>>> Between 1975 and 1994 more than 1 million South East
Asians came to the U.S. as part of this country’s largest
refugee resettlement program. Many Cambodians came to the
Bronx in the 1980s as many residents there were leaving.
Now the story of the Bronx Cambodians is being
told in a new book.
>>> I'm a girl who was born in Cambodia,
grew up in the refugee camps and raised in the Bronx.
And that identity to me, the core of that, is being
Cambodian.
>>> Chhaya Chhoum was a young girl when she
arrived in the Bronx with her family. Her mother had
fled Cambodia when the brutal Khmer Rouge
regime took over the country killing and
torturing millions. The "lucky" ones found themselves in
camps in Thailand and the Philippines. Chhoum says
her mother, who moved from camp to camp, longed
to move to the U.S. wanting a better life for her children.
>>> In the refugee camps, before we came,
they showed us videos of what it was like to live in the
United States, how to open the television,
the refrigerators, it was opportunity for me,
not necessarily for herself, but for her two children,
my sister and I, to thrive. Because she survived the
war and violence.
>>> In 1985, as part of the largest refugee
resettlement program in the U.S. Chhoum’s family
found themselves in the Bronx.
>>> This building right here where the Battambang
Market sits was one of the first buildings that
Cambodian refugees were settled into.
>>> Professor Eric Tang is a former community
organizer in the Bronx, and a recent fellow at
CUNY’s Asian American/ Asian Research Institute.
He is author of the new book, Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees
in the New York City Hyperghetto.
>>> After the 1960s many of the middle-class
families moved out of the ghetto, were pushed,
left behind, were the poorest of the poor.
And so sociologists refer to this new era of the ghetto,
which is not just racially segregated,
but economically homogenously poor as "hyperghettos".
>>> According to historians, 55% of
the Cambodian refugees resettled in areas that
had been abandoned and distressed,
not just the Bronx in the 1980s, but Providence,
Rhode Island, Philadelphia and Lowell, Massachusetts.
The 10,000 Cambodians who settled in the Bronx also
faced poverty, violence and discrimination.
>>> I recall growing up in the Bronx my uncle used to
experience violence, always getting beat up,
always fighting all the time because he was
getting- and he was in high school so he was a
lot older than me. And people, our people getting
robbed and living in poor conditions with no hot water
when we were resettled into the most horrible buildings.
The conditions haven't changed.
>>> The Cambodians shatter the stereotypes of the
so-called model minority.
>>> The Cambodian population here in the Bronx economically
reflect what's happening with Cambodian refugees across
the country and that is they maintain some of the
highest poverty rates, some of the highest unemployment rates
and some of the hightest high school dropout
rates in the country.
>>> 80% of the population receives some kind of
well-fare assistance, and many in the community
continue to suffer from PTSD, the horrors of war
still lingering in their everyday.
>>> We have in the U.S. with respect to our refugee
policy this doctrine of work first or work immediately,
doesn’t matter if you just came from a war zone and haven’t
healed from the mental and physical traumas of war,
we want you to get a low wage job immediately.
>>> And there hasn’t been much improvement in 30 years.
According to the latest census data, 42% of Bronx Cambodians
live in poverty. Close to 24% are unemployed and 62% had
less than a high school education.
>>> I don’t think our U.S. refugee policy is really a
resettlement policy. It’s a policy that says,
okay, here’s who were going to take from certain
countries based on our geopolitical interest but
once they are here there isn’t a plan economically
for how they’re going to be fully integrated and
develop the social and economic capital they need
to secure livable wage jobs for the long haul.
>>> Today, the Bronx is a different place.
It’s still New York City’s poorest borough, but crime
and unemployment are down and businesses are moving in.
While many Cambodians left seeking better
opportunities, this part of the Bronx still has the
largest Cambodian population in New York and
is known as little Cambodia.
>>> Unlike many Asian ethnic communities in New York City
there aren’t the kind of normal ethnic signifiers that you see
here in the Bronx for the Cambodian population.
Restaurants, you know mom and pop shops, even social clubs.
You don’t see the signage like you do in Chinatown
or Koreatown and that’s because the refugees who
came here were largely penniless, they were not
capitalized ethnic entrepreneurs that could
than establish what sociologist call an ethnic economy.
>>> Because the Cambodian population is shrinking,
those still here have to fight harder to make sure their
community is being served. One woman who continues that
fight is Chhoum.
>>> There is so much opportunity, but there is
also there is so much pain too. The Bronx hasn't
really recovered from the 80s, the war on drugs.
I want to be a part of that recovery. We came when
people were leaving and we're not going to leave,
we are going to be a part of rebuilding this community.
>>> She wants to leave her mark. She has been an
active community organizer since she was a teen
and now she is founder of Mekong NYC.
>>> The mission is to really organize the Southeast
Asian community to stand up for themselves
through arts, and culture to organizing.
>>> This former refugee is raising her family in the Bronx.
She doesn’t live to far from where she first landed.
And she isn’t planning on leaving any time soon.
>>> I think the Bronx is amazing. I think I would
not want to be raised anywhere else except for
the Bronx because I'm a badass because of that.