Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto

Between 1975 and 1994 approximately 150,000 Cambodian refugees entered the United States as part of the country's largest resettlement program, which granted asylum to nearly 1 million war refugees from Southeast Asia. Many of these refugees were resettled in some of the nation's poorest urban areas. During the 1980s and 1990s as many as ten thousand Southeast Asian refugees arrived in the Bronx, a New York City borough beset by “poverty, crime, and derelict housing” (p. 4). In Unsettled Eric Tang tells the story of the Bronx Cambodians with insight, verve, and compassion. Whereas most sociological accounts depict refugees moving gradually but inevitably toward greater stability, Tang's study insists that the desperate conditions of refugees' lives during war and in transit—including experiences of uprooting, displacement, and captivity—persist in resettlement America. This riveting ethnography draws on Tang's field notes from his years as a youth organizer in the northwest Bronx's refugee neighborhoods and his extensive interviews over three years with one Cambodian woman, Ra Pronh. Ra's personal hardships—as a survivor of four years of hard labor under the Khmer Rouge, of six years of overcrowded refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines, and of nearly thirty years of welfare, workfare, and housing displacements in the Bronx—reveal the continuity between her life as a subject of imperialist warfare in Southeast Asia and of the “hyperghetto” in New York City. Ra's stories thus counter the assumed-inevitable arc of refugee crossing, settlement, and mobility and reveal that entrance into the United States—the purported place of refuge—was a mere transfer to yet another site of captivity.