UC Riverside

This thesis covers the historiographical migration of both the Khmer and Cham peoples of the Kingdom of Cambodia, from 1832 to 2020. It focuses on how migration shaped the lives of the Khmer and Cham peoples through war, religion, starvation, torture, finding work to support their families, school, overcoming disease and landmine explosions, and traveling to religious events. Using the work of twelve scholars, analog and digitized historical documents, and three oral history interviews, this research explores how people of Khmer and Cham descent migrated, lived, worked, assimilated, conducted religious practices, and were educated in Krong Siem Reap, Kâmpóng Cham, and Kandal Provinces, before, during, and after French colonization, the Khmer Rouge regime, and after Communism.The information is analyzed thematically through historiography and synthesis, concerning wars over land, ethnocentrism, assimilation, retaining religion and culture, education, and the Khmer and Cham peoples finding work to support to their families. Ultimately, through migration, the location, era, level of education, religion, and occupation of the present-day Khmer and Cham peoples differentiated their experiences from those who lived in the nineteenth nineteenth and twentieth centuries.