WHAT'S IN A NAME

Listen Here ↓

What's in a Name Pt. 1

00:00 / 19:24

What's in a Name Pt. 2

00:00 / 25:31

A two-episode podcast in which historian and professor Dr. Sarah Seekatz explains the research and findings from her sabbatical project on the history of building names at San Joaquin Delta College.

The podcast presents Dr. Seekatz's work exploring who these buildings were named after, how those choices were made, and why those histories matter today.

Produced by Digital Media students Peter Espitia and Cheyenne Wells.

For more information or to read Dr. Seekatz's full sabbatical report, contact: sarah.seekatz@deltacollege.edu

PETER: Everything has a name. Think about your own name for a minute. Do you know where it came from, what it means, what it meant when it was given to you? Or maybe you’ve chosen a name, one that fits you like a glove, coming from someone or something you admire. Now think about where you went to school. Wilson, Cleveland, Hoover, Christa McAuliffe, John Muir, Julia Morgan, Commodore, Lincoln, the list goes on. And on our own campus, here at San Joaquin Delta College, we have buildings named after just as many people. Danner Hall, Shima, Holt, Tillie Lewis…. Budd.

We trust that somewhere along the way, during the process of creating something out of nothing, the possible names and the people behind them were carefully picked, deliberated, and vetted. But what if they weren’t?

For historian and professor Dr. Sarah Seekatz, one name near her office caught her attention that would lead her down a path of questioning who we choose to honor… and what we choose to leave out.

I’m Peter Espitia for Delta College’s Digital Media department, and this is What’s In a Name?

DR. SEEKATZ: My name is Dr. Sarah Seekatz and I’m a professor of history here at San Joaquin Delta College, and I especially teach Mexican American history.

I’m a public historian, and public historians are very curious about the way we remember things and what gets included and what gets left out.

My other focus was California history, including Latino history and the ways in which Latinos are included or excluded from museums and public history and things like that.

So I spent some time working in museums, and eventually I became a professor here at Delta College about 10 years ago.

And one of the things that I noticed in the building where I worked and where I had my office was that there was a plaque to a man named James Budd. And I read the plaque.

It says the Budd Center at San Joaquin Delta College was dedicated on July 24th, 1976, named for lawyer James H. Budd, a lawyer, congressman, and the 19th governor of California, the only Democrat to win state office in the Republican sweep of 1894, a farsighted statesman as well as a skillful politician.

I saw that sort of close to my office and I thought, that's so strange because, as historians, we're always reading between the lines and trying to put context into things. And what I know that maybe a lot of other people don't know is that in 1894, in the 1880s and 1890s, the Democratic Party was the party of white supremacy and they were very much leading the fight against racial equality during Reconstruction, trying to limit the rights of newly freed enslaved peoples. They were also on the forefront of immigration reform in a way that was very harmful to many people who had wanted to come to the United States, and they were also very anti-Chinese.

So it was alarming to me that the campus would be celebrating someone who identified as a Democrat in that moment, and it just got me really curious about who James Budd was. So long before I began a deep project, I set out to look at who James Budd was, and it was very clear very early on in looking at his congressional record when he was a congressperson that he was very anti-Chinese, which made me question again why San Joaquin Delta College would have his name up on the building.

We as historians, we've taught this kind of stuff, and paying attention to the little details is always setting you up for surprises, I think.

Well, I've been involved in the renamings on campus, specifically in renaming the Plaza Dolores Huerta Plaza, and I supported others who were working to rename one of the forums, Campesino Forums, and I was in support of renaming the Dawn Mabalon Forum that way. So I was sort of familiar with the process here, but I was really curious, like, how did we get the names in the first place? Before we even talk about renaming, how do we get the original names and what is this history?

I decided that when I took a sabbatical, which is when professors step away from the classroom and step away from teaching and instead focus on a project, some type of research that really helps the campus, that I really wanted to uncover this history so that if the students, if the community, if the faculty, the staff, if the Delta College campus wanted to. Change names, they would have full background moving forward so that they can make a more educated decision than just like the seven line bios that are on all the plaques around campus.

And so I was able to take that sabbatical and really dig deep into newspaper archives and all kinds of records locally and digitally that talked about who all these people were around campus. And then why were they named this way? Who were the people that were doing the naming?

