The Portal to Texas History 2022 Research Fellowship Awardee

Ngoc “Ann” Tran

Project Title

War on the Waters: Race, Capital, and Diasporic Vietnamese Passages along the U.S. Gulf Coast

Project Description

This project narrates the postwar formations of Vietnamese refugee communities along the Gulf of Mexico, focusing particularly on fisher people and the seafood industry. Contributing to studies of racial relations in the U.S. South, I attempt to tie cases of refugee resettlement in places like Galveston, Texas, and New Orleans, Louisiana to longer histories of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous migrations, displacements, and labor economies on and surrounding the Gulf of Mexico. Thus, my research makes an argument for understanding overlapping and sedimented racial geographies along the Gulf by looking closely at the relationships between labor, space, and water in coastal refugee placemaking.

Biography

Ann Tran is a 2nd year Ph.D. student in American Studies & Ethnicity at USC. She graduated magna cum laude from Texas Christian University with B.A.s in History and English in 2020. Her developing dissertation project explores relational racial formations in the U.S. Gulf South through the lens of the postwar Vietnamese diaspora. Her previous research projects have looked at Vietnamese student anti-war movements in the United States in the late 1960s and humanitarian hygiene programs in rural Vietnam during the American War.