Refugees, Oppression, & Resistance in Oakland Chinatown

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Producers: Keefe Tankeh, Zac Weiner, Jessica Cheng , Milton Zhang

Description: Last year in 2020, Southeast Asian Americans honored the 45th anniversary of the resettlement of refugees to the United States. SEARAC, in their commemoration statement, wrote a call to action for government officials to address the health, economic, and educational barriers facing our communities, through pursuing equitable local and state policies, and establishing a moratorium on deportation orders. In this podcast, we will be discussing the relationship between Southeast Asian refugee communities and Oakland, CA. Rather than being an overview of the specifics of these communities, which include ethnic Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong, Mien, Khmu, Lao, Chinese, and more from Southeast Asia not to mention diversity in class and gendered experiences, we talk about some of the oppressions created by structural barriers and racialization of Asian Americans which affect these communities. Additionally, we talk about organizational efforts, whether of pan-Asian or ethnic-specific organizations, around community issues and needs, as one form of resistance from these refugee communities. This resistance connects the personal experiences of individual people, to broader structures of oppression which mirror that which engendered the displacement of these communities in the first place.