The U-M Filipino American Student Association visiting the Research Museum Center on 10/7/2022. Alyssa Caldito in the lower right corner. Photo courtesy of UMMAA.
Undergraduate student Alyssa Caldito joined the ReConnect/ReCollect Project Grant team as a Museum Assistant for the U-M Museum of Anthropological Archaeology (UMMAA). While new to working with museum collections, Caldito brought to the project her personal experiences and engagement as a member of the Filipino-American community in southeast Michigan.
In a new blog post, “ReConnecting a Community to its Long Lost Roots,” Caldito discusses the major themes of ReConnect/ReCollect and how the project relates to Filipinx-American perspectives. She describes the research process as she created a website to make items from the UMMAA collections more digitally accessible to the community. “I chose to write about items that were from different regions of the Philippines… I also organized the website by ethnolinguistic group so as to let Filipinx Americans more easily find information about their own ethnolinguistic backgrounds and the items that have similar cultural origins.”
“From working on [item descriptions] and uncovering these stories, I felt a deeper connection to and understanding of the people who came before me. Through the website created from my work, I hope that these objects can reconnect with the communities from which they came from in a way that they have never been able to before. I also hope that these same people can complete the stories of these objects, giving them a new life.”
Some of Caldito’s writing about the UMMAA collections was published by LSA Magazine in the sidebar of their feature story about the project, “Mending a History of Harm” (Fall 2022).