Update on Project Activities
We are currently preparing for our visit to Salinas on Sunday the 14th. We plan to leave campus at 10 am and arrive at Salina’s around Noon. Prior to our visit we need to have 2-3 driving research questions that focus on the manageable scope for the project. In Week 3, we had a Zoom meeting with our partners where we took a digital tour through the census documents and large varied data sets. Our next task is to delegate the midterm in the following pattern: 1. Hannah- methodology, 2. Arriana - background 3. Jasmin- tasks and timeline and 4. Anpo- will focus on the big picture.
​

What We Observed and Learned
As a team we learned that it is easy to get lost in the data sets. So this is where  we hope our driving questions will help us stay directed. The range of years represented in our given data sets is very interesting. We wonder happened in the 50’s? We learned about the different map resources that are unique to Salina’s via agriculture and transportation. We could look into gathering fiscal information about Salinas (may be protected info closer to the present), Hartnell students could possibly help us gather that sort of data. We noticed the chapter on the interactions and connections between different cultural groups and communities throughout Salinas. With that, Salinas has potential to grow and expand, what’s that going to look like in the future? We noticed that the health care promotion services started in the 1920s, did that cause growth in the medical industry in the city? Where were major health centers, and what populations lived in the areas around them? What geographical level does crime data exist at? What is accessible? The Salinas GIS department has a map gallery that could be an interesting place to pull info from. Additionally, finding an Alisal area map could give us a valuable shapefile to layer onto older maps and see what falls within those boundaries. Future growth areas and focus growth area maps could be an interesting resource. Lastly, it’d be interesting to compare school district boundaries with property tax rates to start seeing the correlation between wealth and settlement. It would be neat to look into the demographics of those areas, are there racial divides within the school districts? We also noticed the school District map of Salinas has weird divisions that we want to further look into. 


Critical Analysis/Moving Forward

We would like clarification on our relationship with Hartnell students, what are our roles, how are we expected to interact throughout the course of the quarter? For example, are we developing research questions together? Will the presentation to city hall be done jointly? We would also like to clarify if we are expected to focus on the entire timeframe or if we can narrow in to a specific time period. What is the role of the Monterey County Health Department. The research  questions we developed are: Mathematically figuring out how segregated Salinas was in each decade using census data, map clusters of wealth and racial groups -- Other studies we could reference that have done this. 

Other ideas include: if we could create a sort of “segregation index” where we could do multiple regression and correlation studies to measure the effects of that on other city factors such as GDP etc. We would want to look for information on transportation infrastructure growth throughout the years. For instance, where was infrastructure built and who did it serve? How did that impact the demographics in those areas? Does Salinas have a center that gives info on agricultural history and movements? As a group we are looking forward to getting a clearer picture of present-day Salinas. What is the economic status, what are their main commercial industries etc? We would like to check out the political districts and how they’ve voted, does that have any impact on the other research questions we’ve posed?

Update on Project Activities
This week, we began by reading about the history of Salinas and the economic, political, and social forces that influenced its development.  The two pieces of background reading, excerpts from Lori A. Flores’ Grounds for Dreaming and Carol McKibben’s history of Salinas, made it clear that the narrative of race relations in twentieth century Salinas is highly contested.  
​
We also met with our project collaborators, a diverse group of students, government workers, and academics, and set a date for our first meeting in Salinas.  Before that date (October 14th), we plan to discuss our research goals with David Medeiros, of the Geospatial Center, and Kris Kasianovitch, a research librarian.  Even planning a one-day meeting proved difficult due to the size and schedule variances of our project group. We were restricted by our classes and the time it takes to drive to Salinas, and many of our collaborators had to find time outside of their work schedules, classes, and family obligations as well.  To address this issue, we all shared our contact information and chose student liaisons for the Stanford and Hartnell groups.

