Stacey Salinas
Ethnic Studies Professor, College of the Redwoods, Eureka (California)
Eureka, California, United States
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Dr. Stacey Anne Baterina Salinas holds a PhD in Cultural Studies and is a co-founder and former Senior Historian of the Bulosan Center for Filipinx Studies at UC Davis. Salinas' research focuses on the roles of Filipinas in the Fil-Am towns of the Central Coast during the interwar period with an emphasis on gender, activism, and labor. Her recent publications highlight Filipina resistance fighters in the Philippines, called guerrilleras, during WWII and their eventual migration stories as part of the manang and manong generation. Salinas volunteers and researches for other Asian-American led coalitions like Chinatown’s Pacific Atrocities Education, the Filipino American National Historical Society, & The Filipino American Woman Project Podcast. Currently, Salinas is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the College of the Redwoods in Eureka, California.
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Carrying the Torch Without Burnout: Imagining a Sustainable Future for Asian American Studies
Our roundtable discussion centers on the reality of work life immediately after the PhD. As 1st generation scholar-activists, who feel lucky enough to find a home in the community college system, we nonetheless have felt that our training, and time with the university, did not prepare us to navigate our new terrain. This liminal period of transitioning from the environment of a graduate student to full time professor, on many occasions is jarring. Without practice, mentorship, or simple conversations within the ivory tower on how to manage our time and responsibilities to our communities, while trying to survive our new workloads (of anywhere from 3-6 classes on diverse subjects that do not always align with our fields, but with the needs of the college), such discussions in our training would have better eased us into the workflow of life outside of the academy.
Other tasks within the community college system as new professors include building new curriculum for new divisions and departments in Ethnic Studies, participating and collaborating with local community organizations and student clubs and outreach are a number of the additional tasks we scholars of color have taken on. This cultural taxation, to serve as diversity representatives on multiple committees, who bring with them new literature, pedagogy, and social justice praxis into our decolonial curriculum, are also still expected to remain moored to research and contemporary literature in their respective fields. We barely were able to survive the university as first generation scholars. We feel that we have been thrown into yet another environment of scarcity where we continue to advocate and maintain our departments that intersect or house branches of Ethnic Studies. How do we as new Asian American Studies scholar-activists maintain our momentum and drive to preserve and teach the many lessons of social justice, community building, and abolition that is inherent to the formation and initial purpose of Asian American Studies?
Our papers and reflections ask this question to fellow Asian American scholar activists, both long tenured in their fields and those who are also just entering and settling into the academic workforce: How is this workload sustainable?
Mopping Floors While Talking Stories: Reinventing Kagiwada Library
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.
Stacey Salinas
Ethnic Studies Professor, College of the Redwoods, Eureka (California)
Eureka, California, United States
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