Our Stories: South Asian Americans in Los Angeles

FAIN: PY-234452-16

South Asian American Digital Archive, NFP (Philadelphia, PA 19107-4701)
Samip Kumar Mallick (Project Director: June 2015 to January 2018)

A series of public programming events and digitization sessions located in two Los Angeles neighborhoods with cultural and historical resources that illuminate what it means to be South Asian American. The project would raise awareness of South Asian American heritage by strengthening established community networks and raising awareness through the South Asian American Digital Archive. The events would feature lectures by historians, stories drawn from the South Asian American Digital Archive, and a slideshow and discussions centered on the artifacts digitized during the program.

“Our Stories: South Asian Americans in Los Angeles” seeks to uncover the undocumented, under documented, untold and little-known histories of Los Angeles’ South Asian American communities in two key neighborhoods: “Little India” in Artesia, CA and “Little Bangladesh” in Koreatown. At community venues in each location, SAADA’s Executive Director and a Board Member, together with 3 students from UCLA’s MLIS program, will host digitization days in which community members will bring in materials for digitization and share stories about their relationship to these objects. The digitization events will be immediately followed by a public presentation in which SAADA staff and volunteers will contextualize the newly digitized materials within the larger narratives of South Asian American history. Selections of the digitized materials will then be made available through SAADA’s website, (http://www.saada.org), the world’s largest digital repository of South Asian American community history.