[00:00:03] Tracy La: At the beginning, people told us that a lot of what we wanted to do was impossible, that people in our community were too conservative to even want to talk to people like us, but we pretty much proved that wrong. The first time we ever went canvassing, they were so excited to see us [chuckles] because we reminded them of their kids, and it made them happy to see young people actually involved and care about the community. It only took a couple of months for us to be like, "No, you're wrong." You just got to try and be genuine.

[00:00:31] Speaker 1: Orange County Grantmakers and Past Forward present Adjust Accordingly: Placing Equity Into Practice. A series of discussions about how inequity is experienced in life and work, and how industries, organizations, and people are working to move equity forward. This series was produced with support from the Orange County Community Foundation.

[00:00:53] Host: In this episode, we connect with Tracy La, executive director, and co-founder of VietRISE. Orange County is home to one of the largest populations of Vietnamese immigrants in the nation. VietRISE works to organize for social justice and equity in their community across generations and across cultural divides to create solidarity. Tracy shares what inspired the creation of VietRISE, the partnerships with other immigrant-focused organizations, and where she hopes to see VietRISE grow and expand in the future. Tracy La advocates for her community because no one was before her. She saw the need and she stepped in helping to create VietRISE.

Let's start at the beginning. Why don't you share what inspired you or prompted you to launch VietRISE?

[00:01:51] Tracy: This is a story that actually has many different beginning points, which I think makes it more powerful because there's so many people that wanted an organization in Orange County that organized working-class Vietnamese people for a very long time. It wasn't until literally the election of Trump that, I think, took people into a big shock, and the fact that a lot of Vietnamese people in Orange County voted for him as well. It didn't make sense to a lot of people in the community because he represented things and perspectives and views that didn't really align with the lived realities of what our community was facing like poverty, economic inequality, and deportations. That was a really big one for his election.

For myself, I had actually volunteered my first-ever campaign in 2014. I just wanted to know what it was like to go out there and go in the field and talk to people. I was assigned to talk to mostly Vietnamese voters, so it was my first time really talking to people at their house, directly to them. It was the lowest voter turnout since the great depression. I think that really got to me because there's so many things that were happening in that election, and I felt like people need to have the education, knowledge, skills, tools to have a say in the things that impact them. A lot of people don't know who their elected officials are or which policies make their lives easier or not.

I was a college student at that time, so I joined the student government. Then I got really involved in my commission to register students to vote and provide voter education. Then I ran for student body president. That was the 2016 election. We registered 6,000 students directly that year. As part of the efforts to also build political education for them in voter education and get them interested in this process.

After that, I organized with a mostly Korean group in Orange County through another nonprofit. It didn't make sense to me why there wasn't a group like this for Vietnamese people. The opportunity came. We converged. There were two even paths, me going where I did, and then other community members that had been conducting surveys, focus groups, trying to start and find someone that would be willing to start a project like this, and that ended up being me.

[00:04:25] Host: Since the inception of VietRISE, talk a little bit about the work that you've done and what the organization has accomplished.

[00:04:35] Tracy: This is our fifth year anniversary, actually, so it's been really exciting. Our work has been focused on organizing and building leadership in working-class Vietnamese communities. Not just young people, but seniors as well. We've worked on policy and advocacy campaigns that are mostly focused on immigrant justice, housing justice, and economic justice. In 2021, we were one of the leading groups that got rent control passed in Santa Ana. This was huge for our community because Vietnamese seniors were trying to do that in Westminster in 2019, and we supported them, but it didn't work out. We were successful in 2021.

We've also worked on what we call cultural change work, which is really just like education and getting people to change their beliefs and values toward how they think another person in their community should be perceived. Some of the campaigns I worked on include deportation defense and preventing deportation of Vietnamese refugees. In 2020, actually, we were successful in securing the freedom of a community member that was unjustly indefinitely detained by ICE, even though he was supposed to be released from prison and he's now one of our staff members leading that very same work.

[00:05:55] Host: Wow. I want to talk about some of the generational shifts that have happened in the over two decades since the mass immigration relocation of Vietnamese to Orange County and other parts of the United States. In that time, a lot shifts, but in that time, in the Americanization of the second and third generation, is there a waning of cultural practices and beliefs or involvement of younger generations in the community?

[00:06:35] Tracy: Not in Orange County. Orange County is like the capital of the diaspora. That's what we call it. I think a lot of activities that involve young people around Vietnamese culture has really been about service or just carrying out parts of the culture, dances, line dances, whatever. We want young people to not just do service because it looks good, but because they really want to change the roots of why a community member or someone might be facing poverty.

So getting deeper into it, and also where these holidays come from in the first place, what's the real meaning of it. In Tết, in Vietnam, how do they celebrate Tét? Which is basically our New Year, and that's about coming home, and the mid-autumn festival. Every year I see the same, I think, amount of people, young people that come out and do these kinds of service work, but I've been seeing also more young people come out to our organization that wants to learn more about, go a little bit deeper into the historical context and how they can take it, the advocacy or service work they do to the next level.

[00:07:42] Host: We're a couple of days away from Tết and I want you to talk about how important it is to keep those cultural traditions and heritage alive and to spread those traditions to new generations and keep it alive, and not let it just be washed out in the Americanization.

[00:08:16] Tracy: Actually, one of my biggest fears is losing my language and my culture and where my family came from. It's incredibly important because part of what builds confidence and self-empowerment in people is just knowing where they come from, or knowing where the community comes from, or what are the things in different moments in history that led up to where they are now.It's a way for them to connect with their family or other people in their community.

