The Asian American Research Center has received a grant of $150,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a new project: Community Archival Resilience and Engagement (CARE): Voices of Asian American Elders in the San Francisco Bay Area. The project, funded as part of NEH's Cultural and Community Resilience Program, is an oral history and community archival project with elderly Asian Americans in San Francisco documenting the cultural practices that have developed as responses to the shared collective experience of the COVID-19 and anti-Asian hate pandemics. We consider how the survival mechanisms from past collective traumas of migration or world events and cultural knowledge help Asian American elders during the pandemics and document their cultural resilience and resistance from their own perspectives. The research team includes Associate Vice Chancellor for Research, Dr. Lok Siu as P.I., Project Director Loan Dao, Ph.D. ('09), recent alumni Sou Saechao and Aian Mendoza as Project Coordinators, and Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies Librarian, Sine Hwang Jensen as the Project Archivist. Three undergraduate students, Elaine Cheng, Isayah Nuestro, and Abigail Verino, have received research grants of $1000 to develop their own projects related to CARE. The project supports preservation practices with community-based co-creation of knowledge through partnerships with Bayanihan Equity Center and Lao Seri Association, who serve low-income Filipino, Laotian, and Thai elders. The CARE team will train young community interviewers to conduct intergenerational oral histories of elders and offer the elders archival workshops to preserve their memories. Their stories will be accessible via the CARE collection in the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library’s open access public search engine to reach a broad audience and for use by future researchers.
April 16, 2024