The Trailblazer Award honors the work of an individual or group who has used limited resources in innovative ways to create, maintain, or support digital collections. TDL strongly encourages applications from libraries, archives, and cultural heritage institutions that may not have full-time staff dedicated to digital projects but that have found creative and innovative ways to develop a digital presence.
The winners of the 2024 Trailblazer Award are Sidney Lu, Loïc Duggal and Hoang Nguyen for their work on the History of the Japanese Farmers in Texas digital exhibition.
This exhibition is the product of a year of research and teamwork, and was designed by two undergraduate students, Loïc Duggal and Hoang Nguyen, under the guidance of Dr. Sidney Lu, Annette and Hugh Gragg Associate Professor of Transnational Asian Studies at Rice University.
This digital exhibition presents the amazing yet less-known stories of the earliest Japanese immigrants in Texas. They came to Texas as immigrant farmers at the beginning of the twentieth century to pursue personal success on the one hand and to escape the rampant racism against Asian immigrants on the U.S. West Coast on the other. By starting farms along the Gulf of Mexico and cultivating rice, vegetables, and fruits, they contributed to agricultural development in Texas as well as fought racial prejudice in the state. Viewers can find biographies of various Japanese farming families in Texas and stories of their endeavors in the state and beyond.
The three-person team worked closely with the local Japanese American community in Houston, especially the Japanese American Citizens League’s Houston Chapter, to collect sources, pictures, and stories. For nearly a year, the team met every two weeks to discuss the structure, design, as well as stories each individual or family presented in the exhibition. The team drafted and carefully revised each story presented in the project and also made connections among them.
This exhibition challenges the conventional, West Coast-centered, narrative in Asian American History and brings the stories of Asian Americans in Texas to the center. It illustrates the hardship and perseverance of early Japanese immigrants in Texas and highlights their contributions to the state. It gives voice to the largely forgotten early Japanese American immigrants in Texas and recognizes the great contributions they made to the economic growth and cultural development of the state.
Funded by the Fondren Fellows Program at Rice, the team curated this exhibition to celebrate the Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in May 2023 at Rice University. It is now a permanent digital exhibition on the website of Houston Asian American Archive.