New Collections

During the summer the Southeast Asian Archive was fortunate to be the recipient of two sizable collections which further document the resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees in the United States.

Mitchell Bonner has given the Archive his collection of over 3000 photographs and slides documenting daily life and special events in Northern California's Southeast Asian communities. The images date from a 1975 Christmas party for Vietnamese refugees at San Francisco's International Student Center to a 1996 Lao New Year's celebration in Richmond. Among the scenes are a 1983 Khmu New Year's festival in Stockton, an undated Iu Mien ceremony for the one year anniversary of a death, a 1979 beach ceremony for Vietnamese refugees who died at sea, a 1979 Hmong wedding party, and a 1982 Khmer music and dance festival in San Francisco. This rich collection provides valuable visual documentation of the Southeast Asian refugee experience.

Dr. Van Le recently presented the Archive with approximately 500 items relating to Southeast Asian refugee resettlement from the 1970s through the 1990s. Included are Vietnamese and English language periodicals and materials from government and private agencies relating to the education, health care, and culture of the refugees. Representative titles are Bach Viet (Pontiac, Mich.), Journal of Refugee Resettle- ment; Hmong attitudes towards surgery, by Bruce Bliatout, Multnomah County, Oregon; Cambodians in America, Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations; A manual for Indochinese refugee education, 1976-1977. (Center for Applied Linguistics). Dr. Le's gift fills in a number of gaps in the Archive's holdings, as well as adding important new titles to the collection.