What We Observed and Learned
As previously mentioned, we realized that Salinas’ history, especially in regards to settlement patterns and race, is very complex.  Salinas, like much of the American southwest, is located on Native American lands that were seized by Spaniards, later to become part of Mexico, then the US.  Farmers used the area’s rich soil to grow a wide variety of crops, including lettuce, which helped Salinas prosper even as the rest of the country plunged into the Great Depression.  The huge growing and packing operations that once made Salinas one of the richest cities in America depended on a diverse community of laborers. These workers came from China, Japan, the Philippines, Mexico, and the Dust Bowl in several distinct waves of migration.  This information is what our sources could agree on. They disagreed, however, on the issues of community integration and discrimination. 

Flores’s paper presented a fairly simple historical narrative: all these groups were subjected to legal, social, and economic discrimination.  The government and community may have used different laws or acts of violence to harm each group, but ultimately the mechanisms and motivations for discrimination were the same.  Flores also described Salinas as a segregated city, which jibes with the reports of our colleagues at Hartnell College. However, Dr. McKibben’s research suggested that the historical picture of Salinas was more nuanced.  She described many instances of social integration (some forced and some chosen), from Mexican men going to bars in Chinatown to the whole city celebrating a Filipino hero. She acknowledged that racism still had (and has) a significant impact on life and settlement in Salinas, but she also added that some aspects and members of minority communities were widely appreciated and celebrated.  At first glance, the historical maps of Salinas seem to support both Flores’s and McKibben’s arguments, showing both seemingly segregated areas and prominent minority-owned businesses and land plots.

Critical Analysis/Moving Forward
Out of all the URBANST 164 projects this year, ours initially seemed the least connected to sustainability.  After reading Miriam Greenberg’s discussion of justice-oriented sustainabilities, the role of this project has become clearer.  In order to address issues of inequity in present-day Salinas, it is critical that we come to understand the historical roots of those issues.  By examining settlement patterns and their influences, we will hopefully be able to see if and how certain groups have been restricted and others have been encouraged to prosper.  In order to do this, we next need to narrow the scope of our research.

While this project has a fairly straightforward set of deliverables, our initial instructions are rather open-ended.  Dr. McKibben referred to the first phase of our research as an “exploration” of our data in which we will have to select a few drivers of settlement patterns and geographic areas of interest. Even with the maps and census data we already have access to, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by this amount of data. Dr. McKibben suggested that we might select a geographic area of focus within Salinas, and this would allow us to immediately screen out a lot of data.  Also, we would like to select a few of the most important drivers of settlement distribution and delve further into those. For instance, we could focus on economics and chart demographic changes in relation to lettuce sales and key events like the onset of the Great Depression.  No matter what we decide to focus on, it will be crucial that we continue to critically examine our sources and ask ourselves how different authors are trying to portray the city of Salinas. Even seemingly “neutral” sources like maps and census documents have their own subtle biases that we must evaluate with caution.  As we continue to examine the references we have been given, we will also consider which GIS and graphic design techniques we should use to analyze and present this information.

Update on Project Activities
This week, we had a chance to talk with Jonathan, Andrea Jany, and Carol McKibben. Jonathan’s call gave us more specific directions in regards to what our deliverable is to look like next Thursday, and what we should expect at the visioning session on Thursday. Andrea’s shed some insight on how to devise a questionnaire for the residents, that will be less in depth than the interviews we’ve planned, but allows for us to have a good survey of the residents beliefs in regards to Alisal housing/community. Carol’s call gave us background on the Alisal community in preparation for the interviews we wish to conduct on Thursday. We will be talking with her in person again this upcoming week to flush out more ideas for our interviews.

In addition to these meetings, we started developing a survey on housing situations and housing preferences in the Alisal based on Andrea’s advice and recommendations. We are planning to have a short survey, at the most 1 page front and back, to pass out during the Housing Workgroup meeting on Nov. 16. We want to collect quick quantitative data on demographics of current housing in the Alisal as well as residents needs and preferences for future housing solutions. Along with one-on-one interviews we are going to conduct, this will give us a decent sample size of the Alisal and greater Salinas community. The survey will be in English and in Spanish. Andrea has also offered to give us feedback on our survey draft before Thursday. In addition to the survey, we also contacted the residents we made connections with at the last meeting and asked if they were willing to be interviewed at the next meeting. We already obtained approval from two of these residents. We will ask Jonathan if he can make arrangements for any additional interviewees he can identify. Lastly, we have divided the work for annotating and synthesizing the HTMA document and we met early on Friday to look over our notes and discuss what we have.

