Preserving Yesterday and Today

Photographs once thought of little or no value can offer glimpses of history as decades slip by. A snapshot of a 1930s street, for instance, shows how automobiles looked then, what details men and women considered fashionable, which stores flourished. Those backward looks are possible because of run-of-the-mill snapshots, which one person chose to keep and just about everyone else threw away.

Students of the Vietnamese refugee experience in America, especially the sons and daughters of those refugees, also have benefited from ordinary artifacts collected with an eye toward the future.

On the third floor of the main library at UC Irvine is the Southeast Asian Archive, a collection of materials ranging from Orange County Tet festival posters to doctoral dissertations to literary magazines from the 1960s. With more than 2,000 items, the files offer insight into Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian culture in Southern California during and after the wars in Southeast Asia.

Community leaders in Little Saigon, which has the largest number of Vietnamese outside Vietnam, dreamed up the archive and persuaded university officials to house it. All involved deserve credit.

So do community members who contributed books, magazines and newspaper clippings about their experiences. Researchers from across the nation have consulted the archive, which one founder said was designed to help Vietnamese remember their background and Americans to understand the values of the newcomers.

While the UCI archive was compiling history, Vietnamese refugees and immigrants have been receiving help for many years from what is now known as St. Anselm’s Cross Cultural Community Center in Garden Grove.

Formerly called St. Anselm’s Immigrant and Refugee Community Center, it assisted those fleeing Vietnam in the 1970s and later waves of political prisoners and boat people. It did good work with Amerasians, the children of Vietnamese women and American servicemen who came to this country to search for their fathers.

St. Anselm’s has lost some federal funds as programs were eliminated and expects to suffer more cuts next year. Community center officials wisely have tried to develop new programs to serve people who have been here too long to be considered refugees but who still may require assistance. The center also is right to seek funds from corporations and other contributors to make up for shrinking or disappearing government grants. Fund-raising is an important part of the work of nonprofit groups. When successful, it not only allows the good work to continue; it also establishes a strong presence in the community.