Greater Than Their Sum: 2 Cultures Give

Forging unprecedented new cooperation among Orange County’s fastest-growing ethnic groups, more than 3,000 mostly Vietnamese and Latino residents raised $90,000 for hurricane victims in Vietnam and Central America during a walkathon Sunday at Mile Square Regional Park in Fountain Valley.

The donations came in dollars, pesos and yen, and organizers said they hope remaining pledges trickle in for a total of $100,000.

The money will be equally divided and delivered via the American Red Cross to the people of both regions, whose central areas were devastated late last year by hurricanes.

In English, Vietnamese and Spanish, community leaders were introduced before the walk began on a stage flanked by the American and Vietnamese flags.

“Thank you for your willingness to show the world that . . . despite the issues that keep us apart, when it comes to the important things . . . we come together,” state Sen. Joe Dunn (D-Santa Ana) told the assembled crowd. “It is that spirit that will help the flood victims.”

Zeke Hernandez of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, thanked the primarily Vietnamese crowd for “joining hands and marching and walking today.” He said, “It’s a long journey, but we will walk as a community together.”

The humanitarian effort offered an opportunity for Vietnamese Americans to start building bridges with Latino neighbors by teaming up on a nonpolitical project for which neither group benefits and whose goal is clear-cut: aiding the BENEFITvictims of a natural disaster.

“There’s been some outreach in the past, but it was mainly at the activist level,” said organizer Suzie Xuyen Dong-Matsuda. “This is a chance to involve the regular people in the two communities.”

For their part, Latino leaders say they are touched by the gesture and will build on the partnership.

“It’s not only raising money for victims, it’s developing relationships among the younger members of the community,” Hernandez said. “As you establish ties, you realize your concerns are the same.”

Those connections are “long overdue,” given the potential gains for each ethnic group, said Dr. Rolando Castillo, a member of a Latino physicians group that works on community health issues.

Orange County is 27% Latino and 12% Asian, with Vietnamese making up the largest subgroup. By 2020, Latinos and Asians together will make up 56% of the county’s population, according to the Cal State Fullerton Center for Demographic Research.

In the past, the two groups had many differences. By and large, Vietnamese tended to be conservative and Republican, while Latinos were more likely to be Democrats. Historically, the two groups also came to the U.S. from very different circumstances; many Latinos immigrated to the U.S. for economic reasons while Vietnamese were primarily political refugees, observed Rusty Kennedy, executive director of the Orange County Human Relations Commission.

Dunn said that he observed during his campaigning among the two populations last year that they also organize and govern themselves differently, with Vietnamese more authoritarian. Further, the Vietnamese American community has often been divided, said attorney Lan Quoc Nguyen, a key organizer of the walkathon.

But in recent years, issues such as welfare reform and immigration have strongly affected both groups, providing some common ground, Nguyen said. And others say tentative grass-roots cooperation is emerging in school, business and crime-fighting matters.

“What we’re seeing is a realization by both groups that we need each other,” Nguyen said.

A Clubby Affair

As the morning walkathon assembled at the sprawling park, members of scout troops, service clubs, churches and temples gathered in look-alike shirts under hand-lettered signs with slogans such as “‘Together we care.” There was, however, the occasional stroller who showed up alone. An old Vietnamese man who spoke to almost no one walked the four-mile route through the rambling park, then plunked down under the gnarled branch of a tree, rubbing his bare feet and smiling.

Twenty county high schools with Vietnamese student associations participated, as did numerous campus service organizations. The Santa Ana High School Key Club International chapter, its 100 members predominantly Latino, was out in force, chattering in the pre-walk cold about their good works and bad hair.

A Vietnamese American Key Club member presented the group with a flier about the walkathon, said Lauren Chamberlain, president of the club, whose parent organization is Kiwanis.

Sometimes it is the little gestures that impress. A meeting for participating organizations was held last Monday, “and people there were just so nice,” Chamberlain said. “A lot of the meeting was in Vietnamese, but they went to the trouble of getting the translator for me and a few others!”

“You learn more about them, they learn more about you,” said Blanca Jimenez, 16, of Santa Ana High School, “and it breaks down stereotypes.”

The event attracted politicians with heavy Latino and Vietnamese constituencies. But Hernandez demonstrated how self-deprecation can be a big hammer when trying to break down walls.

He earned the biggest applause by concluding his remarks with a statement of thanks to participants, which he read in halting Vietnamese. Grins in the audience gave way to outright laughter after he quipped: “That was Vietnamese, not Chinese.”

Organizer Anh Bao Do closed with a simple invocation: “Remember, the fragrance stays in the hand that gives the rose.” John Lennon’s peaceful anthem “Imagine” was played, followed by “We Are the World.” The large crowd swayed, arms overhead, made a few attempts at the wave and drifted off to the grassy walkathon route.

It was the youthful turnout that seemed most encouraging to organizers and politicians.

Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove), who walked the four-mile circuit, said she finds the fledgling partnership of both ethnic communities exciting.

“It’s significant, first, that the communities are working together . . . and the second thing is that this event was really organized by the young people in the community,” Sanchez said. “We’re hoping that this translates into working together on more issues. . . . Hopefully, this is an awakening of activism.”

Watching November’s devastation unfold in Central America in the wake of Hurricane Mitch, attorney Nguyen felt the urge to reach out. Mitch killed more than 12,000 people, left 8,000 missing and made several million homeless. It was considered the most destructive storm of the century for that region.

In December, word arrived about typhoon-level storms that struck central Vietnam, killing about 250 people and injuring 1,000.

Nguyen, along with nearly two dozen Vietnamese American youth groups and community members, came up with the idea to join with the Latino community to raise money for hurricane victims.

Community leaders said Sunday that this first large-scale collaboration marks a first step in a promising alliance between two communities that, despite their similar struggles, have seldom teamed up due to language, political and cultural differences.

“My hat’s off to the organizers,” said Kennedy of the Human Relations Commission. “The message it sends to the rest of the county [is] that regardless of ethnicity, we’ll join together. I think that part of building a community of the future are things like this, where race and ethnicity become irrelevant, and that people recognize that we have much more in common than things that divide us by race, religion.”

Hernandez said he contacted local Hispanic radio and TV outlets to publicize the walkathon, although he had short notice compared with the fund-raising machine that was already running in Little Saigon. The Vietnamese American community had staged a walkathon last year to benefit hurricane survivors, and this year it tapped into the same ethnic media--television, radio and newspaper--and community network to rally attendance.

Sunday’s Latino turnout proved disappointing, organizers said, but they expect that to change with more advance word on future partnerships.

Vietnamese Americans were overwhelmingly positive about the walkathon from the start, said Dong-Matsuda, adding: “The community wanted to show that we can go beyond our own community and reach out to others. You don’t have to be just one ethnic group to care.”

Inspired by Little Saigon reaching out to local Latinos, Vietnamese activists in Houston staged a similar fund-raiser last week with Latino groups and raised more than $60,000, organizers there said.

To have such a public display on Sunday of solidarity between two different ethnic groups seemed fitting on the day before the day commemorating America’s leading advocate for a colorblind society, Kennedy said.

“None of the people engaged in this exercise are benefiting themselves. And they’re joined together by their desire to help those in need. . . . It really invokes the spirit of Martin Luther King, and it’s a really nice way to celebrate his birthday.”