What We Observed and Learned
Meeting with Jonathan:
Jonathan described the Thursday deliverable in detail during our phone call with him on Tuesday. What our partners are asking for is a high level summary of key findings and recommendations offered through the HTMA, translated into Spanish, and accompanied with graphics. By our next call on Tuesday, he wants the English version of the high-level findings, so he has time to make suggestions and edits before it is translated into Spanish. Our report will also include infographics that will, in part, beautify the statistical data on the Alisal community, but also focus in on topics like gentrification and overcrowding in a visually-appealing and educational way. When we asked him how the data gathered from the first visioning session will be implemented in the Alisal Vibrancy Plan, he said that that information is used to draft guiding vision statements and guiding principles for the plan. Right now, the team is operating on a high-level basis, but these sessions and further data collected with help with narrowing these vision statements into super specific solutions. On Thursday, we will be making another trip down to Salinas for another visioning session. This session will give us opportunity to talk directly with residents for 45 minutes on specific subjects, such as infrastructure, quality of life, housing, etc. This session coupled with Professor McKibben’s suggestions will hopefully be very fruitful.
 
Meeting with Andrea Jany:
It was extremely helpful to see the approaches being implemented in Austria to address the housing issues being seen across the world in large cities. Her talk emphasized on the 10 principles being used in the project which are: Awareness (of social housing in the society), Involvement (involve people so they participate in process of social planning, Diversity (diversity in city and of housing estates), Social integration, Environment (integrate into the existing environment, connect w/ rest of city and neighbors already there, have amenities within complex for the rest of neighbors already in estate, Land use, Renovation, Protection (protect residents w/I job), Higher quality, and Funding.

We were able to meet with her very quickly at the end of the talk to talk to her about our project and goals. She said she thought it would be helpful to get more demographics on Alisal and she offered to help us on the questionnaire.
 
Meeting with Professor McKibben:
Professor McKibben’s focus is more on how Alisal got to be the way it is today rather than solutions. Her main focus during our conversation was for us to realize that we should not be fooled by the similarities in the racial makeup between Alisal and other cities in the United States. The story for most cities getting to the way they are in terms of racial segregation can be traced back to purposeful policies with the intent of segregation back in the 19th century. For Alisal however, the segregation was not purposeful. Alisal is different; it was not deliberately segregated. It was originally settled not by people of color but by whites. It was founded outside of the city limits, which is the reason for its lack of infrastructure. The city did not neglect Alisal on purpose as it was outside of the city limits. The people of color in Alisal were interspersed by whites and class was the big differentiator, not race. Professor McKibben emphasized that we show that Alisal developed in a unique way though it faces many of the same problems as urban Californian cities. The residents of Alisal need to be informed that the area has been this way for 100 years and that those houses were built by people trying to restart their lives, not by the city of Salinas. She suggested questions for our interviews to get a better idea of what the residents believe the reason is for the current conditions of the Alisal. She also gave us insight into what she thinks residents of the Alisal will want in terms of housing. She believes they will want single family housing as currently exists but just better conditions. She also recommended we ask residents: “Do you see Alisal as the community you want your children to live in? Or do you see this as a temporary space?” She thinks they probably don’t want to stay in the Alisal and so they don’t need more housing, just better conditions that allow them to eventually move on. She also talked about the general complications there would be with building more housing in Alisal as it is an area filled with pesticides so there were policies implemented that lead to the lack of housing development in the agricultural areas as they are essentially poisoned.

