Copyright by Linda Ho Peché 2013

Copyright by Linda Ho Peché 2013 The Dissertation Committee for Linda Ho Peché certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Searching for the Spirit(s) of Diasporic Viet Nam: Appeasing the Ancestors and Articulating Cultural Belonging Committee: Pauline Turner Strong, Supervisor Ward Keeler Nhi Lieu Martha Menchaca Suzanne Seriff Thomas Tweed Searching for the Spirit(s) of Diasporic Viet Nam: Appeasing the Ancestors and Articulating Cultural Belonging by Linda Ho Peché, B.A. Art, M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2013 Dedication To my mom, María and my dad Khuôn Acknowledgements Graduate school has been such an experience—rewarding, frustrating and sometimes perilous in its own way. Producing this dissertation has been like navigating my own difficult physical, emotional, spiritual and intellectual journey, and I owe my survival to so many people. These acknowledgements will not do justice, but I will try. I owe my intellectual growth to my fellow graduate students, professors and mentors. I am grateful for my advisor and committee chair, Pauline Turner Strong, who has been a limitless supporter since the moment she recruited me as a graduate research assistant in 2002. Martha Menchaca helped me hone my master’s thesis and has always provided much-needed encouragement. I benefited from taking courses with many wonderful scholars such as Martha Norkunas in folklore and Emily Skop in geography, where I learned a good deal about gender, feminism and space. Emilio Zamora’s course based on La Raza Unida Oral History Project was my introduction to oral history as activism, and it afforded me the opportunity to work with brilliant graduate students like Brenda Sendejo. I am thankful for Nhi Lieu’s insightful commentaries and for introducing me to the innovative work being produced by Asian Americanists. I am extremely grateful for Suzy Seriff for her careful readings of my work, and for trusting me to work on the community outreach component of the exhibit project “The Forgotten Gateway: Coming to America through Galveston Island.” I owe much intellectual growth to this time in my life. I appreciate Thomas Tweed’s insistence on looking for obscured v theoretical lineages during his religious studies theory and method course, and for his insights on how best to frame this dissertation. Ward Keeler agreed to be part of this committee late into my research, and for that, and his supportive feedback, I am thankful. The Folklore and Public Culture cohort that I entered graduate school with became enthusiastic cheerleaders and allies—thank you Dan Gilman, Miriam Robinson- Gould and Amanda Morrison. Kayla Price read every incarnation of this dissertation (bless her), and without her genius this document would not have been appropriately formatted. I loved collaborating with Ritu Khanduri on a comic strip project with Vietnamese grade schoolers, and working with Lidia Marte on creating hand-made visual/poetic books with Latino high school youth. I have fond memories of working with Shay Cannedy at the Texas State History Museum, and our all-too sporadic conversations. I count myself lucky for the opportunity to have met and presented with the few graduate students doing work on Vietnamese Americans and religion, including Thien-Huong Ninh, Mimi Khuc, and Long Bui. This dissertation was made possible in no small part to my interaction with these scholars and graduate students. I also owe thanks to a number of mentors for cultivating in me a strong background in public sector ethnographic fieldwork. I learned a lot from working with Pat Jasper at Texas Folklife Resources, and I am grateful that Sarita Rodriguez convinced me to apply for a summer internship at the Smithsonian Institution’s Office for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. It was there that I worked with the wonderful duo, Olivia Cadaval and Cynthia Vidaurri, on a festival and traveling exhibit on the expressive arts of the Rio Grande Border region, which inspired my master’s thesis. vi I also learned a lot from university teaching and collaborating with non-profit organizations. In 2008, Madeline Hsu from the Center for Asian American Studies hired me to teach a course on Vietnamese Americans for the U.T. Center for Asian American Studies. It was a fulfilling experience that afforded me the opportunity to coordinate a student oral history project on local Vietnamese Americans. It was during this time that I met Nancy Bui and The Vietnamese American Heritage Foundation, and I thank them for including me as an advisor for their 500 Oral Histories Project, and for identifying participants for my research. Other non-profit organizations aided me in identifying participants, including Boat People SOS in Houston that allowed me to volunteer and to interview a number of staff and clients, and the Archive of Vietnamese Boat People in Australia that allowed me to participate in their refugee camp tour “Return to a Place of Freedom” in Indonesia. I was afforded different kinds of financial support during the last research and writing stages. The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research funded the fieldwork phase from 2010-2011. Toward the final stages of writing this dissertation in 2012, I was hired by Tani Barlow at Rice University’s Chao Center for Asian Studies to teach courses in Asian and Asian American studies, which allowed me to emerge from a post-fieldwork funk and back into the world of scholarly inquiry again, thankfully. I met scholars doing great work there, including Uzma Quraishi, Kimberly Hoang and Aynne Kokas, who contribute great scholarly work that has kept me inspired and on my toes. I owe much to my family, beginning with my maternal grandmother María Luna (1911-2010) who raised me while my parents were at work and who was my first model vii of strong womanhood. I thank my mother for instilling the importance of higher education and a certain penchant for organization, my father for helping me at various stages of the research and for cultivating a love of reading, and my brother Kelly for being there anytime I needed him. I especially want to thank Robert, whom I met, married and had a child with during the course of this work, and who supported me throughout this process. I am thankful for our daughter, Anya Linh, who reminded me often that there is always time to pick acorns. Last, but certainly not least, special thanks to the individuals and families that shared their time, embraced an outsider-sort-of-insider, and shared their (memorable and mundane, inspiring or traumatic) personal stories with me. There are too many to name here, but hopefully this dissertation will give a brief insight into a tiny sliver of their lives and my interactions with them. viii Searching for the Spirit(s) of Diasporic Viet Nam: Appeasing the Ancestors and Articulating Cultural Belonging Linda Ho Peché, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2013 Supervisor: Pauline Turner Strong This dissertation contributes an interpretation of the ancestral altar tradition among Vietnamese American first and second generation practitioners. It traces the contours of the shifting transformations in domestic religious practice, specifically the transnational and diasporic dimensions in people’s lives. I address how and toward what ends the religious is accessed, experienced and/or transformed in the materiality of everyday life, in the context of a complex relationship to a diasporic homeland and an emerging second generation. The research was conducted in Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio (Texas), Carthage (Missouri), Sài Gòn (Viet Nam) and Pulau Galang (Indonesia). I make two main assertions. The first is that domestic religious practices matter in exploring issues of cultural citizenship and belonging. As a collection of things, I explain how altar assemblages are constituted through the purposeful and chance encounters of the practitioner(s), which is a way to talk about the global (such as transnational mobilities or the discourses about diasporic citizenship) through the intimately local. My second claim is that ideas of cultural citizenship can intersect with religious motivations ix and practices, and that they happen (are performed, imagined and circulated) transnationally, or more precisely, translocatively. I document how practitioners’ and groups of practitioners’ struggle to combat the (current Vietnamese) state’s interventions in re-narrating the circumstances of their exile and also the relative invisibility they face as historical subjects in the United States. By carefully examining ancestral altars as a constitution of “things” and as situated “spaces,” I address various facets of what they are and how they work—as ways to express a familial or diasporic imaginary; or as assemblages of things that are both intimately meaningful and private, yet situated at the intersections of geopolitical engagements and cultural politics. x TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................ XI List of Figures ...................................................................................................... xiii PART 1: INTRODUCTION ..........................................................................................1 Methods, Sites and Subjects ..................................................................................10

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