The Libraries received $208,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities and $65,000 from the California State Library to provide better campus and public access to unpublished materials in the nationally-renowned Southeast Asian Archive, including development of a sophisticated web resource on Southeast Asian Americans with 5,000 digitized textual and visual items from the Archive’s collections.

The Southeast Asian Archive collections are international in scope, but primarily document the resettlement of Indochinese refugees to California, which is home to more than 700,000 Southeast Asian immigrants. Materials include poignant letters written by desperate refugees fleeing the former Indochina, photographs documenting both transitional life in camps and new lives in California, deeply moving works of art expressing the refugees’ emotions and experiences, and records of resettlement organizations.

Professor Linda Trinh Vo of UCI’s Asian American Studies program leads the board of scholars that is advising the library. “I use the archive collection extensively for my research, said Professor Vo, “and my students are fortunate to be able to access the resource for their research projects. Students learn first-hand about the importance of preserving the history of a re­fugee/­­ immigrant community, and I am especially impressed when they gather and contribute archival materials to the collection. The archive is only a few miles from the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam and the largest Cambodian population outside of Cambodia, so it plays an instrumental role in bridging the university to local communities.”

For more information about the grants and the Southeast Asian Archive, contact Jackie Dooley at (949) 824-4935 or jmdooley@uci.edu.