Professor McKibben’s perspective was very interesting and informative. Some of the members of the group had also just assumed Alisal got to the way it is today in the way urban areas across the United States got to the way they are but Alisal’s story is truly unique. It was also helpful to remind us that it is possible the residents of Alisal do not see their future there and are only there temporarily until they save up enough money to move out. So it may not be the correct approach to simply get more housing in the Alisal, and in fact it may not be possible due to the policies against the development of housing in the area. However, the conditions under which they are living are not the most ideal in terms of allowing the families to move up and out of the Alisal and the community does not sufficiently prepare its youth for a future outside of the agricultural area. There is still change that can be made that is in line with Alisal residents’ needs and aspirations.

Critical Analysis/Moving Forward
This weekend will not only be spent drafting up the summary of the HTMA document and getting a draft of the infographic, but it will also be spent carefully analyzing the notes from the past visioning session and delving more into the history of Alisal’s creation. These observations will help us fine-tune the research questions we developed in the second week, and turn them into interview questions for this upcoming session. Summarizing the HTMA and cultivating the interview questions simultaneously will allow us to draw side-by-side comparisons of these two approaches to addressing Alisal’s housing crisis, and determine what recommendations can be offered and where. We are planning on presenting Jonathan with an English version of our HTMA summary and accompanying infographics by Tuesday so he can offer his comments, as well as answer any questions we have in regards to our interview process. After we make the necessary edits and get approval, we will translate the infographic to Spanish. The final infographic should be ready by the day of the next Alisal Vibrancy Plan Housing Workgroup meeting on Thursday, November 16. Professor McKibben will also be a resource for helping us with our interview questions. Professor McKibben said she would be willing to meet with us the day of the the next Alisal Vibrancy Plan Session (November 16) to discuss our work at that point. She also offered help on our final report.

Update on Project Activities
On Tuesday Jonathan sent us the draft HTMA along with some comments from one of the Housing staff members. Each of us individually read through the HTMA and made annotations. Our schedules haven’t lined up very well this week due to midterms but we will meet Saturday morning to discuss our notes. Jonathan also sent us the scanned copies of the raw data collected at the visioning session from last week. The visioning session incorporated residential voices by having residents brainstorm solutions on giant sheets of paper. These documents were collected by Jonathan’s team, and copies of those documents were shared with us. We are concurrently reviewing those suggestions and the HTMA to determine the language necessary to to communicate the findings in the HTMA to the general Alisal community. Our updated version is due November 16th. We will also meet to discuss this data, review the notes, and make some general comparisons, then create an action plan to make more specific comparisons to see where discrepancies lie within the HTMA document. We were unable to contact Jonathan this week due to our busy schedules, but when we decide upon a convenient time we will contact him so that we understand which specific parts of the HTMA document, if any, the organization wants us to translate. Until then we will pick parts we feel are the most significant areas in the HTMA, based on what we observed at the visioning session, and Jackelyn will start translating them after we make our preliminary review of the document. We decided to split up the work in this way: First we will all work together to summarize the HTMA document. Once we have the summary in English, Jackelyn will translate the HTMA summary. Celine and Jennah will check over the translation and make any edits or suggestions for technical things like grammar and more important things like language use, then we will ask another student to check it as well for added perspective. We were unable to speak with Carol McKibben this week because of conflicting schedules but will attempt to reschedule again the week after the next. We are also going to schedule to meet with Andrea Jany. 

