- Introduction
- Oral History Methodology
- Foundational Scholarship
- For Further Reading & Listening:
- Thank you!
Introduction
Roots in New Soil is an episode of the Amplifying Identities podcast, a podcast centered on exploring stories from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and beyond. Our episode was created as a part of our graduate level Theories, Methods, and Uses of Oral History course in collaboration with our instructor Dr. Priscilla Martinez and the incredible oral history collections from Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History (BUIOH).
In this episode, “Roots in New Soil: Building Vietnamese-American Life in Texas,” we centered the oral histories of Vietnamese-Americans who came to the United States as refugees in the wake of the fall of Saigon in 1975. We were driven to this topic because we knew we wanted to tell a story of migration. However, after looking through the vast collections of the BUIOH, we chose the Vietnamese refugee experience because it was a new field of study for both of us, and we felt drawn to the common themes of migration, family, identity and food.
Oral History Methodology
This episode leaned heavily on the oral history interviews we were given access to by Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History (BUIOH). In particular, the collection titled “Becoming Texans, Becoming Americans: The Making of the Vietnamese Community in North Texas” contained the interviews of our primary narrators Dai Pham Schroeder and Phong Hung Le, as well as others who collectively informed our discussion. By using their own words and testimonies, we were able to express certain aspects of their experience that otherwise wouldn’t have the specificity or the personal element inherent to oral history.
A foundational element of our work was to represent their stories of leaving Vietnam and coming to the U.S. Here is a quote from our narrator Phong Hung Le who was only 10 years old when his family fled Vietnam. In it he recalls his priorities as a young boy who was told to “grab one thing” which is precisely the kind of humanizing moment that might otherwise be overlooked. Here it serves to demonstrate the rapid change in people’s lives which left some with only the things they could think of in a moment.
Foundational Scholarship
Details like the above memory made us think about how we could best share these stories in a podcast format. We aimed to let the narrators speak for themselves and learned it was best to provide scholarly context with research guided by the narrators’ experiences. Certain secondary source texts proved vital to informing perspective and guiding our analysis.
In our episode we relied on Yên Lê Espiritu’s article “Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in US Scholarship,” specifically her analysis of the refugee identity as an identity to consider within “a critical global context.” While also using Nazli Kibria’s Family Tightrope: The Changing Lives of Vietnamese Americans to discuss the effects of immigration on the family as a group through the lens of individual perspectives and experiences.
Another great avenue of research was the Southern Foodways Alliance which is a beautiful repository of food knowledge for the American South. In particular we recommend Minh-Y. Tran’s article “Sticky Rice with Mung Beans and Biscuits with Gravy” which appeared in the magazine Gravy which can be accessed from the Southern Foodways Alliance website.
In that vein of individual experience speaking for broader cultural and identity experiences we were tasked with engaging in a discussion of food and gardens as sites for expression and escape from these changes and continuities.In the last segment of our episode we made extensive use of Roy Vu’s fantastic book Farm-to-Freedom: Vietnamese Americans and Their Food Gardens which operates as a beautiful examination of the Vietnamese refugee experience in the United States, connecting it to the broader history of Vietnam and the general immigrant foodway experience.
For Further Reading & Listening:
Bankston, Carl L. “Vietnamese-American Catholicism: Transplanted and Flourishing.” U.S. Catholic Historian 18, no. 1 (2000): 36–53. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25154703. Baylor University Institute for Oral History, Oral Memoirs of Dai Pham Schroeder – Transcript (Waco, TX: Baylor University Libraries Digital Collections), accessed October 21, 2025, https://digitalcollections-baylor.quartexcollections.com/documents/detail/oral-memoirs-of-dai-pham-schroeder-transcript/1838288. Baylor University Institute for Oral History, Oral Memoirs of Phong Hung Le – Transcript (Waco, TX: Baylor University Libraries Digital Collections), accessed October 21, 2025, https://digitalcollections-baylor.quartexcollections.com/documents/detail/oral-memoirs-of-phong-hung-le-transcript/1838226. DeBlasio, Donna Marie, et. al. Catching Stories : A Practical Guide to Oral History. 1st ed. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 2009. Espiritu, Yên Lê. “Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in US Scholarship.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, no. 1–2 (2006): 410–33. https://doi.org/10.1525/vs.2006.1.1-2.410. FitzGerald, Frances. “'Punch in! Punch Out! Eat quick!': From Maine to Texas, the Vietnam refugees are getting the hang of the American way.” New York Times (New York, NY), Dec. 28, 1975. https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/punch-out-eat-quick/docview/120231992/se-2. Haines, David W. “Kinship in Vietnamese Refugee Resettlement: A Review of the U.S. Experience.” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 19, no. 1 (1988): 1–16. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41601404. Kibria, Nazli. Family Tightrope : The Changing Lives of Vietnamese Americans. Course Book. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1993. doi:10.1515/9781400820993. “Refugees-Help Today!: A Place to Live, A Job to Live By.” Texas Catholic (Dallas, TX), Jul. 11, 1975. https://access-newspaperarchive-com.libweb.lib.utsa.edu/us/texas/dallas/dallas-texas-catholic/1975/07-11/page-4. Tran, Minh-Y. “Sticky Rice with Mung Beans and Biscuits with Gravy.” in Gravy. Southern Foodways Alliance, May 14, 2024. https://www.southernfoodways.org/sticky-rice-with-mung-beans-and-biscuits-with-gravy/. United States. Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1975: H.R. 6755, 94th Congress, 1st Session. Introduced May 5, 1975. https://www.congress.gov/bill/94th-congress/house-bill/6755/text. Vu, Roy. Farm-to-Freedom: Vietnamese Americans and Their Food Gardens. First Edition ed., College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2024. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/127011.
Credits:
Created with an image by Pixel-Shot - "Headphones with microphone on color background"