Guide to the Union of Pan Asian Communities Records

For this week’s blog post, I chose to explore the archival collection titled ‘Guide to the Union of Pan Asian Communities (UPAC) Records’. The UPAC was found in 1972 in response to the need to unite the small and geographically dispersed groups of Pan Asians. This specific collection of data focused on the social services UPAC provided in order to address community organizing, health, educational, employment training, housing, and mental health needs of the Southeast Asian immigrants and refugees community within the San Diego metropolitan area. This archive is divided into five series including UPAC administrative files, Indochinese Service Center administrative files, program files , Subject Files, and audio visual media.

The narrative I was able to gather from the materials in this collection, was that UPAC cared for and wanted to help improve the general well-being and education of the Asian, Pacific Islander and other ethic communities of San Diego. They recognized the diverse ethnic and cultural identities and strengths of these communities and their need for self-sufficiency. Looking through the detailed list of contents, it was evident that UPAC understood the needs of their community, applied to multiple funds in order to support their programing, and collected evaluations both of staff and service in order to continue providing quality service.  The data in the collection also spoke to the political climate during the time such as the evaluations from the California Council for the Humanities in Public Policy Affirmative Action Conference in 1978.

Even with over 180 boxes of data, there is some information missing. The Union of Pan Asian Communities collaborated with many community organizations who shared similar goals and perhaps even created new committees along the way. Basic background information of these organization as well as their purpose are not provided. In the audio visual media series, there are many cassette tapes translating consumer education in different languages such as Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong, and Lao. What is not known is how accurate the translations were and how successful the cassette tapes were in teaching the community about these topics.

In order to address these gaps, including interviews from members of the community who benefited from these programs would provide more insight. Newspaper articles would also be a great source to gather multiple perspectives on the services and resources provided by UPAC. Another option would be to explore other other archives pertaining to similar topics that may contain the missing information.