And really, we as public historians are always asking whose stories are getting told, whose stories are not, and why?

So I think one of the ones that's the easiest to talk about is James Budd, who brought me to the project in the first place.

A lot of times the campus and the larger community remembers James Budd because he's a governor, and that's a big deal. There are not that many governors in the state of California. He was also a congressperson, and that's also a political accomplishment.

One of his main goals while he was a politician was really to push Chinese immigrants out of California and out of the United States. That's sort of hidden in all the discussion that historians are having about him or that we've had about him here on campus.

People will take care to say he was involved in pure food and drug reform or that he was sort of against the railroads, but all of that came second to his major focus, which was really harassing the Chinese through laws and policy and also through a really violent rhetoric.

Before Congress in 1884, he said that, "in the United States, the Chinese possess all the traits of their kind in China. Females are brought under contracts and bonds of prostitution. Perjury in our courts is general. Murders are common, and rewards for the latter are openly published in Chinese language in Chinatown. As to the contamination of our youths by opium and syphilis, it's widespread. I believe their presence now and heretofore a curse."

And so I think it's so important that we look at his own words. I mean, he's using the same anti-immigrant rhetoric that we hear today in 2025.

He's saying that the Chinese are immoral. He's saying that they're criminals and they're dangerous because they're murdering people, lying, and that they're trafficking in drugs. He's focusing on opium, but that they also are carrying diseases and corrupting our youth. I mean, we've heard this problematic, really deeply troubling rhetoric around immigration, and as someone who teaches Mexican-American history, as someone who is Mexican-American history, he could be talking about my ancestors too because that anti-immigrant rhetoric starts with Asian immigration, and then it quickly proceeds to all immigrants. I mean, the foundation of our immigration policy is about excluding Asian immigrants, specifically the Chinese.

So he went before Congress and asked for time to talk about this. He asked that they consider sort of expanding the Chinese Immigration Act, which happened in 1882 and that essentially forbid Chinese immigrants from coming to the United States, particularly if they are workers. There were a few exceptions for merchants and diplomats.

But he's asking his fellow congressmen to reconsider and make it really clearly about race and ethnicity.

He's introducing an anti-opium bill. And we might think on the surface that that's about limiting access to drugs in the United States, but as a historian, right, we know that there's a lot of people doing opium in the United States in that moment. And many of them are women who are drinking it.

His bill prohibits the smoking of opium, which is a way that some people who did do opium that were of Chinese descent would prefer. But it totally allowed for the consumption of opium in other ways, largely the vast majority of people who are consuming it through these patent drugs by drinking it. So he's even going on record saying, if we drive out opium use, then we can drive out the Chinese because he so closely associated them with criminal behavior and with drugs. I mean, this is the same type of rhetoric that we're hearing about immigrants even today.

today So I think that really uncovering how his Chinese, anti-Chinese rhetoric was such a core part of who he felt that he was, was a really important correction to the historical record because people have gone on record and said he was a governor, he was the only governor from Stockton, he helped bring money for the deepwater port in Stockton, but the core of who he was and what he really fought for was to prevent the Chinese from coming.

And even when he left Congress, he turned as a local citizen to try and exclude the Chinese from Stockton itself. When he was a citizen in 1885, he was a part of a huge meeting of about 300 people that was forming to sort of remove the Chinese from Chinatown, and he said he, quote, wanted to make it, quote, devilishly uncomfortable so that in adding laws to the books in Stockton, it would be so difficult for them to, let's say, make a living or to have housing that they would leave Stockton and go somewhere else. He says, law or no law, Chinamen must go.

If we're saying we're gonna get rid of the Chinese without a law, then what's left is violence. And that's really what he's calling for, not only in Congress, but also laws that he's calling for in Congress, policies that he's calling for in Stockton, but also outright violence that he's calling for.

But, you know, that's not the end of Budd's story; he also has a lot of problematic history with women, and it's certainly sort of a theme of Bud's life that he didn't really see our immigrant ancestors as equal, and I don't think he saw our female ancestors as equal.

What came out when he was running for governor was that he had impregnated a very young woman who was not his wife. This young woman, her name is Nancy Neff, and I think putting her name in the record is really important.

