Operation Baby Lift and Others

From carla_jeanpierre@fulbrightweb.org Tue Jul 5 09:57:23 2005

Date: Tue, 05 Jul 2005 12:58:39 -0400

From: Carla_Jeanpierre <carla_jeanpierre@fulbrightweb.org>

Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

To: vsg@u.washington.edu

Subject: [Vsg] Operation baby lift and others

hello group,

I forwarded an email to you sometime last year with regard to research I'd begun in Hanoi last year on Africans and African American soldiers/scholars who ventured to Paris in search of liiberation by attending conferences and so forth, mostly in protest of the Vietnam War; I received many helpful responses. Gracious thanks!

However, since I've returned to the US and maybe moving to my hometown in Louisiana soon, I'm interested in learning more about the Vietnamese Catholic population there. A broader question that has been on my mind is how Vietnamese populations are concentrated in certain areas around the country, i.e. Boston, New Orleans, Los Angeles and whether these concentrations have anything to do with living assignments given to Vietnamese families after the Vietnam-American war.

Where can I get information on living assignments associated with US operations like "baby lift" and possibly others?

Thank you in advance for any helpful input.

Carla

From ivs2@cornell.edu Sat Jul 9 06:50:11 2005

Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2005 09:49:54 -0400 (EDT)

From: Ivan Victor Small <ivs2@cornell.edu>

Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: [Vsg] Operation baby lift and others

Dear Carla,

Operation Baby Lift was a particular program of limited scope, but for a general introduction to US policies on the dispersion of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao refugees to different parts of the country in the 1970's, and the voluntary secondary migration patterns to various nodes such as California, etc. that later followed, check out Rumbaut Ruben, "A Legacy of War: Refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia" in Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America, S. Pedraza & R. Ruben (ed.)1996, Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing.

Hope this helps,

Ivan

Ivan V. Small

Ph.D. Student

Department of Anthropology

Cornell University

Ithaca, New York

From dhaines1@gmu.edu Sun Jul 10 09:26:50 2005

Date: Sat, 09 Jul 2005 18:04:09 -0400

From: David W. Haines <dhaines1@gmu.edu>

Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: [Vsg] Operation baby lift and others

Carla:

I'd add a few other kinds of sources if you really do wish to pursue this.

First, the federal government was greatly committed to dispersing refugees (for a variety of reasons--some good, some not) and therefore kept rather detailed records of where refugees went. These data are in a variety of reports that go all the way back to 1975. A reasonable federal government depository library may well have some of these. As to the ideology of that kind of dispersal, there is a wide literature, but Ruben Rumbaut's piece is indeed, as Ivan suggests, a good place to start. If you can't find the Wadsworth book, that particular piece originally appeared in a journal--I probably have the citation somewhere.

Second, the actual New Orleans situation has been of interest to many people from the very early days. Some were intrigued by the religious issue (many Vietanmese Catholics there); others by the way a new group of Asians shifted the racial discourse in New Orleans; and others by the way in which Vietnamese recreated more rural-oriented lives in an urban setting (including some very creative use of the New Orleans area embankments for private gardens). Some of the more interesting work on Vietnamese-American schooling and identity also comes out of New Orleans (Zhou and Bankston).

Third, local resettlement agencies often (well, sometimes anyway) keep rather detailed records on who comes from where, when, and even why. So wherever you are in Louisiana, just find the local resettlement office. Presumably the Catholic Diocese will be involved very strongly.

Hope that helps.

David Haines

Associate Professor of Anthropology

George Mason University

President-elect and program chair

Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology