Refugee Dreams Revisited – Youth Performances

Refugee Dreams Revisited
Produced by MediaRites Productions.

Starting with the fall of Saigon in April 1975, refugees from Vietnam awaited approval to move to the US and other countries. By 1979, there were almost 62,000 Vietnamese in refugee camps, with more than 140,000 people displaced from Cambodia and Laos. Portland, Oregon, was one of the medium-sized US cities that dealt with the relatively sudden influx of every major ethnic group (Vietnamese, Lao, Hmong, Mien and Cambodian) from Southeast Asia.
Fifteen former refugees were interviewed for the Refugee Dreams Revisited project, which was created for the Peabody award-winning series Crossing East that ran on 230 public radio stations.

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Crossing East Archive Project

More than 10 years ago, MediaRites debuted Crossing East, (Our Stories, Our History, Our America), the first and to date only Asian American/Pacific Islander history series on public radio.

In 2016 we embarked on an exciting project to save more than 150 hours of oral history recordings gathered for this groundbreaking Peabody Award-winning radio series hosted by George Takei and Margaret Cho.

We digitized all the interviews, transcripts and photos online for the public to use for educational purposes. This act of preservation is called the Crossing East Archive Project.

MediaRites was awarded funding from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Oregon Cultural Trust, the Regional Arts and Culture Council , the Multnomah County Cultural Coalition and the PGE Foundation and built the multimedia Crossing East archive. We created two projects to celebrate the 10th anniversary year. See the Archive at: http://www.crossingeast.org/crossingeastarchive/

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