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Primary Submission Category: Social/relational factors
Organizing another way of being Vietnamese American: mental health of young women in conservative families in California
Authors: Emma Tran,
Presenting Author: Emma Tran*
The scholarly dismissal of right-wing people of color forecloses opportunities to forge intergenerational and interracial politics of solidarity in pursuit of an expansive “public” health. To address this issue, I collaborate with a grassroots youth organizing group based in Orange County, California to ask: how do young Vietnamese American (VA) women make sense of their families’ and communities’ conservative politics? How does political misalignment affect their health and wellbeing?
This community-engaged project draws on three years of ethnographic fieldwork as a volunteer and member of a youth organizing group based in OC, as well as 60 interviews with VA women high school teachers, organizers, and girls age 18-23 living in California. Findings show that participants’ sensemaking concepts are ultimately underpowered to make clear sense of their families’ and communities’ politics (e.g., how their refugee families could endorse vehement anti-immigrant sentiments while being immigrants themselves), which has severe affective consequences, such as chronic feelings of betrayal, shame, and hopelessness. In part because conservatism has a political monopoly in OC, young VA women trust few to no people to speak about politics, further isolating them and taxing their mental wellbeing.
Moreover, while right-wing politics are attributed to anti-communism as a trauma response to war, dispossession, and assimilation, my research suggests that anti-communism masks other political agendas, such as anti-immigration, anti-Black segregation, and patriarchy. These findings underscore that community organizers face an important opportunity to recruit young diasporans into social justice projects salubrious for their personal and community’s health. Lastly, this paper emphasizes that public health researchers must attend to ideological ecologies that function not only as socio-structural determinants of health, but also as the contexts through which those very determinants emerge.