Nancy Neff had grown up near Budd, and her grandfather had given her and her siblings property, sort of some family scandal where the grandpa didn't wanna give it to the mom, so the kids had it. So it's this complicated legal thing where they got property.

Because Nancy was underage, her parents had wanted to move to Oregon, and they were gonna leave her in Stockton, but she was underage, so they needed someone to sort of act on her behalf. So she was James Budd's financial ward, at the very least, if not outright ward. And to be somebody's ward means like somebody is over you; they have power over you, legally speaking. And listen, if you ask the historians, but even if you ask the woman, any woman, if you have power over a woman's money, you have power over her.

If you're thinking about that, that's even more true in the 1870s when this is happening. So he was her, at least, financial controller; he oversaw her money, she was his ward, and she became pregnant. She went to San Francisco with him and gave birth, and the baby was either stillborn or born too early. There's some discussion of whether or not it was an abortion, but the baby or the fetus doesn't survive, and then Nancy gets really sick.

She ends up with smallpox, and he put her into a smallpox hospital where three days after giving birth, she died. But what happened in those three days is also really telling because in those three days, Nancy Neff made a new will.

James Budd was named the person who was supposed to get everything.

Doctors were interviewed and they said she's dying of smallpox, there's no way in these three days that she could have signed this will that gave James Budd everything. And James Budd is a lawyer, he knows the law very well.

It’s likely, it's probably… I believe that he was forcing her to sign a will that gave him everything. And one of the greatest pieces of evidence we have for that is Nancy Neff is an educated lady–she knows how to write, she knows how to read. And instead of a signature, she just has an X for her name. So she was incapacitated in a way where she wasn't even able to sign her name–she shouldn't have been signing a will.

James Budd then sort of takes the land. He says he never profited from it, but he also claims that the Neff family were his family, and if that's the case, then the family should have gotten all of this. So it's this really long and complicated legal thing that is also swept under the rug.

There's never a mention of it in anything at Delta College that talks about this. There's never a mention of the Chinese exclusion he fought for, there's never a mention of his problem with Neff.

But also, this comes out when he's running for governor about a month before the election, and he just kind of dismisses everything. He'd sort of like, if you've ever seen Hamilton and he's trying to write his way out, he just writes these incredibly long things that say the Neffs should be grateful because I was such a son to them.

And the Neffs took him to court and they were like, you tried to beseech our daughter's name. We sat here with you when you guys told us that she was pregnant and you said you were gonna get a divorce and marry her and you didn't do that. And now you're claiming to be the hero in all of this. He never apologizes or anything like that, so this is really troubling.

When he does become governor, he vetoes a bill that would have raised the age of consent, which I think is also really troubling. The Women's Christian Temperance Organization had been going state by state trying to increase their age of consent, meaning they wanted it to be 18 years old before a person could choose to have sex or choose to get married.

The legislature had increased that in the state of California from 14 to 18. And Governor Budd vetoed it.

When asked why, he refused to sort of comment, but his friends went ahead and commented for him and really suggested that they shouldn't have this law because there was no exception for women who were loose. So this is basically saying these children who had been raped or who had engaged in consensual premarital sex, there should have been a loophole for them so that that was the reason why he vetoed it. And we are talking about children here. And a lot of the women who had campaigned for this, they put the blame squarely on Budd's shoulders because they had worked really hard to get the legislature on board and to pass this law, and Budd's the one that killed it. And they aren't able to get this law into effect until about two years after women won the right to vote in California and then demanded it.

So he has troubling history with women. He has so many points in time where he talks against the Chinese. He also engaged in blackface. And blackface is a cultural practice in the United States where white people used burnt cork to paint their face and to make fun of African Americans. That was the point of blackface: to dehumanize them and to sort of, quote unquote, act like them, but in a way that was also dehumanizing the way that they spoke, the way that they dressed, the jobs that they were doing, the songs that they sung. And James Budd loved that form of entertainment. He went on record talking about that.

And he also, because he was so into theater, he put on blackface and performed at least once. And if you talk to historians, they've talked about this a lot and about how dehumanizing that was and the way in which that made it easier to pass laws that were not allowing African-Americans to be full citizens and made it easier for violence to become really widespread.

