Undergraduate Student Profile: Maia Michelle Jardenil Mislang
Maia Michelle Jardenil Mislang graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 2024 with a Bachelor of Arts in History. As an undergraduate student, she conducted research with Watsonville is in the Heart (WIITH) for two years through THI’s Public Fellowships and the Humanities Division’s Employing Humanities Initiative. In 2022-2023 she was an oral history intern and in 2023-2024 she was a lead on the WIITH digital archives team. We talked to Mislang over the summer to hear more about her wide range of experiences from archiving to creating a zine.
Hi Maia! Thanks for chatting with us about your ongoing research. To begin, could you give us a general synopsis of your research projects and experience with WIITH? How did you get started with the team and what have you all been working on these last two years?
Hi, thanks so much for reaching out to me. I originally joined WIITH as an oral history intern in 2022, and since then, I’ve helped on our curation team, but the bulk of my work has been focused on expanding our online archive. Before we started performing our own research, we spent a lot of time learning about and discussing various books that had been published about the formation of Filipino communities throughout America with an emphasis on the Manong generation. At the end of my final year at UCSC, Special Collections reached out to us, and we collaborated to publish the zine, “I’m Just Nosy,” where I talk about my experience developing our community-based archive. In this zine, I focus on my friendship with Juanita Sulay, which was founded on a shared love for archiving, hunting for our family histories, our appreciation for our Filipino families and communities, and our roles as eldest sisters. While this is not discussed as in-depth in the zine, these connections were really developed and shared between Juanita, myself, and Meleia Simon-Reynolds. Also, during the run of Sowing Seeds my coworkers and I led educational tours for different school groups.
Can you talk about some of the personal significance of this work for you? How did being a part of WIITH impact your experience at UCSC and time living in Santa Cruz ?
I am so thankful for everything that WIITH offers— the opportunity to do research as a history student and the amazing people that I’ve been able to work with and so many trusted mentors and friends whom I really cherish.
Getting to know people in the Filipino community of Watsonville has been such a special experience. I came into this project hoping to make connections with Filipino people and communities in the Santa Cruz area and this has manifested in so many ways that I hadn’t even considered. I think the most profound moment for me was during the opening ceremony of Sowing Seeds.
I spent the beginning of the night at the front desk with my WIITH friends to greet and sign people into the MAH, and over the course of the night there were so many community partners that I recognized and welcomed or met through their family members who knew me and it was in these moments of so much excitement where I really felt like there was a community that I could stay in Santa Cruz for. Prior to this, I had spent so much time feeling out of place in Santa Cruz but that night really shifted my perspective as I was able to witness the importance of the work we were doing.
As a Public Fellow you were a part of the Humanities Division’s Employing Humanities initiative to give undergraduate students opportunities to translate their humanistic skills and training into relevant and valuable contexts outside the classroom and beyond graduation. One of the goals of this initiative is to support you with your transferable skills, like leadership, teamwork, critical thinking, and equity and inclusion, to help prepare you for your next academic or professional experience and future career. Think back to your skill set at the start of your work with WIITH and now that you are about to finish – how have your transferable skills grown? And has this experience impacted what you might want to do in the future?
Lol this is such a perfect time for this question. I’ve spent the past month and a half (at least) working on my resume and applying to jobs and tweaking my resume so I’ve been thinking about these things for a while. I can confidently say that my experience with WIITH has changed and improved and developed my skillset to a remarkably substantial degree. So much of the work we do is based around teamwork and we relied on each other’s feedback in our projects and our team meetings. We had a lot of discussion-based meetings based on chapters of a book or an article and at the start of these I had a really hard time figuring out how to come up with questions or critiques about what we were reading. I was able to develop critical reading and writing and feedback skills because I had the opportunity to pay attention to what Meleia or Christina or Professor Gutierrez had to say in these discussions. My career trajectory has shifted a lot because of this project— when I first joined I had shared in my interview that I wanted to understand what “doing history” looked like and now I am coming out with the experience of an oral historian and I feel a tremendous joy and love for archiving, which I am so grateful to Meleia for mentoring me in. I am currently planning to earn a masters degree in library and information sciences to continue archiving and hopefully work in libraries. There are more ways WIITH has supported my transferable skills, but it feels hard to put in to words. I really love my coworkers and I think we share a strong sense of love and respect for the community that we work with, so things like leadership, equity, inclusion, and teamwork seem to come naturally when we are all coming together to share our research or help guide each other in projects we’re passionate about because we really enjoy working together.
