The “Becoming Texans, Becoming Americans” Oral History project documents the stories of Vietnamese refugees who arrived in North Texas following the fall of Saigon in April 1975. The twelve oral history interviews, conducted with the support of the Charlton Oral History Research Grant from Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History, illuminate the particular challenges faced by Vietnamese refugees in the post-Vietnam War era and also offer a window into the process of immigrant integration.

Since refugees arrived in North Texas as both individuals and family units, the narrators for this project were selected to represent a variety of ages at the time of arrival to the United States. Of the twelve narrators, five were young children at the time of their arrival, four were teens or young adults, and three were adults. This variety contributed to a more complete and nuanced understanding emerging over the course of the interviews of the different ways in which immigration and integration are experienced at different ages and stages of life. In addition, age at the time of arrival has clear implications on notions of identity.

Each interview in this collection has been indexed using the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS), making the interviews and transcripts fully searchable.