PANA Institute for Leadership Development

The PANA Institute's Historical Documentation Project is an exciting new initiative to archive document history at an Asian American faith community. An initial two-year endeavor funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the project is a three-way partnership which draws upon the expertise and resources of the PANA Institute, the Presbyterian Church in Chinatown, and the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

Referred to in brief as HDoc, the cooperative effort targets the Presbyterian Church in Chinatown (PCC) as the project site in recognition of the community's importance as the first Asian American church in the United States. Also the first Chinese Protestant church to be established outside China, PCC was founded in 1853 and celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2003. Out of this community came the first English/Chinese bilingual newspaper in the country, the first public school serving the early immigrant Chinese population in the United States, and the first Chinese daily newspaper in the country. The church also produced some of the earliest Chinese seminarians and pastors in the United States; was an early champion of women's rights, examining the intersection of gender, race, and class issues; and led the way in religiously based social activism among Asian American communities in the 1960s. Despite its storied past and long history of involvement in the surrounding community and beyond, however, PCC has not had archives to systematically preserve its contributions to local history, to national history, and to American church history.

HDoc seeks to remedy this situation in a three-step process:

• Production: the creation of new records in the forms of oral history interviews (with transcription and translation), photographs, and videotapes
• Preservation: the gathering, organization, and housing of historical documents and materials for long-term safekeeping at the Bancroft Library, with full public access for research and educational purposes
• Presentation: the creation of interpretive materials, showcasing the resources gathered by the project and emphasizing the importance of documenting this type of community history.

A parallel purpose to the archival process proper is the hope that HDoc will be a model for many similar projects in other Asian American and Pacific Islander faith communities. Together, these projects that archive material evidence of the vibrancy and contributions of API religious groups and individuals and their relationship to the broader flow of history would be a foundational step towards critical historical scholarship in API communities.

To link to the completed finding aid for the HDoc archives at the Bancroft Library on the Online Archive of California, view an online exhibit of the project's presentation pieces, or read articles on the project, please return to the first page of this section.