I wanted to understand what “doing history” looked like and now I am coming out with the experience of an oral historian and I feel a tremendous joy and love for archiving…
Another way I can gauge these differences is that I feel more confident in exercising many of the skills you had mentioned. While Sowing Seeds was open during the spring quarter, we had to give educational tours to school groups. Though the beginning of these tours felt a little awkward, we were all able to recognize ourselves as authority figures in sharing our knowledge and effectively communicate it to broad audiences.
Could you share a specific anecdote or memory from your time as a Public Fellow that stands out to you? Is there a specific project you really enjoyed working on, or something you contributed to that you’re particularly proud of?
Sure!! There have been so many special things that I’ve been a part of but I think what really stands out to me is the pattern of focusing on a certain task for the week and coming to team meetings with a lot of excitement to share what I had been working on or had learned and to hear about everyone else’s week. Towards the end of my first year with WIITH, I remember really loving curation team meetings with Christina, Una, and me because Una had been working on her digital exhibit, was sharing a lot of really exciting research about Rosita Tabasa, and had been trying to pin down the various locations of the Philippine/Oriental Gardens Cafe. Similarly, Ian and Julie were working on a mapping project, which was fantastic to watch develop, and Jacob had been writing an essay (which later became a digital exhibit) on cockfighting, which was so much fun to hear about. I think the last special memory I’d like to share is about archiving trips Meleia and I would take to visit Juanita and Allen on the weekends.
I am so thankful for everything that WIITH offers— the opportunity to do research as a history student and the amazing people that I’ve been able to work with and so many trusted mentors and friends whom I really cherish.
Meleia would pick me up around 9 am and we would pick up pastries along our way at some cool local bakery and when we arrived at Juanita and Allen’s we would pack-mule our scanners and backpacks and laptops and eat our snacks and chat. At the end of these days, we would realize it was later in the day than we had expected and would look at the ever-looming stack of binders to be scanned before slowly pack our things to leave, and we would hug Juanita and Allen one million times and I’d share some photos of my family (something I didn’t consider doing until my final scanning trips) and we’d buckle into Meleia’s car and wave goodbye to Juanita and Allen. Scanning days are my favorite part of WIITH and it’s one of the things I am going to miss the most.
People absolutely loved getting a copy of I’m Just Nosy at THI’s Night at the Museum. The way it captures the process of creating a community archive but also serves as a guidebook for others in an accessible format is powerful. Tell us a little more about how you decided to make the zine. Can you describe your process for putting it together, what it means to you, and what you hope others glean from it?
Thank you so much! Sam Regal, who is part of UCSC’s Special Collections, reached out to Meleia at the end of the winter quarter with the idea of creating a zine, and Meleia thought of me. The three of us had a super stressful first five weeks of the spring quarter where we were brainstorming together and I was having a hard time writing something that wasn’t an academic paper for the first time in four years, and then we went into editing while I started putting together a rough draft design while having, honestly, no experience in the program I was using. We met with Juanita in person at the beginning of the quarter to scan a surprise collection of photographs about the Women’s Club and to talk to her about her experience as an archivist and family historian— this conversation is what I relied on a lot while writing the zine. At the start of zine creation we knew we wanted to include the online group community somehow which is important because it’s how the community got re-connected around quarantine and continues to stay connected. It was important to me to focus on Juanita while making sure I was able to include as many people as I could which I achieved through highlighting individual voices and using photographs from various family collections. The back cover of the zine is a list I had written of photographs that I wanted to use.
I had bought a sketchbook roughly the size of the zine pages which is what I used to help me format the zine, draw the strawberry leaves on the cover, and keep track of information from oral histories or about zine creation or checklists, etc. The zine means a lot to me because Juanita and Allen are special to me and because it encapsulates a shared passion for archiving with the people that I was able to work on this with and because it helped me articulate my gratitude for my family and for Watsonville is in the Heart. From talking with community partners, I understand that there are some feelings of uncertainty about whether or not their children or grandchildren will find an interest in their family histories as they have, so I hope this can act as a source of affirmation that their stories are important while providing some helpful ways that people can start to record the memories of their elders… without the task being too daunting! There are a lot of hopes and expectations I have placed on this zine and the truth is: archiving has been so easy for me to pick up because Meleia and Christina and Kat had created a work flow and (most importantly) spreadsheets to organize information. These spreadsheets are so important. I think there’s a lot I’ve blocked out from the creation process so I want to emphasize how much effort Sam and Meleia put into helping me create this zine. I know my name is on it, but this would not be possible without them and their support and guidance and feedback and I really regard it as a collaborative effort.
Fun Question: When you aren’t on campus, where is your favorite place to go in Santa Cruz County?
I love tide-pooling along HWY 1!!! It wasn’t as easy for me to get to beaches on a whim so I would also go to Sunset Cove a lot!! I love the beach so much!!
Banner image and image from the MAH: from West Cliff Creative