“Appropriating Assimilation and Automobility:
Vietnamese Refugee Resettlements and Refusals”
Ivan Small, Professor of Anthropology & Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University
This talk focuses on Vietnamese migration experiences within the United States over the last half century since 1975, triangulating the experiences of refugees and migrants shaping their lives and communities across four distinct yet interconnected regions in New England, the Midwest, California, and the sunbelt South. It examines transnational financial, migratory and material flows among Vietnamese Americans, and how and why they have contributed to first, secondary and third wave migration patterns. Southeast Asian refugees resettled in the U.S. after the Vietnam War were scattered as part of a dispersion policy intended to culturally assimilate newcomers. By the 1980s, catalyzed by auto-mobile affordances, many had moved to warmer climes with established Asian population nodes – in particular California. Since the 2000s, a third wave of migration has been fueled by new international migration as well as interstate migrants who feel priced out of California. Many are moving to new “ethno-burb” nodes of Asian settlements in the sunbelt South. I examine transportation, real estate, investment, and entrepreneurship patterns within and across these migrant-scapes and settlements linked and worlded by mobile pasts and futures. Southeast Asian American subjectivities are subconsciously shaped by longer histories of repeated displacements. Community formations are therefore modeled in part upon the specters of remembered and anticipated places, concurrently longing to establish roots and presence while collectively refusing external assignations of how to do so. This unmoored lens offers insight into the complex trajectories of migrant aspirations and appropriations that contrast with the emplaced nuclear family centered assimilation models once envisioned by refugee resettlement policy makers.
Ivan V. Small is Professor of Anthropology and Southeast Asian studies at Northern Illinois University. He is author of Currencies of Imagination: Channeling Money and Chasing Mobility in Vietnam (Cornell University Press 2019), co-editor of Money at the Margins: Global Perspectives on Technology, Financial Inclusion and Design (Berghahn Press 2018), and has written numerous journal articles and book chapters. As an economic anthropologist he examines affordances of and connections between financial, bodily, and material mobilities. His current research investigates responses to Southeast Asian refugee resettlement policies in the U.S. after 1975. He holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University.