Collection
Asian Americans in Western Mass. Oral History Collection
The Asian Americans in Western Mass. Oral History Collection holds student-recorded interviews with Asian American residents of western Massachusetts.[1] Cambodian narrators are among them, and the recordings are kept in Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.[1]
History
The interviews come from Professor Richard Chu's University of Massachusetts Amherst course "Asian-Pacific American History, 1850-present" (History 253). He added a civic engagement part to the course in spring 2017 and began teaching it as an honors course in fall 2018.[2] By December 2019 the project had run for three semesters.[2]
Leaders of each community choose a member willing to share a life story. The project has worked with the Bhutanese Society of Western Massachusetts, the Bayanihan Association of America, the Regional Tibetan Association of Massachusetts, the Chinese Association of Western Massachusetts, the Vietnamese Catholic Community of St. Paul's Church and the Cambodian American community of Amherst.[2] In fall 2018 students interviewed members of the Bhutanese, Filipino, Vietnamese and Cambodian American communities of western Massachusetts, with the stated aim of preserving and honoring the lives of underserved Asian American communities.[3] The Asian American Commission of Massachusetts co-sponsors the project.[1]
That semester the interviews were videotaped for the first time. Students showed 20-minute edited versions to the narrators, their families, community leaders and local officials at the UMass Center in Springfield.[3][2] The 2018 course report dates this event December 1, 2018, and the 2019 report dates it December 8, 2018.[3][2]
Material coverage
The narrators are members of Asian American communities in Springfield, Amherst and the wider Pioneer Valley. As of 2019 all of them spoke English, because the students could not provide translation.[2] The interviews are held as film or video, each with a stated length and language.[1]
One interview is with Roeun Chea, an art and math intervention teacher in the Springfield public schools. Born in Cambodia, he spent three years in a Khmer Rouge concentration camp and three more in a refugee camp in Thailand. He then resettled with a foster family in western Massachusetts.[1][2] Lily Tang, Richmond Amoako, Noelle McManus, Mae Humphreville and Christine Yao recorded the interview. The record dates it December 19, 2018, and it runs 33 minutes and 33 seconds in English.[1][4]
Catalog and access
Items carry identifiers such as murg025_h5_4_f2018-i003. The videos are posted on the website of the Special Collections and Archives Division of the W.E.B. Du Bois Library and are open to the public for research and other uses.[2] Requests to publish, redistribute or replicate the material go to Special Collections and University Archives at the UMass Amherst Libraries.[1]
Selected recordings
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Digital Commonwealth record for Roeun Chea
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 Past@Present, Preserving Local Pasts: Richard Chu's Project to Document Asian American Histories in the Pioneer Valley (December 10, 2019)
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Past@Present, Course Highlight: Asian/Pacific/American History, 1850s-Present (December 12, 2018)
- ↑ Credo record for the Roeun Chea interview