Santa Cruz in Color is a digital people’s archive and multimedia community storytelling repository that documents local grassroots social movements for justice throughout the Central Coast, with a focus on the greater Santa Cruz area.

As a popular educational initiative that contributes to collective knowledge and resistance, this teachable digital archive catalyzes and deepens understanding of regional struggles against structural violence. Santa Cruz in Color works with community partners to document both historical and ongoing local movements and organizing against racial injustice, dispossession, labor exploitation, deportation, neoliberal trade policy, imperialist wars, regional militarization, police violence and repression, displacement and gentrification, environmental racism, and educational inequity.

With an idyllic reputation as a place of towering redwoods, pounding surf, progressive politics, and sustainable farming, Santa Cruz has a potent hold on the popular imagination.

Yet its mystique obscures its “peaceful violence,” or what Native Hawaiian activist Haunani-Kay Trask described as “[p]ower over peoples and land and economies. Power to take and consume. Power to define and confine. Power to maintain power.” Reimagining “Santa Cruz” against its ideological whiteness and self-advertised lure as a Central Coast getaway, this archive centers local peoples’ struggles for life possibility, justice, and dignity both here and around the world.

Localizing Ethnic Studies

Community-centered and grounded in ethnic studies methods and praxis, this people’s archive and storytelling repository is animated by a commitment to political education. In order to sharpen our analysis and prefigure the worlds in which we wish to live, we must study people’s struggles for justice, the challenges they faced, the tactics of power unleashed against them, and the ways they sustained their resolve and reproduced movements for change. Capitalism requires inequality, which racism enshrines, and Santa Cruz and the Central Coast have served as the setting for many pitched battles for dignity, liberation, and life possibility. Challenging the idea that ethnic studies must necessarily be imported into our area, with north county overwhelmingly white, we need only to recognize the vibrancy of ethnic studies in our midst.

Rather than view ethnic studies as a field of study confined to the classroom, Santa Cruz in Color locates ethnic studies organically and dynamically within community movements that have shaped local social landscapes, yet are seldom materialized in place, building, or street names, much less in history books. Approaching ethnic studies as public history and culture, this archive enables local people and visitors to encounter Santa Cruz through the lens of grassroots justice struggles. Santa Cruz in Color partners with a range of organizations that have fought against racialized policing, opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, helped Santa Cruz secure sanctuary status during the time of U.S. dirty wars in Central America, moved in solidarity with the Palestinian people’s long struggle for freedom, and sought to surface the histories and struggles of local communities of color. As a living archive, Santa Cruz in Color is dedicated to uplifting past and present grassroots movements for justice in the Central Coast. We are only getting started!