair and founder of the Bulosan Center for Filipinx Studies, Dr. Robyn Rodriguez, had begun the process of re-organizing, archiving, and re-imagining the library into a digital media lab and research room. During the Spring of 2022, a proposal to continue the renovation of Kagiwada library at UC Davis was submitted. Stacey Salinas, a Cultural Studies PhD Candidate and Bulosan Center’s Senior Historian, along with the Asian American Studies Coordinator, Angel Truong, were approved in continuing the project of renovating the Kagiwada Library in Dr. Rodriguez’s vision.

Upon reviewing the immense untouched collections of Asian American Studies material (books, periodicals, bibliographies, and more) that previous faculty had accumulated, along with fifty years worth of material donations from local Asian American community organizations and students (including papers, research, and club paraphernalia), both Salinas and Truong came to the revelation that renovating the library was not simply a task of cleaning, sorting, and updating. To their surprise, Salinas and Truong found the department’s late professors’ (George Kagiwada, Isao Fujimoto, Peter Leung, and Steffi San Buenaventura) papers, research, and lecture material that they had left behind in unlabeled boxes and bins in the library space. Thus the summer long project of renovating the library also became a student-activist endeavor to recollect and reflect on the thoughts, unpublished writings, and research of past community professors and students who helped to establish and grow Asian American Studies at UC Davis.

Our paper will discuss the renovation of the Kagiwada Library and the motions and emotions of the process of archiving student-activism and the intentional cleaning to make a welcoming space for future students. Most importantly of course, this paper will also discuss our work in documenting the personal histories and talk stories that have informed the community and student oriented space that is Asian American Studies at UC Davis. Furthermore, we discuss our findings and reflections on the archival material we stumbled upon and the talk stories we conducted with the first cohort to graduate from the Asian American Studies department in the 1970s during the turbulent years of the student and civil rights movements. Lastly, we conclude our paper with a reflection on Asian American women’s affective labor in preserving student spaces within the university for the sake of cultivating community space for future generations of Asian American student-activists.