There is a growing number of younger people who can't speak Vietnamese largely because there's not really a lot of services or language services that provide that kind of tutoring. The language has changed so drastically in Vietnam that the dialect that we use here is very different from the dialect that's currently being taught professionally, or is being used in Vietnam. I see the pain and the disappointment and shame in young people who can't speak it, but want to.

There's a lot of us that can't ask our parents what it was like growing up or what it was like during the war because we can't speak the language and that doesn't allow us to connect with our parents or family the way we want to because we can't speak the language. That's what we do with VietRISE. We try to make language lessons as part of every program we do. It's critical and absolutely necessary and needs to be more invested in.

[00:09:47] Host: You mentioned this a little bit, but as you're reaching out to the younger generation, how important is it to bring that first generation and that older generation into the fold and into the work that you're doing at VietRISE?

[00:10:08] Tracy: Very much so, actually. The two generations I work with the most are younger and senior, 60 and up. It's incredibly important. They are some of the communities and people most deeply affected by the issue areas I focus on like rent control. They were organizing for it for years before we ever even formed as an organization. A lot of the Vietnamese seniors live in mobile home parks, and they live on fixed income. Some of them have disabilities, and they're getting priced out of their homes.

I remember a senior told me that it's not always disease or health problems that kill seniors, it's mental health and being alone. When we started at VietRISE, I knew we can't just focus on young people, it has to be an intergenerational effort. We started with young people because they were the ones that we see change the minds and hearts of the older people in their families. I saw it in my family. All of our team saw that. But then it was seniors, I think because of the level of respect that they have in our community, that are really going to take it toward an idea or belief that is more unified.

An idea or value isn't just that young people believe in it, but actually, seniors believe in it too because they need it. We actually did focus groups back in early 2022. We did this with the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley and they had interviewed other communities of color and using some very similar questions. Out of all the communities that were spoken with in those focus groups, Vietnamese seniors are the ones that are more likely to say that they can't wait to pass on the torch to the next generation. They do really believe in the leadership of the next generation, and they want to nurture it.

[00:11:56] Host: In exploring that generational gap between that first, and now we're into the third generation, what is the difference in how they view this cross-cultural solidarity? I may be wrong, but I imagine that the older generation looks more towards just their own community, where it's the younger generation that is more open to embrace solidarity.

[00:12:29] Tracy: Definitely. In that very same focus group or research we did, really it was just conversations with people in our community that were older. They and everyone else, every other community, believes that a community other than theirs is way more unified than ours. We talked a lot about us not being unified, but these people neither are unified, and they shared that they want to build relationships with other communities but don't have enough spaces or places that can facilitate that relationship building. Or to bring people together in places that are not awkward but are genuine.

I think I actually see people in our community practice solidarity more than they think, more than we think actually, because you see solidarity in the workplace, neighbors, Latino and Vietnamese neighbors live together, and they respect each other's culture, and they celebrate each other's culture, or they honor it as well. I don't think that's talked about enough, because they're already practicing along with solidarity, and maybe some young people are even. There is a desire to want to build that here. We know for sure in the communities that we work with, the Vietnamese communities. We've been able to see that in action like during the rent control fight. It was Vietnamese, Mexican, Latino, White mobile home residents, renters that came together to talk about and to push for this. I think young people are told constantly different definitions of what solidarity looks like, and so I think it can be confusing for them. That's what we want to change also.

[00:14:09] Host: Your website highlights this term cross-cultural solidarity and collective action. I know you've touched on it, but what are the directions that VietRISE moves to find solidarity in action?

[00:14:31] Tracy: I've gotten to a point where I tell folks now that it's not an abstract-- You can't think of it abstractly. You can't just not talk to someone from other communities, you know, “Bring solidarity to that community!” It's really one-on-one and direct. We meet, or befriend, or just come into contact for whatever reason because we're advocating for the same issues and policies, and then we meet people from other communities.

That's what happened in 2018 when we first started, actually. California had passed the sanctuary law and Trump sued California for passing it, and local city councils were joining that lawsuit and declaring that they don't believe in the sanctuary. It was at the same time that deportations in the Vietnamese community were increasing, also because of Trump and Trump policy. During these fights, we ended up going to city council, and we came across Mexican and Latino immigrants that were fighting to protect that sanctuary as a value, and we were there as well. We talked with the civic organizers and connected and realized that there was actually a lot more in common.

That's the relationship that needs to constantly be nurtured and figured out and discussed. We're never at the point where we're like, we’ve achieved it and it's done. It's a constant ongoing practice, and it has to be, I think, with people you're in contact with often in your community or even online. I don't think it's correct to say, "This community is clearly in solidarity with this community." We're not a monolith, no community's monolithic, and I think that's really where it starts.

Living in solidarity, it's looking at your neighbors and the people around you and seeing what is it that we need to do together or what is it that we don't understand about each other, and what happens when we do come together in solidarity to make the community better.

[00:16:22] Host: Are there specific organizations that you've partnered with and continue to partner with in this work?

[00:16:29] Tracy: Yes, absolutely. We started a partnership with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network in 2018, and a group called the Harbor Institute for immigrant economic justice. Three of us as organizers launched a campaign called Bring Human Rights Home in 2019. On top of being a call to action for elected officials to, honestly, not to be hypocritical about commenting on human rights violations in other countries and really actually address it here when we're telling them that it's happening here as well. This is in the context of immigration. It’s also a campaign that is dedicated to bringing together Vietnamese, Mexican, and Central American residents that live in the Central Orange County area. We did a really big festival in 2019, about 300 people out and the festival brought music, art, and culture organizations, and we tied the music and the culture to what we were advocating for at the time, which was around sanctuary. That's what we've been doing since.