Sad songs and love songs. For Vietnamese refugees who fled Vietnam
after the 1975 takeover by the Viet Cong, the predominant music of
choice falls into these two general categories rather than any
particular musical genre. In fact, Adelaida Reyes discovers, music
that exiles call \u0022Vietnamese music\u0022 -- that is, music
sung in Vietnamese and almost exclusively written before 1975 --
includes such varied influences as Western rock, French-derived
valse, Latin chacha, tango, bolero, an d paso doble. The Vietnamese
refugee experience calls attention to issues commonly raised by
migration: the redefinition of group relations, the reformulation
of identity, and the reconstruction of social and musical life in
resettlement. Fifteen years ago, Adelaida Reyes began doing
fieldwork on the musical activities of Vietnamese refugees. She
entered the emotion-driven world of forced migrants through
expressive culture; learned to see the lives of refugee-resettlers
through the music they made and enjoyed; and, in turn, gained a
deeper understanding of their music through knowledge of their
lives. In Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free, Reyes brings
history, politics, and decades of research to her study of four
resettlement communities, including refugee centers in Palawan and
Bataan; the early refugee community in New Jersey; and the largest
of all Vietnamese communities -- Little Saigon, in southern
California's Orange County. Looking closely at diasporic Vietnamese
in each location, Reyes demonstrates that expressive culture
provides a valuable window into the refugee experience. Showing
that Vietnamese immigrants deal with more than simply a new country
and culture in these communities, Reyes considers such issues as
ethnicity, socio-economic class, and differing generations. She
considers in her study music of all kinds -- performed and
recorded, public and private -- and looks at music as listened to
and performed by all age groups, including church music, club
music, and music used in cultural festivals. Moving from
traditional folk music to elite and modern music and from the
recording industry to pirated tapes. Reyes looks at how Vietnamese
in exile struggled, in different ways, to hold onto a part of their
home culture and to assimilate into their new, most frequently
American, culture. Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free will
attract the attention of readers in Asian American studies, Asian
studies, music, and ethnomusicology.
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