A Home for Our History: The Southeast Asian Archive at UC Irvine
One of the most unique aspects of the Vietnamese American Oral History Project is our close collaboration with the Southeast Asian Archive (SEAA) at UC Irvine. Established in 1987, the SEAA hosts numerous primary documents, images, and media as well as other reference material on refugees and immigrants from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. In the mid-1980s Dr. Pham Cao Duong proposed the idea of an archive on Southeast Asians given the large population that resettled in the surrounding area since the 1970s. The archive was, and continues to be, a community-oriented site and center.
In 2004, the SEAA received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and California State Library which then allowed for the UC Irvine libraries to digitize many of its collections and make them available online via SEAAdoc.
Since the SEAA’s founding, librarian Anne Frank has been at the helm of the archive, outreaching to local Southeast Asian American communities and overseeing the operations of the archive in general. Since her retirement in 2007, the SEAA has not hired a replacement.
Today, due to budget cuts across the UC system, the Southeast Asian Archive needs community support more than ever. That’s where UCI Alumni Chapter, the Vietnamese American Community Ambassadors (VACA) comes in.
VACA has launched a fundraising campaign known as the VACA Initiative, to raise funds for a SEAA archivist. The archivist’s main responsibilities will include organizing, abstracting, preserving, and making the SEAA collections widely available to the public. This position is crucial in sustaining and growing this unique and important archive on Southeast Asians.
If you would like to find out more about how to support the archive, please click here!
The VAOHP works closely with the SEAA in order to help bolster the strength of its collections, but also to help foster a sense of ownership and community collaboration for Vietnamese Americans of all ages.
Upon the project’s completion in three years, UC Irvine’s Southeast Asian Archive will serve as permanent home to our collection of oral histories. Researchers and community members from near and far can then peruse the interviews online via UC Irvine’s library website or come to the archive to listen to the interviews and look through the documents and images collected with the interviews. This is the historical contribution the VAOHP and the SEAA would like to make for the Vietnamese American community in particular and to public history at large.
