Mission

Our mission is to preserve, promote, and enrich the history and multicultural identity of Salinas Chinatown, historically the home of the Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino communities of Salinas. We honor the past while seeking new and creative ways to integrate Salinas Chinatown’s history and multicultural identity into present and future community life.

The Big Idea

HELP! Asian Cultural Experience of Salinas is running out of archival storage space.
We are excited to report that ACES has received a number of important historical objects and original photographs in a new collection, and we expect to receive more collections in the near future. We have a small storage area at Moongate Plaza, but with the large collections coming in, we are now running low on storage space.

Please help us purchase and renovate a 20-foot storage container so that we can store our archival materials properly. The container is relatively inexpensive, but to store our archival materials we need additional insulation, shelves, and devices to monitor humidity and temperature control inside the container.

Your generous donations will enable us to store these collections while contributing to our knowledge of the multicultural history of both Salinas Chinatown and Salinas Valley.

ACE has an amazing collection of historical photos and objects donated by local Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino families. As a volunteer and board member, I have worked with other ACE volunteers and staff to create historical and cultural exhibits. We've done research to find descriptions—names, places, dates, activities—for the the images and objects. Learning about who the people are, where they are from, what they’ve done, and why is fascinating; these stories represent an important part of Salinas and Monterey County history. We input the photos with their descriptions into our new digital archive, which is great to have—but we need to preserve the original photos and objects for posterity and to create our museum. Realistically, it will take years to renovate the Republic Cafe as a museum and cultural center. That’s why ACE needs an archival storage container now.

- Kathleen Slattery