Research Guides: Southeast Asian Diaspora Studies: Home

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Julia Huynh

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Orange County and Southeast Asian Archive Center,
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Asian American Studies
by Julia Huynh Last Updated Jun 25, 2025 305 views this year
Critical Refugee Studies
by Julia Huynh Last Updated Jun 18, 2025 12 views this year
Southeast Asian Diaspora Studies
by Julia Huynh Last Updated Jun 25, 2025 402 views this year

What is Southeast Asian Diaspora Studies?

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.

Basic Information about Southeast Asian Americans

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.

Southeast Asian American Demographics

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."
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.

more...
The New Face of Asian Pacific America: Numbers, Diversity & Change in the 21st Century

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.
Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America*

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.

more...
Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America: Primary Documents

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.
Encyclopedia of Diasporas: Immigrant and Refugee Cultures Around the World*

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.

Find BOOKS

Library Search - open to all

Search the UCI Libraries' online catalog to see if a particular book, journal, journal articles, online resource, govt. publication, video, etc., is available via the UCI Libraries.

Library Search is open to all -- no UC affiliated needed. Search across the UC catalogs to look for books, whole journals, government publications, and videos when you have keywords, authors, and/or titles in mind. For each item you want to read, be sure to write down not just the call number, but also the location and title.

See below for a list of suggested titles:

Claiming Place by Chia Youyee Vang (Editor); Faith Nibbs (Editor); Ma Vang (Editor)
ISBN: 9780816697762

Publication Date: 2016-03-10

Countering the idea of Hmong women as victims, the contributors to this pathbreaking volume demonstrate how the prevailing scholarly emphasis on Hmong culture and men as the primary culprits of women's subjugation perpetuates the perception of a Hmong premodern status and renders unintelligible women's nuanced responses to patriarchal strategies of domination both in the United States and in Southeast Asia. Claiming Place expands knowledge about the Hmong lived reality while contributing to broader conversations on sexuality, diaspora, and agency.
Displacing Kinship by Linh Thuy Nguyen
ISBN: 9781439924693

Publication Date: 2024-03-15

Nearly fifty years after the end of the war in Vietnam, American children of Vietnamese refugees continue to process the meanings of the war and its consequences through creative work. Displacing Kinship examines how Vietnamese American cultural productions register lived experiences of racism in their depictions of family life and marginalization. Second-generation texts illustrate how the children of refugees from Vietnam are haunted by trauma and a violent, ever-present, but mostly unarticulated past.
The Filipino Primitive by Sarita Echavez See
ISBN: 9781479842667

Publication Date: 2017-11-14

The Filipino Primitive takes Karl Marx's concept of "primitive accumulation," usually conceived of as an economic process for the acquisition of land and the extraction of labor, and argues that we also must understand it as a project of knowledge accumulation.
Refugee Lifeworlds by Y-Dang Troeung
ISBN: 1439921784

Publication Date: 2022-08-29

Cambodian history is Cold War history, asserts Y-Dang Troeung in Refugee Lifeworlds. Constructing a genealogy of the afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, Troeung mines historical archives and family anecdotes to illuminate the refugee experience, and the enduring impact of war, genocide, and displacement in the lives of Cambodian people. Troeung, a child of refugees herself, employs a method of autotheory that melds critical theory, autobiography, and textual analysis to examine the work of contemporary artists, filmmakers, and authors.
Slow Noodles by Chantha Nguon; Kim Green (As told to)
ISBN: 9781643753492

Publication Date: 2024-02-20

A haunting and beautiful memoir from a Cambodian refugee who lost her country and her family during Pol Pot's genocide in the 1970s but who finds hope by reclaiming the recipes she tasted in her mother's kitchen.
Troubling Borders by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud (Editor); Lan Duong (Editor); Mariam B. Lam (Editor); Kathy L. Nguyen (Editor)
ISBN: 0295747277

Publication Date: 2020-02-01

Juxtaposing short stories, poetry, painting, and photographs, Troubling Borders showcases the creative work of women of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, Thai, and Filipino ancestry. This thematically arranged collection interrupts borders of categorization and gender, in what preface author Shirley Geok-Lin Lim describes as a leap over the barbed fences that have kept these women apart in these, our United States of America.
Unsettled by Eric Tang
ISBN: 9781439911662

Publication Date: 2015-10-01

After surviving the Khmer Rouge genocide, followed by years of confinement to international refugee camps, as many as 10,000 Southeast Asian refugees arrived in the Bronx during the 1980s and '90s. Unsettled chronicles the unfinished odyssey of Bronx Cambodians, closely following one woman and her family for several years as they survive yet resist their literal insertion into concentrated Bronx poverty. Eric Tang tells the harrowing and inspiring stories of these refugees to make sense of how and why the displaced migrants have been resettled in the "hyperghetto." He argues that refuge is never found, that rescue discourses mask a more profound urban reality characterized by racialized geographic enclosure, economic displacement and unrelenting poverty, and the criminalization of daily life. Unsettled views the hyperghetto as a site of extreme isolation, punishment, and confinement. The refugees remain captives in late-capitalist urban America. Tang ultimately asks: What does it mean for these Cambodians to resettle into this distinct time and space of slavery's afterlife?
Planting Seads by Chanida Phaengdara Potter; Mk Nguyen; Narate Keys
ISBN: 9781732799905

Publication Date: 2018-11-10

What are the stories Southeast Asians carry from the Mekong to the Mississippi? In Minnesota's first Southeast Asian-authored anthology of stories, poetry and artwork, the Southeast Asian diaspora storytelling (SEADS) initiative aims to reclaim, honor and amplify the lived experiences of veterans, mothers, activists, scholars and other historically invisible narratives of Hmong, Khmer, Lao and Vi't community members. From childhood sweethearts to memories of the CIA secret armies, to first winters in Minnesota these stories explore long-buried edges of war and grief, memories and the resilience to rebuild and reimagine the lives our elders believe we could have for ourselves. The high costs and the unexpected treasures. These stories leave the reader with a renewed sense of hope and an understanding of the urgency for everyone to learn from our shared history so that future generations do not have to repeat it.