Second-year MLIS student recognized by the Society of American Archivists for international community archives project in the Philippines.
Maia Mislang, a second-year MLIS student in the UCLA Department of Information Studies, has been awarded a 2026 Mosaic Scholarship from the Society of American Archivists (SAA). The $5,000 award is given in recognition of Mislang’s academic and personal achievements, and her commitment to addressing diversity concerns within the archives profession.
Mislang, who earned her bachelor’s degree in history at UC Santa Cruz, recently took part in a transnational project in the Philippines. “Saritaan,” an Ilocano word that means, “to talk story,” is part of a research initiative called “Watsonville is in the Heart” (WIITH), a partnership between UC Santa Cruz and The Tobera Project, a grassroots organization based in the Pajaro Valley that seeks to preserve the history of the first Filipino migrant settlers that arrived in California’s Pajaro Valley between the 1920s and 1940s.
While at UC Santa Cruz, Mislang was working on the WIITH project. This summer, she traveled as a graduate student lead with four UC Santa Cruz undergraduates to Pangasinan Polytechnic College (PPC) on the Philippine island of Luzon, to collect archival records and oral history interviews that reveal the region’s histories of migration, led by Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez, associate professor of humanities, and Steve McKay, professor of sociology, post-doctoral researcher Meleia Simon-Reynolds, and Tobera Project community members Maurice Carrillo, Dan Fallorina, and Juanita Sulay Wilson. In addition, a representative from The Humanities Institute and family members joined them.
Mislang, her UC Santa Cruz colleagues, and students from PPC gathered and processed historic materials through interviews with descendants of the “Manong generation,” Filipino men who were recruited to work in agricultural jobs in the United States between the 1920s and 1940s when the Philippines was an American territory. The project will be made publicly accessible online and will be used to create curriculum on local history that will be taught in schools in Pangasinan and in California. In addition, Mislang created a zine titled, “I’m Just Nosy,” as a capstone project for her work with WIITH.
“I was a community-engaged archivist for two years and it was so formative,” says Mislang, a Los Angeles native who was raised in Santa Barbara. “I love archival processing and I really love working with community members. It’s amazing to be in this archival world; it’s something that I really want to be a part of.”
During her first year in the MLIS program, Mislang was a student worker for a radio show records project at UCLA’s Film and Television Archive. This fall, she begins her internship at the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, one of several sites that are part of the UCLA Community Archives Lab.
Mislang says that she chose to attend UCLA for her MLIS program because “This is where community archives is really blooming. Through WIITH, I got to work with a UCLA MLIS alumna, Sam Regal, who was telling me about how awesome the program was, she had a really great experience.
“We also were looking at a lot of Michelle Caswell’s community archives scholarship,” says Mislang. “UCLA made a lot of sense for me in that people I know have a lot of great things to say about the program. Also, I’m from Southern California and I have a lot of family in L.A., and it was nice to be able to go back and make a new relationship with the city, to do community archives [and] community-engaged work.”
Mislang says that the support of her classmates and professors has been valuable since UCLA has given her “so many incredible experiences. It feels so much larger than me and so I’m kind of trying to find my place in it.
“I have so many people who are supporting me, my peers and mentors outside of UCLA, and Professor Caswell,” says Mislang. “People value your thoughts here, and [tell you] to stop second-guessing yourself. It’s a very good, important space that you belong in.”
“All of my peers are so excited about what we’re studying and what we’re doing,” she says. “It’s really uplifting to see what my friends are working on and are so passionate about, and also, how they’re supporting other people. I’ve been having a very good time interacting with my classmates and I feel very inspired all the time.”