Chong A. Moua
Chong A. Moua, a doctoral candidate in U.S. History at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, is this year's recipient.
Her research project (and dissertation title), "Refugee Cosmopolitanism:
Hmong Refugeeism and Critical Statelessness," impressed the review panel
with its approach to a less-studied Southeast Asian refugee community.
Ms. Moua describes her work as "[analyzing] the ways in which Hmong
refugees upend the discourse of the United States as a nation of refuge
for displaced immigrants." She adds, "Historically stateless, the Hmong
provide a fitting case study to interrogate the issues of belonging,
refugeeism, and their relationship to the nation-state."
She plans to work with the Southeast Asian Archive's collections during
summer 2013, at which time this brief announcement will be updated and
include a photo of her in the SEAA reading room.
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2012-2013 Recipient - Jane Le Skaife
The 2012-2013 recipient of the Southeast Asian Archive Anne Frank Visiting Researcher Award is Jane Le Skaife, a doctoral student in Sociology at UC Davis. Her proposal, "Transnational Tightrope: A Study of Vietnamese Refugees in France and the United States," was especially well developed and detailed. Since the mission of the Southeast Asian Archive (SEAA) is to document the experiences of the refugees and immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (the former Indochina) in their new home countries, the SEAA collections are the strongest in the U.S. for her research. She is the fourth recipient of the $500 award, named after the founding librarian of the Archive and made possible by an anonymous donor to defray travel costs to UCI. Thanks to the award, Jane spent part of this summer here.
She asks, "How do Vietnamese migrants, as political refugees rather than economic immigrants, experience transnational ties? How has the construction of their identity outside of Vietnam as anti-communists shaped the transnational space in which they interact with their homeland? Finally, how have their transnational experiences influenced the fostering of cooperation or fomenting of conflict between their country of origin and their countries of settlement?"
Her archival research complemented the extensive interviews she is conducted with Vietnamese refugees in Orange County, which she began in 2010 while interning for the Nguoi Viet Daily News, the oldest and most widely read Vietnamese-language newspaper in the U.S. She also completed over 60 in-depth interviews in France during March/April 2011, where the Vietnamese-French community was established four generations ago. This was well before the Vietnam War ended in 1975, which triggered waves of refugees and—in Orange County—the beginnings of what is now the largest Vietnamese community outside of Vietnam. Both diasporic communities are aware of each other, with members of some extended families living in each country, if not also in Vietnam.
Jane expects to receive her degree in June 2013. Her research engages the grassroots and scholarly communities in new and intriguing ways. Her work will contribute new insights to the growing body of scholarship on refugees and their transnational ties.
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| Malaphone Phommasa in the Southeast Asian Archive |
2011-2012 Recipient - Malaphone Phommasa
Ms. Malaphone Phommasa is the third recipient of the award. Her research focuses on the Laotian refugee journey and resettlement in America, particularly the impact of those experiences on the educational aspirations of their American-born children as well as their parents. What were the different ways in which Laotians fled their home country? How did they survive the refugee camps? How and where did they form communities in the United States? To what extent have they formed ethnic enclaves? What role did these events play in shaping their educational goals and career plans?
Malaphone is a MA/PhD student in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at UC Santa Barbara. The detailed study she is undertaking of the long road many Lao Americans took to establish new lives and families in America will be a valuable contribution about an under-studied population. In accepting the award, she said, "The Southeast Asian Archive provided the foundation for my blossoming interest in Laotian American/Southeast Asian research as an undergraduate at UC Irvine, and it continues to support me in my graduate career through the wonderful guidance of [SEAA librarian] Christina Woo and interlibrary loans. I am honored to be given the support to spend more time working in the Archive and Special Collections." |
| Quan Tran in the Southeast Asian Archive |
2010-2011 Recipient - Quan Tran
Ms. Quan Tran was the second recipient of the award. Conducting research for her doctoral work in American Studies at Yale, she examined “the different modes of knowledge production in the Vietnamese diaspora.” The Southeast Asian Archive collections provided her with records and recordings of musical performances, archived materials from the Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association (VAALA, based in Little Saigon), and information about Vietnamese communities here and abroad that built memorials to recognize the struggles of refugees’ journeys to freedom. She was also interested in the history of the Southeast Asian Archive itself as a body of collected memory that plays a role in producing knowledge about the Vietnamese diaspora.
Quan brought to her research visit her own history with the SEAA. While an undergraduate at UCI she worked as a SEAA student assistant for Anne Frank, so she knew more about the structure of the archive than most researchers. Returning to UCI after earning a double B.A. in Asian American Studies and Comparative Literature in 2004, she saw that the collection had grown. In addition, during her undergraduate years, the archival collections were being processed, thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Quan delved into several of them to learn about the collecting and preserving of Vietnamese pasts.
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| Ma Vang in the Southeast Asia Archive |
2009-2010 Recipient - Ma Vang
Ms. Ma Vang was the inaugural recipient of the award. A doctoral student in Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego, Vang researched Hmong refugee resettlement and current events in California, the Air America airline during the Vietnam War, General Vang Pao, and Laos-U.S. relations. The award paid for travel expenses for her visits to the Archive, photocopy services,and other expenses related to conducting her research.
Vang acknowledged the depth and breadth of the Southeast Asian Archive's unique collections about the displacement of Southeast Asians -- including the Hmong, who left Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand to settle primarily in the UnitedStates. "The UCI Libraries Archive is one of the few with material about Hmong displacement and Hmong in the diaspora," she said, "so I am truly grateful for this support."