So knowing all that about James Budd made me really question–part of our mission statement is to be student-centered. And can we be student-centered if we slap the names of racists and misogynists on our buildings?

Part of our mission statement is to be anti-racist. And that may involve us reconsidering who we're choosing to honor, because it is an honor to have a building named after you.

That really led me to question… how did Budd get this honor in the first place?

PETER: In our next episode, Dr. Seekatz tells us just who chose the names for the buildings on the Delta College Campus.

Thank you for listening to What’s In A Name. I’m Peter Espitia. Thank you to Dr. Sarah Seekatz for her research and dedication to our students. Our audio technician has been Cheyenne Wells. Music credit goes to Pixabay.

This has been a production of KWDC 93.5 LPFM, Delta College Radio. This program is made possible by listeners like you. Programming is produced by the students, staff and faculty of San Joaquin Delta College’s Digital Media Department. It is supported by the Delta College Department of Arts and Multimedia, the Career Technical Education and Workforce Development office, and the State of California. Thank you for listening.

DR. SEEKATZ: We actively and continuously strive to be a student-centered, anti-racist, and equity-focused college.

PETER: That was Dr. Sarah Seekatz, historian and professor, reading a piece of San Joaquin Delta College’s mission statement that caught her attention. In our first episode, Dr. Seekatz walked us through some of her research from her sabbatical, where she took a deep dive on the names of the buildings on Delta’s campus, with a focus on the Budd building. In this final episode, Dr. Seekatz explores just who chose these names, and what it takes to attempt to change them.

DR. SEEKATZ: It was really three men who made suggestions to the board of trustees and to the campus administration about who we should name the buildings after. Those three men, two of them were professors here, both in the history department, and one of them was a friend of theirs.

And if we look at these men who are trained in the historical profession in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, their view of history is really different than your view of history. Who should be honored and the way we should consider history is very different. And that's really clear in the organizations that they were and their own research.

So, two of them were professors of history: R. Coke Wood, who was a professor here at Delta and then also at UOP, and Bill Dofflemeyer, also a professor here. And then Hugh E. Hayes, who ran in their circles and sort of helped at UOP, but was not a professor.

But they're all connected, and they're connected through these organizations that they were a part of. And it's things like the Western Corral, which is a group of mostly men who came together to talk about Western history, but also Western lore. They're sort of play acting in this way that really glorifies the Wild West the way that popular culture sees it, meaning there were good cowboys and bad Native Americans, and they had shootouts all the time. And we needed these rugged, individualistic, manly men to sort of pave the West.

And listen, historians today don't think that way. There were historians then that didn't think that way. And so what you'll see in the building needs is that all these men are sort of very interested in the Wild West fantasy. Certainly, R. Coke Wood was very interested in Gold Rush history, especially. He had his own museum in Angels Camp.

They were a part of this Western Corral, which focused on Western history. Hugh Hayes was very interested in weapons. And so we might think about the history of weaponry and who that leaves out, and the ways in which weapons historically have been used to reinforce power, normally through the hands of white men.

Some of them participated in the Native Sons of the Golden Rest, which was historically a racist organization that campaigned against Japanese immigration. And while that may have predated their involvement, that's still a legacy that was there.

So if you look at the building names, so many of them are tied to this Western fantasy. There was a building here called Cunningham Center that's named after Sheriff Cunningham. So this idea of him being a Western sheriff who fought the banditos, the bad guys, was a big part of it.

The Lockes arrived in California really early on. So that's this Western history of this settler colonialism and these pioneers paving the way, which is problematic. Holt is very tied into early agriculture, and agriculture is, of course, a story of settler colonialism in the West. Native peoples had their own agriculture, but it was largely pushed out because of settler colonialism. Budd, he came to Stockton when he was a very young guy, and he grew up in Stockton. But he created this persona of himself as like a Western cowboy. So instead of riding on the railroads and stuff, he would ride in this old wagon, and he depicted himself as this up-by-the-bootstraps, frontier kind of guy, even though he grew up in non-rural Stockton.

So they all have this connection. And it's interesting to think about these three men who made the suggestions of these names that the board of trustees or the campus administration ultimately decided on, and see that they're people that they admired, and they're people like them. All of these people are white men, except for George Shima.