What We Observed and Learned
This week we spent time reviewing the HTMA document. It’s a technical document but we were tasked with making it accessible to the Alisal community. We are deciding how to best split up the document so that we can all contribute equally. The three of us have varying degrees of expertise in language, writing, editing, and graphic design skills, and we want each person to contribute depending on their strengths. Something else that we are grappling with is how to make the HTMA as accessible as possible. Our original task was to translate the document into Spanish, but is that the accommodation that needs to be made? Alisal is a predominately low-income community, but a lot of technical jargon is being thrown around in this doc. We are discussing how we can best convey the ideas presented in the document, with terms such as “rent control” commonly discussed in academia and community organizations but not necessarily a word easily translatable in Spanish by colloquial terms. For example, we recall that at the workgroup session we attended in Salinas, these types of terms were usually triggers of “code-switching,” where bilingual residents slip in English words like “rent control” but monolingual Spanish speakers may not fully understand this idea. Likewise, gentrification and displacement are also big concepts casually discussed in academic settings, but these ideas are not very accessible in Spanish-speaking communities. The direct translation is gentrificación, however conveying the actual meaning and connotation behind that word is not as easy as a simple translation. For these reasons, we realize we have to be critical with the language we use when translating this document. We have decided upon first reviewing the document, annotating the information and synthesizing the information in English, then translating into Spanish. Since we all have the background and vocabulary that allows us to understand and analyze this kind of policy information, we would be used to using vocabulary like “gentrification,” and we most likely will when making annotations because that is how we understand these ideas. However, we need to keep in mind that for our process of translation, we need to come up with ways to simplifying the language so that the community can understand, while keeping the full meaning and context of the ideas conveyed. These dynamics can not be lost in translation because simplifying and minimizing the weight of these ideas does not serve this community justly. We will provide definitions to terms in order to empower residents by giving them the words they need to express their ideas, needs and desires. 

Critical Analysis/Moving Forward
Moving forward we will meet to discuss our annotations and create a summary of the HTMA in English. Jackelyn will translate the HTMA summary and Celine and Jennah will check over this. This was decided because Jackelyn does not have experience creating infographics while Celine and Jennah do. We want to divide our work evenly while making the best use of our respective skills and knowledge. In the weeks coming up Jennah and Celine will be discussing layout designs and ways to design an infographic that will best be interesting, relevant, and accessible to the community we are presenting to. We are inspired in part by the presentations by Mei Lum and Diane Wong on the ways they presented information to their community, and presentations by Deland Chan on community meetings about transportation and infrastructure. We remember specific comments about text being too small for elders and information being too technical for the general community. These are all concepts we are going to take into account. We will talk to Jonathan this upcoming Tuesday to get a clearer idea of what parts of the HTMA he wants us to translate, and what kind of infographic he expects or what other types of media we are able to create and present. Another question we have is whether our team budget is going towards printing the infographic, because we also need to know how many copies we would need to make or if the City of Salinas will produce print copies for their workgroup meeting. We will also discuss with him the summary we made thus far and get his recommendations. We will try to meet with Carol for more background on Alisal so we know more about the sensitivities the community may have. We will meet with Andrea Jany to get more guidance on the interviewing process. We got some contacts to interview at the visioning session that we will contact once we have a solid plan for the interviews. We will interview on November 16th and we will have to do more planning to develop strategies.

Update on Project Activities
On Thursday, Jackelyn, Celine, and I travelled two hours south to attend the Alisal Vibrancy Plan Visioning Workshop, facilitated by the City of Salinas. It was held in a school auditorium. The workshop was meant to allow for residents (both in Salinas and in Alisal) to be involved in the planning process for the Alisal Vibrancy Plan. This event was our first official introduction to the Alisal community, and our first form of contribution to the AVP. We are scheduled to talk with Carol McKibben this weekend and Andrea Jany the coming week. Talking with them will prepare us for when we conduct interviews with residents. We will also be debriefing the Visioning Workshop with Jonathan over the phone this week and we will hopefully be receiving scanned copies of the documents created by the attendees in the near future. We also received the long-awaited HTMA document today, and will be working on reading, dissecting, and translating that document next week. 
 
