Reimagining the greater Santa Cruz area against the implied whiteness of its “surf, sun, sustainable farming, and redwoods” image and its self-advertised lure as a Central Coast getaway, SANTA CRUZ IN COLOR: ETHNIC STUDIES COMMUNITY HISTORIES OF THE CENTRAL COAST, a multi-year initiative anchored by the Center for Racial Justice, delves into the region’s submerged histories and effaced realities, with a focus on grassroots community-of-color struggles for life possibility, justice, and dignity in the most unaffordable area of the country. By shedding light on how race, racism, and racialization have fundamentally shaped not just the region’s uneven wealth, but also, local histories, social movements, and practices of resistance, this place-based archival and public history initiative seeks to re-story Santa Cruz in order to materialize the grassroots accounts of local people and organizations that have fought for justice in this area. Focusing on different terrains of struggle, segments of the archive document struggles for workers' rights, international peace, sanctuary and migrant justice, and ethnic studies, and against war, segregation, police violence, and displacement. 

For the past year, interns at the Center for Racial Justice (CRJ) have been developing their research projects, based on their own areas of interest in local movement histories, building out modules formatted as lesson plans to shape an open-access people's archive of the greater Santa Cruz area. This has included conducting interviews with community members who have long been involved in struggles for justice, editing transcripts of oral histories, conducting research into local movement histories, searching for artefacts and looking through materials, outreach, following investigative lines, and much more. We are currently working on building on the digital interface and mounting a public event at the Resouce Center for Nonviolence, one of the CRJ's community partners, to present the materials in ways that engage and are accountable to local communities. 

SANTA CRUZ IN COLOR works with a range of local community organizations not just to archive their movement histories but more vibrantly to extend the transformative power of their past and present struggles against structures and systems of violence, dispossession, and exploitation. Rather than view ethnic studies as a field of study confined to the classroom, this project understands that ethnic studies resides organically and dynamically in community movements that shape local social landscapes yet are seldom vivified in public culture. Proceeding from an understanding that ethnic studies is public history and culture, this initiative aims to build a living, open-access ethnic studies archive that enables both the peoples of this area and visitors to encounter Santa Cruz through the lens of grassroots justice struggles. Through standing partnerships with community organizations, this archive highlights historical local movements against racialized violence domestically and abroad, while documenting ongoing struggles. Through community oral histories, curated historical documents, and study modules, as well as walking tours, this initiative fosters public education and engagement with and study of local movements against racial injustice, labor exploitation, deportation, police violence and repression, displacement, gentrification, educational inequity, and regional militarization.

Our goals in the near-term are to roll out our people's archive as a multi-stage launch series.

May 31, 2025: Soft launch of SANTA CRUZ IN COLOR archive at the Resource Center for Nonviolence, with a focus on modules organized by student intern areas of research.

September 2025: Launch in Watsonville of the 1985-87 Watsonville cannery strike module.

Spring 2026: Launch of module on local ethnic studies, including the 1990s' struggle for Chicano studies at Aptos High School, the recent and current struggle for ethnic studies in Pajaro Valley Unified School District, and  the Salinas roots of the Third World Liberation Front strike.

CRJ student interns will also be publishing their op-eds on local community struggles for racial, economic, and decolonizing struggles for justice throughout Spring 2025.