Dr. Steffi Filipino Archives Project

One individual that had a huge impact on my life was Dr. Steffi San Buenaventura. She was born on August 7, 1941, in Manila, Philippines. She attended Maryknoll College for her undergraduate work, earning a degree in English literature and a minor in journalism. Continuing her education, she did her graduate work at the University of Hawaii, Manoa and earned an American Studies Ph.D. in 1990. She told me once that as a person of color in academia, she had to work twice as hard and as a woman of color in academia, she had to work four times as hard.

In 1991, she was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship to the University of California, Los Angeles. She then went on to teach at the University of California, Irvine and the University of California, Riverside, before going to the Unversity of California, Davis in 1999. Her research interests were in American ethnicity, immigration history, race relations, social movements, religion, Asian American studies with an emphasis on Filipino American history, Asian diaspora, and Philippine-United States relations. However, her interests were always with her students first.

Before Dr. Steffi passed away on November 27, 2002, she planned to create an Asian/Filipino American archive that consisted of first-hand documents, pictures, correspondence, and published materials in the Shields Library Special Collections. She had received these items from the Filipino Federation of American and early Filipino immigrants in Los Angeles. The Asian American Studies Department is still raising funds to build this collection.