A new audio-visual project collects stories from Pajaro residents displaced by the March 2023 Pajaro River flood. (County of Santa Cruz)

PAJARO >> The afternoon before more than 2,000 Pajaro residents were flooded out of their homes and businesses in March 2023, German Llamas was running the Pajaro Food Center. A county official dropped off Spanish-language fliers for him to hand out that essentially said the Pajaro River could flood and to heed an evacuation order.

But not everyone who came into the shop had decided whether to leave or to protect their homes. Customers bought bottled water and food to hunker down, Llamas said. They should have grabbed their important belongings, pets and families and fled, Llamas said in a new project called Pajaro Floods: A Living Archive. 

“I’ve regretted that night. I should have told everyone to get out,” Llamas said. “I should have said, like, ‘This isn’t good.’ But I fell asleep just looking at my phone checking the water levels. I woke up around 2 or 3 a.m. Then I saw a tweet that the levee had breached. I saw videos of the water rushing down the road, on San Juan Road.” He called his father to ask what to do.

Around 4 a.m., the water started flooding the Pajaro Food Center. The power went out. Six inches of flood water inundated the store. Then more. Then mud everywhere. With no running water or electricity, “How were we even going to clean up?” Llamas asked. 

“In people’s views, the county wasn’t doing enough,” he said. “We’re on our own,” he said. “That’s how people took it.”

Llamas’ story was one of several audio interviews collected in Pajaro’s Floods: A Living Archive, a project of Stanford University graduate students Rowan Ings and Jierui Fang. Ings, of London, and Fang, of Plano, Texas, conducted about 10 in-depth interviews after the flood in Pajaro. They spoke to church leaders, business owners, middle schoolers and other residents.

As the pair got to know people and conducted more research, just about every person they talked to had thought deeply about what happened and “had very profound things to say,” Ings said. “They wanted those stories to be shared.”

Ings said the project tried to elevate the flood survivors’ experience and highlight some lessons, rather than focus on victimhood and sadness.

“It’s happening increasingly in different places across the country, extreme weather events like this,” Ings said. “The more we can do to center people who are experiencing it and their voices, the better prepared we’ll be going forward.”

A line for food forms after a flood wiped out the possessions of hundreds of Pajaro residents in March 2023. (Tyler Maldonado — Santa Cruz Local file)

One lesson learned was to have clearer instructions from authorities. 

The flood caught many people off guard. Some heard sirens, but it wasn’t clear whether to stay and protect their homes or leave for safety. A lack of information in Spanish and Mixteco exacerbated the confusion.

On the project website, flood survivors talk about the night of the flood and the days that followed. Headphones aid the listener’s experience to hear ambient sounds like water sloshing underfoot.

“When we were trying to set up the first interview [with a Pajaro resident], he was like, ‘Oh, maybe bring your mud boots. There’s still mud across town’,” Fang said.

The website includes new maps and old images of prior Pajaro floods from the Pajaro Valley Historical Association’s archive to create “multisensory repository of memories of a space and its flood,” according to a project description from the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. 

The Pajaro River also flooded Pajaro in 1998, 1995 and 1955. A levee overhaul project to protect Pajaro and Watsonville lacked funding and was delayed for years before it broke ground Oct. 2.

“Something that we tried to get across in the interviews — because they came up a lot — were, on the one hand, a sense of frustration that [floods] kept happening,” Ings said. “And the feeling like people weren’t caring or paying attention and there wasn’t enough assistance.” 

Ings asked, “Would this be the same if it happened somewhere else? Or is it because of who lives here and how people live here that it’s not receiving the help it needs?” Ings asked. 

“But at the same time, everyone emphasized the strengths of the community and how everyone came together in the community. How everyone was volunteering, helping each other to clean up, setting up night shelters, distributing information,” Ings said. 

“So something a lot of people said was it really gave them hope that the community could be united like that, even if they were frustrated.”

Clarification: An earlier version of this story misidentified Jierui Fang’s graduate program.

Read more

• Slow recovery continues after Pajaro flood – Sept. 13, 2023
• Months after Pajaro flood, repair crews race against winter rain – Aug. 23, 2023
• Flooded Pajaro residents detail losses, hope for federal aid – March 29, 2023
• Pajaro flood victims start long road to repairs — March 23, 2023
• Flood victims take refuge in South Santa Cruz County shelters — March 14, 2023
• Long awaited flood control project to start in Watsonville, Pajaro — Jan. 26, 2021

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