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Southeast Asian Diaspora Studies is a relatively new field developed by scholars from across a wide range of academic disciplines. The strong focus on imperialism, war, immigration and their legacies often link research inquiries within the field. It can be situated within umbrella interdisciplinary fields such as U.S. ethnic studies and area studies, but remains resistant to fixed categorization. While the region of Southeast Asia includes more than ten nations, the Southeast Asian Archive at UC Irvine has a tighter scope to focus on the populations and histories of those from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam—the three countries directly involved with the Vietnam-American War and formerly known as French Indochina.
Since the end of the Vietnam-American War in 1975, millions of immigrants and refugees have left Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam to resettle in the United States and other countries. The Southeast Asian diaspora is diverse in their homeland histories, languages, and cultures, but their refugee and immigrant experiences are often parallel. For researchers interested in the Southeast Asian diaspora, we provide circulating, reference, and archival materials that reflect an engagement with the strong and growing Southeast Asian American communities in Southern California. Our Libraries’ many other databases can also provide valuable information, such as journal articles, government reports, statistics, and dissertations. You may also search select digitized materials from our Southeast Asian Archive or explore full oral histories from our Viet Stories: the Vietnamese American Oral History Project collection. Check back with us as we continue to grow our collections.
Thuy Vo Dang was the inaugural project director for the Vietnamese American Oral History Project, a UCI Libraries and UCI Department of Asian American Studies collboration. The project documents and preserves life stories of Vietnamese Americans in Southern California.
These basic overviews are just a sampling of the materials in the UCI Libraries that provide a good introduction to the immigrants and refugees from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam in the United States.
Published by the Southeast Asian Resource Action Center (SEARAC). Contains fact sheets for states with the largest Southeast Asian populations from 2019. Includes "Southeast Asian American Statistical Profile: 2000" written by Max Niedzwiecki and TC Duong in 2004, based on 2000 U.S. Census data. Compare it to the newer data in "Southeast Asian Americans at a Glance: Statistical Profile 2010."
SEARAC (Southeast Asia Resource Action Center) has gleaned statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS), which replaces the long form from the 2000 decennial census of population. The estimates in this report are based on 2009 ACS 1-year estimates, accessed in September 2011 from the American Factfinder website.
Call number: E 184 O6 L35 2003: 1 copy in Langson Reference, 1 in the Southeast Asian Archive.
This definitive one vol. of data and analyses of the Asian American population, based on the 2000 census, includes a chapter on the Vietnamese and one on Southeast Asians (including Hmong, Cambodians, Laotians, Thai, and others). With the 2010 census figures coming out, UCLA may produce another comprehensive, authoritative, and readable tool based on the new census data.
The electronic version of the 2000 3-vol. set is searchable off-campus only by UCI currently-enrolled students, faculty, and staff. The link in the Library Search record for this resource provides searching by keywords, such as Hmong, Miao, Laotian Americans.
Call no.: Langson Library Reference E 184 A1 G15 1999
A compantion to the electronic resource above, this 2-vol. set (in paper) provides the full-text of primary documents, which range from oral histories, letters, autobiographies, government publications, poems, speeches, and other formats of 90 groups in America. There is a chapter for Cambodian Americans, Hmong Americans, Laotian Americans, and Vietnamese Americans.
This electronic book (full-text online) has a chapter on the Hmong diaspora (pp. 103-113), Vietnamese in Australia (pp. 1141-1149), Vietnamese in Canada (pp. 1149-1158), and Vietnamese in France (pp. 1158-1167). Scroll through the table of contents in the left frame. Click on Download PDF (at the right) to display the pages clearly.
