In the early part of the 20th century, Filipinos were U.S. nationals with a legal right to work on the Central Coast. But many of them still faced discrimination and hostility. It boiled over into violence on Jan. 19, 1930, in Watsonville, when Filipino field workers were attacked, beaten and even killed. "At one point the dance hall was over here somewhere," said Frank Malodora, while he points to an empty lot at the end of Beach Road in Pajaro outside of Watsonville. The dance hall during the 1920s and '30s was often packed with Filipinos dancing or the men mingling with white women. It is depicted in many of the archival footage provided to KSBW by the Pajaro Valley Historical Association. "So they would dress to the nines try to impress," Madolora said. The hall was also where white mobs attacked Filipino farmworkers during the Watsonville Riots of 1930. After the mob attacked the hall, Maldolora said the rioters would, "head back downtown and wherever they met Filipos, they attacked them." The attacks against Filipinos grew into five days of violence from Jan. 19-23. It included throwing Filipinos off the Pajaro Bridge. Rioters also shot up a bunkhouse in Murphy's Crossing Labor Camp, where they killed 22-year-old Fermin Tobera as he slept. The violence in Watsonville would spark riots in other California cities across the Bay Area and Central Valley. Madolora came to the Central Coast at age 5 in 1957 from the Philippines. At the time Filipinos were manual labor workers, mainly in agriculture. They stuck together when others in Watsonville ostracized them. Madolora remembers growing up his family, "had parties, get-togethers on the weekend.""Most of the people we knew were single men, 'manong.' Manong in Filipino means brother. To them it was more than a brother, it was family. I was the only family they had," Madolora said.Manong in Filipino is also used to describe the first eave of Filipino immigrants to the U.S., according to Roy Recio, a member of the Asian Cultural Experience on the Central Coast and a Watsonville native. Growing up and having to learn English, Madolora recalls being harassed, beaten and excluded. But says he didn't experienced large-scale violence like the 1930 riots, let alone learn about them. "And I don't think there was enough written about it," Madolora said. University of California Santa Cruz is on a mission to change that. A team of professors, graduate and undergraduate students are preserving Filipino history through the eyes and voices of Central Coast Filipinos. The project is called Watsonville Is In The Heart."I was surprised about how little there was about the history of Asians in the Central Coast," said Steve McKay, associate professor of sociology at UCSC. "The local papers are full of mentions Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, Singh and others, at the time. And what's happened is a slow erasure of that history," McKay added.Third-year UCSC Ph.D. candidate and Santa Cruz native Meleia Simon-Reynolds is part of the project. During her kindergarten through 12th-grade education, she said she missed out on learning about local Filipino history. She identifies as a mixed Filipino. She said the project at UCSC Matters because she wants to integrate the Filipino history of migration and vitality back into the grade school curriculum. "There wasn't a lot of room for other stories as far as SC history goes. So I think if I had learned about Filipino-American history in the local area or even other Asian-American history, other kinds of histories, I wouldn't felt more connection here, more inclusive," Simon-Reynolds said. "Because people are so unaware, of these structures and struggles that were happening, I think it really allows these things to perpetuate, As we are seeing now with the uptick in anti-Asian hate crime."Watsonville Is In The Heart project will record the stories of the local Filipino community. The project team will also photograph artifacts and old pictures that people donate. They are then uploaded to a digital archive to eventually be a public learning tool. Plus it has become a learning tool for the researchers as well. "And you kind of get an insight in their memory, and either their struggles, their highlights. It's a conversation that really you can see kind of who they are as people," said project team member, Nicholas Nasser, a third-year undergraduate history student at UCSC.