What We Observed and Learned
One of our worries was that there wouldn’t be any residents or only few residents at the Visioning session but there were actually many residents. Some not specifically from Alisal, some were from Salinas the city generally that had businesses in Alisal. There was pretty good representation of people, old, young, and disabled. They set up the workshop by three questions asked to the residents. Each overarching section had three parts they wanted to address-- strengths, weakness, and possible strategies to address the weaknesses. There were two facilitators per table and they seemed very well versed on how to facilitate discussion. They asked the questions in a way that wasn’t leading toward a certain answer. They accepted all answers and wrote them down on the large sheets of paper displaying was what said. The residents were pretty participatory and sitting with them gave us a lot of insight into their needs and wants. It was interesting to hear actual stories put to the general issues we had read about. For example, crowding was an issue we read about but sitting with the residents made it more real as one talked about how crowding was a big issue with many families living in a home and their kids wouldn’t have a place to do homework. Another example was a story of how one of the resident’s friend’s landlord continued to up their rent and that it had gone up from $1,900 per month to $2,100 per month over the course of three months. One of the biggest issues they focused on was the lack of rent control and the need for policies to control this. They also emphasized the need to inform the residents of their rights. This was a general issue as well of residents not knowing where resources are. Speaking to one of the residents one on one, she told me she got most of her information on community programing through Facebook and flyers. A younger students told me she learned about opportunities through school. They are required to complete a certain number of community service hours to graduate and this is how she got involved in many of the youth councils in the city as well as internships. Knowing this information, we know in what forms our infographic would be most useful. Some of the other things they focused on where getting youth involved with different programs and with businesses in the community to gain mentors and financial assistance. Keeping the youth focused and expanding their leadership capabilities would keep them from spending time on the streets and would therefore reduce violence. Another issue was the lack of childcare facilities. It was interesting to see they focused most on the housing and the youth. It seemed that it was a general consensus that caring for the youth would eventually result in the lowering of violence and poverty. The Visioning Session was a good experience for us, not only because it was our first experience with the community, but because we were able to each establish relationships with different residents, some parents, some students, some community leaders, watch their collective thinking process as teams, listen to their ideas and see the ones that meant the most to them. 
 
Critical Analysis/Moving Forward
As our next steps moving forward, we plan on meeting with Carol McKibben and Andrea Jany to get more background information and insight on how to conduct interviews with the residents. Each of us made connections with some residents and gathered contact information for the interviews. We will be working as a team to refine our interview questions and methodology, such as using video or audio recording when we speak with our interviewees. Celine took photos at the Visioning Session that we will use primarily for our presentation. We will review the photos and assess what other kinds of photos we want, such as photos of parts of neighborhoods in the Alisal. We were unable to get a tour of the area due to circumstances regarding the high amounts of traffic we experienced on the way to the session, but we hope to get a chance to explore a bit more of the area. Since we finally received the HTMA document, we are excited to comb through this information and identify any discrepancies we see, at first glance, from our experiences working with residents. We are now waiting for documents from the Visioning Session, including notes from each team’s table, to be sent to us. Once we have these, we can make more accurate comparisons with the HTMA document. Next Tuesday we will have a conference call with Jonathan to debrief and identify ways this community forum will be implemented in future planning for the project.

One of the things we enjoyed about the meeting is that the forum seemed overall very well-structured. Residents were seated at different tables to form small teams and work on answering questions together. The majority of tables were “Spanish-only” that composed of many bilingual residents and some monolingual residents. A few tables were designated as English-speaking so other residents could also participate. The majority of the event was run in Spanish and translations were always provided, even the main questions were asked in Spanish. This approach seemed very effective as monolingual Spanish speakers were given the power to express their thoughts and discuss these ideas in a low-pressure environment. We noticed that language barriers still persist, as ideas like “rent control” and “grants” were terms that bilingual speakers, who were often more highly educated, could not translate to Spanish. As this is something we will come across when we translate the HTMA document, we want to identify ways to best translate these ideas so that monolingual Spanish residents can be empowered by having the language to put towards these ideas. 

We want to hear about other ways residents are involved besides semi-formal settings like these. We noticed that there was an issue expressed by many residents about the means of spreading information, such as community forums, to the community. We want to know how much pubbing is done in schools, local businesses, neighborhoods, and places commonly frequented by Alisal residents such as super markets. We would also like to identify who was and wasn’t present because of this issue. A few families were present, but we noticed that many adults participating were community leaders, people who work in different nonprofits or welfare agencies. One participant was a Salinas resident who is a Stanford graduate. We want to ensure that more of the general public, including the working class and undereducated demographics, are getting information about these meetings and are able to attend them.