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 "Vietnamese music" -- 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, and 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, Reyesconsiders 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, immigration
studies, music, and ethnomusicology.
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