There are no women in the names that they picked. There is one woman who was named shortly after that, and bonus points if you know who it is, but it's Danner. Danner Hall is named after a campus administrator, Helen Danner.

There's no women in the original choices they made. There's one person of color, George Shima, in the original choices they made. All of them are Christian, except for Goleman, who's Jewish. Goleman was a really beloved professor at UOP and also at Delta, especially while we were connected to UOP. And so it's really students who are pushing for him, just like it was students who were pushing for Helen Danner.

So these men are really seeing prominent historical leaders of San Joaquin as people like themselves, and that's ignoring the ways in which building community and fighting for civil rights is also leadership.

And they would have not considered that something to honor people with a building named after them. But it's okay for us to consider that.

And I think that there are just so many examples of the ways in which the legacy of slavery, of settler colonialism, of genocide, of Jim Crow and Juan Crow, of limited educational opportunities, it prevented a lot of people of color and women from being able to access the things that they celebrated. So, I'm talking about becoming millionaires–that's why they picked Shima. He was the first Japanese American millionaire. Or the scientific developments, that's why they recognized Holt. Or to be able to devote time and energy to education like Goleman or Locke, because so many people were focused on fighting for civil rights or building their community or surviving. And so I think it's important that we're sort of considering that too. We can't name buildings only after people who have money, because that doesn't make somebody a leader.

We've demonstrated that Budd is very clearly racist in his ideas and his actions, very clearly misogynistic in his ideas and his actions. And if we are going to uphold our mission statement, then it's on us as a campus to consider what it means to send students into a building named after a person who wouldn't have considered their ancestors equal, certainly and sometimes not even human.

You know, just as much as we need to talk about the problems, we also have to talk about the incredible things. George Shima, I want to be really clear that they picked him likely because he was the first Japanese millionaire in the United States. And right there, they're focused on money and leadership. And he was known as the potato king. And so if you look through anything at Delta College, there's like a little museum to him in Shima. And he has a plaque too. And there's a little, there's a couple books that are just generally written that talk about the history. But nobody talks about the fact that he is like the representative for all of Japanese immigrants in this moment in time when there are so many things happening to drive them out. I'm talking about, like, laws that were designed in the state of California to prevent the Japanese, who, like Shima, had been really successful in agriculture, from buying land. The alien land laws. And Shima is part of this Japanese Association. He's the president from its start until his death.

And he testifies before congressional committees to really, you know, say like you can't do this, you can't do this to us. We are successful agriculturalists, and we will fight back. And we are good people. And so he's dealing with these racist sentiments. But his leadership is not in the agricultural fields only. It's in the–when he testifies before congressional committees. It's when he writes; he's a beautiful writer. He writes pamphlets trying to convince, you know, average Americans that these laws that are harmful to the Japanese are immoral and wrong. And, you know, that type of leadership, my goodness, what would it mean if we all knew that going into Shima?

Like I think about how Budd is in this time period, and Budd is really anti-Chinese. And listen, so many times people are like, well, everybody was like that back then. No, the Chinese weren't like that back then, and they had a lot of allies that weren't like that back then.

And you know what, we named a building after one, because if we talk about the Lockes, and this is–the Locke building is named for Dean Locke, which I think it should be named for Dean and Delia Locke. But they had the town of Lockeford named after them, and there was this anti-Chinese group that sort of took over Lockeford. And they're writing about how awful they are and how they're sort of in opposition to that, to the point where the anti-Chinese group made an effigy, right, like a fake Dean Locke, in order to make fun of him. They put economic pressure; they wouldn't buy from his son, who was a meat vendor. And so what a difference to have Budd and the Lockes, who are on the opposite side here. So you can't tell me that Budd was just a product of his time. So are the Lockes, and they opposed all the Chinese action.

It's the exact same way with Shima, who is at the forefront of this, and Atherton, who really campaigned to push the Japanese out, especially during World War II, after they were in internment camps. So I think for us to know that full history really enriches it and, and helps us better understand the places where we're walking.

