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“The US rhetoric on refugees is always ‘I don’t know why they’re here,’ and it seems so disingenuous that you don’t ask the question as to what displaces people.”
Yen Le Espiritu is currently a Distinguished Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her work can be found at the Research Center for Asian American Communities, where critical immigration, refugee studies, U.S. colonialism, and wars in Asia are studied. She is also an award-winning author. Her publications also cover Asian American communities, critical immigration, refugee studies, and more. She has also co-authored many books, the most recent of them being, Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies, a work that insightfully contextualizes and advances the field of critical refugee studies, which was written collaboratively with the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, a group she is a founding member of.
In this interview, Professor Espiritu provides insight into how her background got her into her work, what made her want to write about her topics of research, and the importance of hearing and learning from refugees' voices.
How did your background influence you to do this work and become a professor of Ethnic Studies?
I’m a refugee from Vietnam originally and when we were resettled in the US, I was in a community that was, I would say, economically depressed and a very diverse community with largely black and brown folks. I think I have always been really interested in questions that have to do with racial and economic inequality. I'm now in the Ethnic Studies department, which is a discipline that really interrogates different kinds of power structures and thinks about ways to address them and replace them with something more livable.
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How do you think your research and the work you’ve done have impacted how you teach?
Teaching and writing are very linked. Even the questions I have about my research and the way I think about how to address them come from a conversation with students in the classroom as well as in-office hours.
Of course, being in Ethnic Studies, we have many students of color, so their questions are very insightful, and they allow me to use what I know as far as my research skills and my intellectual training to try to answer those questions.
You’ve published many books on Asian American communities and refugee studies. At what point in your research did you realize you wanted to write about these topics?
I guess when I was in graduate school. Up until that point, I hadn’t realized that you can study your own community and that was something that you can do for pay. So, when I was at UCLA, doing my PhD, there was the Asian American Studies Center and that was my first time really encountering that kind of scholarship that focuses on the questions that I just thought were my own questions, but then realized they were historical and intellectual questions. So yeah, I think it was when I was in graduate school when I was introduced to this kind of work, and it has become my focus since then.
You’re a founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, and this group really advocates for refugees and puts their stories at the forefront to shape their own narrative. Can you speak to the importance of learning and hearing from refugees themselves as opposed to secondhand sources?
I just finished teaching about this today. What the Critical Refugee Studies Collective does is amplify what we call a refugee critique of refugee laws - and so, refugee critique emerges from refugee experiences. So, refugees' experiences, storytelling, poetry, artwork, writing, and so on provide the counterevidence to the state's representation of who refugees are. For us, the key thing is to say, “What if you look at refugee issues not from the vantage point of the nation-state,” which we always do.
It’s always, “Refugees are a problem for the state. What do we do with them? Do we keep them out? How many should we let in?” All these questions essentially just construct and reduce refugees into a problem that the state needs to solve - and you hear this from everyday conversation. But critical refugee studies say, what if we look at this refugee condition from the perspective of the refugees? What is the critique of the law and what will refugees enable us to see, or talk about conditions that have led to their displacement? I always ask my students, when does displacement begin, and when does the refugee become a refugee?
The US rhetoric on refugees is always “I don’t know why they’re here,” and it seems so disingenuous that you don’t ask the question as to what displaces people. The idea’s just “they want to come here and take what we have.” So, a refugee critique, using refugee experiences, creative works, imaginings, and everything provides a counterpoint to the state’s problem-oriented approach to refugees.
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What would you say is the most challenging part of doing this work?
That it’s not funded well. In part, because Ethnic Studies are something that continues to be fought for. Not every institution has Ethnic Studies, so it isn’t well known in that way. Everyone knows about history or chemistry, you know, especially in the STEM area. But Ethnic Studies are something that students must encounter in college.
Maybe now with Ethnic Studies requirements that will be less so, but the research funders or university administrators don’t really understand what we do. So, the main thing is the lack of resources, the lack of acknowledgment of the kind of work that we do, and the lack of understanding of how transformative the work and scholarship are.
What would you say is the most rewarding part of it?
Both in terms of teaching and publishing, I see very clearly how ethnic studies scholarship impacts the real world. And I think, even though this is a very negative response, but I think that one of the pushbacks of Ethnic Studies across the US is because Ethnic Studies have made an impact. I think about how young people like you, even high school students, have a vocabulary now to talk about social justice, to talk about power, to talk about intersectionality. All of this emerged out of Ethnic Studies scholarship in a way that my generation didn’t have, so I think in terms of this it has been really impactful.
You know, talking about white privilege, that’s just a concept that people, even if they challenge it, they do know about it. So that kind of concept, again, was just emerging when I started my career. So yeah, I think it’s rewarding because I do see the impact on public discussion. And I think that it’s very empowering for young students, both at the high school and college levels who are immigrant students. What I teach about are immigrant and refugee studies, and for them to recognize how histories of colonialism and militarism impact their family history, I think that feels very empowering for them.
Yen Le Espiritu is one of 36 scholars participating in Coastline’s NEH Higher Education Faculty Institute titled, "Fifty Years Later: The Vietnam War Through the Eyes of Veterans, Vietnamese, and Southeast Asian Refugees". This program is being offered through Coastline to enhance undergraduate teaching and expand upon the intricacies of the Vietnam War. If you want to learn more information on this event, see here.
