Hayward is Home: Knowledge and Belonging in the Heart of the Bay describes a collaborative digital and public humanities effort to share a unique history of the Bay Area. Overcoming great challenge and hardship, residents of Hayward have defined meaningful and artful ideas of home; they undertook one of the world’s most significant ecological restoration projects at the shoreline of San Francisco Bay; and they have invested hard work in supporting and caring for one another. History majors at Cal State East Bay identified these key themes by scouring local archives, by consulting current scholarship, and by listening to community members today. This session argues that we have much to learn from the Bay Area community of Hayward as we seek to repair the harms of the past, help and respect one another, and give space for ecological diversity.".

Among Bay Area communities, Hayward remains under-examined by historians and scholars. And yet its experiences of activism around ideas of home, community building, and knowledge-making are significant in Bay Area and California histories. Confronted with the loss of their homes, Indigenous peoples, Black and Japanese Americans, and laboring peoples living in Hayward have articulated profound arguments—ancestral, historical, artistic, and humanistic—to ensure their connection to, and sufficiency in, this East Bay place. In the area of belonging, Queer Haywardians imagined and acted upon an intersectional community of care through the Hayward Area Country Press, a community news publication of the 1970s. Latinx contributors to Barrio Expressions, a Hayward media production, created a powerful space for identity-building, education, and artistic expression drawing together the entire Bay Area. In the area of ecological knowledge, Hayward naturalists and educators generated new, complex understandings of watersheds and wildlife, leading to one of California’s most significant environmental restoration projects at the Hayward shoreline. None of these histories is very widely known; we hope to assist in amplifying these histories by bringing them together in a single digital community engagement project.

Hayward is Home diminishes boundaries between academic and community-created histories, by acknowledging historians’ dependence on knowledge gathered, generated, and preserved outside of archives and research institutions. At the same time, we wish to share in the joy and power of working physically in local history institutions and archives that have weathered long shut-downs during the pandemic. Above all, we hope to demonstrate the significance of Hayward’s unique histories, and how these have had larger ripple effects through the Bay Area and California, if not beyond.