I think that it was really students who kept putting the pressure on to name Goleman Library, because Professor Goleman was such a huge part of their learning and their time in college that they wanted to honor him in that way. And it was also students always who put the pressure to name the first building, and for a long time, the only building named after a woman, Helen Danner, Danner Hall. And so they were putting the pressure on, but she also met their criteria in that she gave the largest financial donation after her death that Delta had ever seen. And so you can meet all the requirements that they had, like being a financial tycoon, and still not be considered, but sometimes when students come together and they see their own power, they can make change happen.

And I think if we look towards the future, that's why we could have different names on our buildings. And in the process of this research, people have often asked me, well, who do you think we should name buildings after? And I say, no, who do you think? That's not for me to decide. That's for all of us to decide and have conversations about and talk to our abuelas and our grandpas and our family members who made change here locally, and how can we honor them?

That's what we did with Dolores Huerta. And listen, we wanted a building because we know that naming a building after someone is such a huge honor. But when I think about how we named the plaza, there's no glass ceiling there and our dreams can go as high as they want there. And we can shout, si se puede, as loud as we want there. And so sometimes it looks like you're taking scraps, but maybe in celebrating those, you're making it into a feast, right? You know, like the best part of all, if you're making, like, pozole or menudo, right? The scraps can taste really good. And they can be a place where, you know, everybody walks through that plaza. And hopefully, we learn about these incredible people in our past who really did work to build us up on the local level, on the state level, on the national level like Dolores Huerta did.

And how many more Dolores Huertas are there out there? So many. And how many will we have in the future? Hopefully even more, especially if we learn our history, and how people like her or Shima made really powerful contributions that were not about money, but were about us and making sure that we were seen as equals.

We have a heritage committee on our campus, and they meet when they receive applications. So there is an application that you fill out saying that you want to change a name or you have a proposal for a new name and the location. It seems really simple on the surface, but it's also about building and being prepared.

So when we were setting out, and I worked with Professor Lynn Hawley on this to rename the plaza Dolores Huerta Plaza, we asked people, should we do this? And could you write a letter for us? I had so many students that wrote like, yeah, this is what it would mean to me. And we included that in the information. We wrote about who Dolores Huerta was and why she met all the criteria of who we should be naming for, because there is criteria about people's “contributions,” and you have to meet them where they're at. And if they don't see that type of leadership as a contribution, then you convince them with your words, right? That it's not only financial, right? It's through this activism and organizing that she worked and that so many other people have worked.

Once you do that, you often make a presentation before the Heritage Board. And then the Heritage Board sort of reviews these all and they make ultimately the final suggestion to the board, and the board has final say. Students can be a part of that at all levels. Students can be the ones to propose a name change. Students can partner together to collect signatures. That's what a lot of us did for the Campesino Forum: to gather information, to write about it. Everybody's strengths can be used in different ways in a type of campaign like that.

But then also, students are always welcome at the board meetings, right? You can do public comments, you can watch those at home, right? To learn about what the board is thinking or to hear about, you know, who they're honoring at different points and why. And so I think paying attention and getting involved is a great way to make change that you want to see on the campus, whether it's the renaming of buildings or some other change you want to have happen.

If we look at who our community is, our buildings aren't reflective of that. Look at how many buildings we have named for women, thinking that at least 50% of our student population are women, we only have Danner Hall and the Lawrence and Alma DeRicco buildings. And so it's really named after Lawrence DeRico, who's a campus administrator, but also his wife, but maybe not, right? Nobody really knows that. That wasn't named until 2009. And then the Hazel Hill Development Center. And listen, that's not including anybody who is non-binary or doesn't identify as either. There are no voices like that on the campus either.

So if we're looking at percentages, it's less than 30% who are not men. And that is a problem if we're 50%, right? We need to be able to walk through the halls and see people who are like us and see the things that they did when they started out like us. That's so important. If we look at the buildings that are named for people of color, and let's say we're just going to look at the main campus buildings, there's about eight of them, only one. It's George Shima. We've made progress in the last five years with Dolores Huerta Plaza, Dr. Don Mabalon Forum, the Tony Finch Forum. But those are classrooms, not buildings. And so we have a long way to go for all of that.

I want students to know that professors have thought about this. Historians care about this, and if it matters to them, they're not alone. I would really encourage students to learn more about the buildings that they're going in every day into the classrooms or departments, and to just kind of educate themselves about who these people are, and then make the determination if that is something that they think should be here or not. And then explore the process, right?

