UCLA

“Defamiliarizing Southeast Asian Refugees’ Kinship across Resettlement, Racialization, and Deportation” tracks the role of notions of nuclear family in Southeast Asian (SEA) refugees’ resettlement to, racialization within, and removal from the United States. Starting with a legal analysis of the language of Operation Babylift, the Orderly Departure Program, and the Amerasian Homecoming Act, the first chapter explores how the state’s construction of nuclear Southeast Asian families reflected Cold War anxieties about family, gender, and liberal democracy. At the same time, Southeast Asian refugee organizations articulated understandings of family in ways that cannot be simplified to contestations or reproductions of the state’s discourse, but instead attest to the multiplicities of understandings of family and kinship beyond the dominance of the state narrative of nuclearlity. The second chapter then analyzes news media from the 1990’s and diasporic Vietnamese authors’ examinations of the role of family in SEA’s racialization to critique how the mythos of SEA nuclear families amplified pre-existing notions of Asian American assimilability and meritocracy in contradistinction to Black undeservingness as popularized in the Moynihan Report. By placing literature in conversation with news reports, this chapter seeks to highlight the multiple ways in which stories about Southeast Asian refugee families and kin have been told. The third chapter turns to interviews with anti-deportation lawyers to explore the possibilities and limitations of the language of family in current legal advocacy, revealing yet another way that stories of Southeast Asian families continue to be narrated. These conversations reveal the limitations of the law and point to the need for socio-political discourse beyond the individual client. By bringing together legal documents, news articles, literature, and interviews with deportation defense lawyers, this thesis argues that despite state attempts to mark Southeast Asian refugees as disposable subjects through reducing their expansive kinship networks to the constrictive nuclear family, reusing the exceptionalized figure of the family-centered Southeast Asian refugee to further deny anti-Black structural racism, and recycling their bodies into incarcerated spaces to justify increased militarized policing before rejecting them from the state through deportation, Southeast Asian refugee subjects have cultivated and narrated a multiplicity of kinship networks, including and exceeding the state-sanctioned nuclear family. Given the historically racialized and gendered construction of family, this thesis asks what possibilities emerge from defamiliarizing the narrative of nuclear families to instead operate through a framework of kinship which may both include and exceed narratives of biological and nuclear family. While deportation defense is a fundamentally state-facing procedure, how might we simultaneously maintain and nourish conversations about sovereignty and freedom as we stumble toward more just and freer futures?