Dear Watsonville is a film that utilizes oral history interviews, illustrations, and archival photos to crystallize the memories of manong descendants. It employs a graphic novel format. The film comprises of 3 vignettes. Each one focuses on memories from a different interviewee detailing their families’ migration journeys and experience growing up in Watsonville.

TOPIC

Filipinos have played a significant role in American history– from the Filipino American soldiers who fought in World War II, to the Filipina American healthcare workers who alleviated critical nurse shortages in the 1950s. Yet their existence in general U.S. history education is sadly limited. This is most evident when we take a look at Watsonville, California. Despite there being a long history of Filipino farmworkers and record of the Watsonville anti-Filipino race riots of 1930, the Filipino migrant communities are sparsely documented. Drawn by the “American Dream,” the first wave of Filipino migrant farmworkers arrived in the U.S. by the thousands during the 1920s and 30s. Filipino migrant labor to Northern California’s Pajaro Valley– specifically, Watsonville– swelled. They are known as the manong (Illokano for “older brother”) generation. Original documentation on Watsonville Filipinos is only found in a sprinkling of local newspapers, which has preserved a narrow sense of manong life in the farming town. Today, many of the manong have passed, but their children continue to live in the Pajaro Valley. It is critical we capture their stories while we can. Through The Tobera Project, a grassroots Filipino heritage organization, and Watsonville is in the Heart (WIITH), the community-driven research initiative, the children of the manong are amplifying their communities’ histories. WIITH has conducted 31 audio oral history interviews (and counting) with manong descendants and is adding them to a novel public archive built from these families’ personal collections. These recordings and archival materials detail leisure activities and community cultural celebrations. With consent from the appropriate parties, Watsonville uses these oral history recordings and archival photographs to create one short film comprised of three vignettes.

Dear Watsonville is meant to look and feel like a moving graphic novel. As viewers listen to edited excerpts from the oral history audio recordings, they will see three main visual assets: archival photos from the WIITH archive, archival 8mm footage of the Philippines from my grandfather, and illustrations by artist Lauren Song. These assets are in illustrated panels. The illustrations are meant to convey the emotions that the archival photos and footage might not. Sondy is interested in using this format for two reasons: (1) graphic novels do a great job of telling a rich story while compressing time and (2) when reading a graphic novel, readers see events and details separated into independent, contained sections (i.e. panels) and need to fill in the gaps with their imagination and personal experiences. This complex interpretation of the story “between the panels” provides a unique experience of multilayered emotion. This format allows Sondy and her team to shape the emotion and meaning of each “shot” with the positioning of the panels.

The auditory component of the film is significant. Much of its sound design is inspired by podcasts such as Radiolab. If the interview subject is feeling nostalgic, viewers might hear the kalimba or bowed Goje. If the interview subject is describing the ocean, viewers might hear calm or stormy waves– American Pipit songs if their story takes place in late fall, or a Brown Pelican’s “hraa-hraa” if it’s summer. The sound design in this film provides the cadence and punctuation to each story.