Because I think buildings matter because we're in them every day, and they're always honoring someone if they have a name after them. But there's so many different things that students are interested in and care about, and this process is the same for a lot of different things. So if this matters to you, consider making change. Think about who you would name a building after. Think about if this matters enough to you to devote the time and energy to. Certainly, one person can't change it all, but whatever we do care about and whatever we are passionate about, we can work to change.

You know, I want to say that Delta College isn't alone in dealing with these legacies that are harmful. I think that in the past ten years, a lot of people have been paying attention, and we've seen Confederate statues come down, and we've seen schools get renamed. And so Delta's not the first organization that's dealing with this, and they certainly won't be the last.

But that also means that it's on us to sort of explore what other campuses have done and the really hard labor that a lot of students have done to try and convince their campuses that it is hard to learn in a classroom that's named after someone who didn't kind of see you as an equal.

And so, you know, there are quite a few quotes and research that I was able to look at, and you know, I really took inspiration from the student activists, especially in the South and on the East Coast, that are trying to rename buildings that are named for people who enslaved their ancestors. Joshua Crutchfield is one of those, and he had said, quote, How much longer do we have to tell you that having symbols of white supremacy on our campus doesn't exactly give us warm and fuzzy feelings?

And I think about that when I walk into Budd, right? Like, what does it mean to be a Chinese-American student and walk into that building? What does it mean to be, you know, a woman, a victim of assault, to walk into that building? What does it mean to be Black to walk into that building? You know, he did blackface. But what does it mean for any of us? We have to be thinking about all of this. And so I was really inspired by a lot of the work that's already been done, and I think that that is a part of bringing justice to our campus, is seeing how it's been done elsewhere and how we might build on top of the hard work that's already been done by folks like Joshua Crutchfield.

I really appreciate having earned my PhD in public history because we spent so much time talking about how we remember the past. Before I got a PhD in public history, I started a museum studies master's degree on the East Coast. I kept asking people, I'm like, okay, but I want to talk about Latino history, like, which professor do I go to for that? And they were like, no, that doesn't exist here.

I remember going to visit George Washington's home, Mount Vernon, as a class, and we had seen a new exhibit. They had just redone the center, and I was really mad because they had devoted so much time to his teeth. I mean, there are all these myths about his teeth and how he had wooden teeth or hippopotamus teeth. Or enslaved people's teeth–that was not circulating at the time; it wasn't really talked about. I was so mad because I knew that Mount Vernon was a plantation, and the amount of space they devoted to the enslaved people who were there was the same amount of space they devoted to his teeth. I brought that up, and it didn't go over well, and so I didn't stay with that program.

Because we have to see our own history: in a museum, in an archive, in a building. And all of these places are political, and they've all had that politics historically. I'm Mexican American, and after I left that museum studies program, I went to work in my hometown museum. It was such an uphill battle to say, like, Mexicans have always been here since this place had settler colonialism. This is native land first, and then it's been a whole bunch of different people, but the museum only really reflected white immigration to that area. My ancestors were there for as long as other people's ancestors in the area of Mexican descent, and the fights that we had to have there to really be able to talk about that. And trying to take this archive that was only about these famous white people and say, like, my story matters too. It matters that my abuela was sent to a segregated school. We gotta document that now, so that my kids, if I ever have them, and I did, can see that.

And so I think, for me, the building names are the same way. We need to document the history that's happened, so that we can have this conversation moving forward, but we also need to make sure we see ourselves in history. Like, I want my kid to come to Delta College and be proud of the building names. I wanna come to Delta College and be proud of the building names. I want that for my students. I want that for my colleagues, and the first step to that is really taking a look and bringing the receipts. I felt like I was pretty good at that, so that was my first step to sort of being able to have the conversation, like what comes after. First, let me tell you why it needs to change. And so it's a great privilege that I had the chance and opportunity to do that.

PETER: Thank you for listening to What’s In A Name. I’m Peter Espitia. Thank you to Dr. Sarah Seekatz for her research and dedication to our students. Our audio technician has been Cheyenne Wells. Music credit goes to Pixabay.

Listen Here ↓

Episode Transcripts