Susan Needham: Anthropologist Helps Create Archive of Cambodian History in Long Beach

Susan Needham, Ph.D., professor and chair of anthropology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, has received a $40,000 grant from the Long Beach Community Foundation for her collaboration with Karen Quintiliani, Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology at CSU Long Beach, and the Historical Society of Long Beach (HSLB) on the Cambodian Community History and Archive Project (CamCHAP).

More than 2,000 photographs and nearly 1,400 English and Khmer newspapers, documents, unpublished manuscripts and reports comprise this collection, which documents the story of Cambodia Town in Long Beach. The collection will be available to researchers and the public on a Khmer-English Website. Future plans include offering assistance to Cambodian communities around the world in starting an archive or in contributing materials to the Long Beach collection.

A wave of immigrants fleeing the Pol Pot regime in the 1970s settled in Long Beach, making it the largest community of Cambodians outside Southeast Asia. An area of the city was officially designated as Cambodia Town in recent years.

“With only a little more than 30 years in the United States, Cambodians have created a vibrant community with contributions in our city to arts, civic engagement, and business development,” says Needham. “When the Cambodians began arriving in Long Beach in 1975, they settled along Anaheim Street which was a run-down area of the city at the time. They purchased property, opened businesses and re-vitalized the area. Also, a lot of federal funds came to Long Beach to provide support and services for this population, but that support was not limited to Cambodians and all [Long Beach] citizens benefited from the increase in medical and social services.”

Needham’s interest in Cambodian culture began when she did an undergraduate research project at the urging of her professor at CSU Long Beach.

“My professor, Pamela Bunte - wife of the late Robert Franklin, who was a linguistic anthropologist at CSU Dominguez Hills - encouraged me to do my honors project on the [Cambodian] community,” she recalls. “Like most other Americans, I didn’t know anything about the Cambodians or Southeast Asia, other than what I knew about our country’s involvement in the Vietnam War. I wanted to do something on Mexico, but I was a good student and did what my professor told me to do. And here I am 20 years later.”

Needham’s collaboration with Quintiliani began six years ago, when they began to write an ethnohistory of the Cambodian community. Their individual research interests – Needham’s on community identity, literacy in the Khmer language, religious practices, and dance; and Quintiliani’s on gender identity, family issues, and the social and economic effects of welfare reform – have enabled them to interpret the unique and complex community for their students, their colleagues, and often the Cambodians themselves.

“Because we each had access to different social networks in the community our work together will provide a richer and more complete study than if either of us did it alone,” notes Needham.

“Most young Cambodian Americans born [here] do not know their history or why their parents came to the United States,” she continues. “This is possibly our number one reason for creating the archive. They do not feel like they have a history or that they have a place in U.S. history. This archive will help them see how much Cambodians have accomplished in the short time they have been in the United States.”

Needham and Quintiliani co-authored “Cambodians in Long Beach” for Arcadia Publishing last year. They are currently working on an academic text on the ethnohistory of the Cambodian community in Long Beach.

For more information on the anthropology department at CSU Dominguez Hills, click here.

- Joanie Harmon