In storied New England mill city, Cambodian Americans make political history

For two centuries white males dominated this New England textile mill metropolis, many ruling from the good-looking Belvidere neighborhood overlooking the Merrimack River valley.

Lowell, Mass., sits within the cradle of the American Industrial Revolution, house to a few of the nation’s first large-scale factories — powered by cascading rivers and staffed initially by hundreds of younger, unskilled farmers’ daughters, dubbed mill women, who captivated Charles Dickens throughout his 1842 visit.

In later a long time, the Colonial city welcomed wave after wave of immigrants — Irish, Greek, French Canadian, Portuguese — to work its mills. Lowell earned a repute as a gateway metropolis for brand spanking new arrivals, one which embraced immigrants, albeit not sharing the facility.

Then got here hundreds of Cambodians who escaped the killing fields within the Nineteen Seventies.

Now totaling a few fifth of Lowell’s inhabitants, these traumatized, hard-working refugees and their American-born kids grew to become the primary nonwhite group to interrupt the native energy construction.

In current years, the Cambodian neighborhood took the lead in remodeling a metropolis council that had been all-white for practically its complete history into an 11-member panel that features three Cambodians and one Black councilor. It, in flip, elected the town’s first mayor of shade.

Up till the municipal election final November, it was inconceivable {that a} former small-business proprietor named Sokhary Chau would lead the federal government of this historic metropolis, about 25 miles northwest of Boston.

Chau, 49, remembers how incredulous he felt when each eye within the room adopted him the primary time he walked as much as the mayor’s podium in January.

Excited however nervous, he forgot the standard banging of the mayor’s gavel as he known as the assembly to order.

“I felt the full weight of being the first Cambodian American mayor,” Chau stated.

At a time when Asian Americans are facing hostility in lots of elements of the nation, Lowell’s Cambodian neighborhood is up and coming — thanks largely to its perseverance, assist from public curiosity attorneys from Boston and painstaking alliance-building with Lowell residents and different disenfranchised teams, who now are additionally benefiting from the town’s dramatic modifications.

They pushed for and received a brand new system of electing most officers by district, changing the at-large course of that had saved Lowell’s white neighborhood in management, even because the white inhabitants declined and final 12 months dipped below 50%.

It’s a quintessential American story, relating the wrestle of immigrants, overcoming racial divisions and even the decline of U.S. manufacturing. Cambodians throughout the nation have taken discover.

“I’m really excited that we’re entering positions of power,” stated Sevly Snguon, 29, an immigrant-rights organizer and son of refugees in Long Beach, Calif., house to the biggest Cambodian neighborhood within the U.S. Lowell is second.

“We have people now on the decision-making side who understand our diaspora and our needs, and can advocate for us,” Snguon stated.

Chau arrived in Lowell within the Nineteen Eighties, as did many Cambodians, after years at refugee camps in Thailand or the Philippines. “We went through the war, lived through the killing fields and pretty much lost our history because of being uprooted,” he stated.

What they did have was a capability for onerous work, a bit chutzpah and a excessive diploma of neighborhood cohesiveness. They additionally bought assist from skilled social welfare organizations, which Lowell had constructed up over a long time to assist settle new arrivals.

By the most recent authorities rely, Asians make up 21% of Lowell’s inhabitants of 115,550, though folks right here say the Khmer neighborhood, because the Cambodian language and outdated kingdom are known as, might be bigger.

Latinos account for nearly 18% of Lowell’s inhabitants and Black folks about 9%.

The at-large voting system had lengthy enabled a coalition of earlier European immigrants and their descendants to dominate.

“It was kind of like, you had to play a political game with the more affluent sections of the city to even be considered,” stated Corey Robinson, 44, elected as Lowell’s first Black councilor in November.

For years Lowell’s nonwhite communities had been murmuring concerning the neglect and lack of illustration from City Hall.

That’s the place the Boston attorneys got here in.

On a December night time in 2016, Cambodian leaders, professors from the University of Massachusetts Lowell and heads of nonprofits had been amongst 30 folks from communities of shade gathered on the house of Sovanna Pouv and his spouse, Lianna Kushi.

Kushi is a neighborhood activist and Pouv on the time was director of the nonprofit Cambodian Mutual Assistance Assn. of Greater Lowell.

The attorneys, led by Oren Sellstrom of Lawyers for Civil Rights, had already made the rounds, explaining how that they had sued different cities over their at-large voting techniques.

Lowell’s Mayor, Sokhary Chau.

(Anik Rahman / For The Times)

Despite deep language, cultural and different divisions, those that gathered that night time started constructing coalitions. The Khmer neighborhood’s most influential nonprofit, the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Assn., is a monetary supporter of the Latinx Community Center for Empowerment.

Six months later, attorneys for Kushi and a dozen different Asians and Latinos filed the suit, asserting that the prevailing system violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the equal safety clause of the Constitution.

In 2019, the city settled, agreeing to switch the election system and pay plaintiffs’ authorized bills. Starting in 2021, the council could be made up of eight district and three at-large seats.

Last November’s election reworked not simply the council, however the elected committee that oversees colleges. Of the seven committee members, three are Cambodian, together with Chau, and one is Black.

Lowell’s white leaders, a number of of whom had been swept out of workplace, acknowledged that the town’s political construction was behind the occasions.

“I knew we had to make some changes, but it was like, we’ll make the changes at some point,” stated William Samaras, 80, Lowell’s mayor in the course of the lawsuit interval. Besides, he stated, it will have been too expensive to maintain combating the lawsuit. Samaras was one in every of three incumbents who misplaced.

Rodney Elliott, 61, had been on the City Council for twenty-four years, together with two years as mayor. “While I was one of the first casualties of the new system, I’m glad it has taken place,” stated Elliott, a Lowell native with French Canadian and Irish roots. “I think it’s important to have neighborhood representation.”

There are already indicators that a few of the outdated favoritism is on the wane.

A Lowell police officer directs site visitors in the course of the Khmer New Year celebration.

(Anik Rahman / For The Times)

Robinson stated a draft proposal for spending $16 million of federal cash for parks had earmarked greater than $9 million for Belvidere, with different areas sharing the remainder.

“There’s no way” that lopsided break up will survive within the new council, Robinson stated, arguing that the funds needs to be divided equally within the eight districts.

“The focus for me is the issue of equity, in education, housing, as well as how to make sure the city’s workforce and commissions reflect the population,” stated Vesna Nuon, 58, who was the highest vote-getter amongst all councilors.

Nuon famous that Lowell didn’t get its first Cambodian American police officer till 1997. Even at present, solely about 5% of the police power is Asian American. And in 1989, white residents led a profitable effort to cross an English-only referendum.

Before the redistricting, Paul Ratha Yem ran for City Council in 2015 and 2017, and fell brief each occasions.

“My last name is not like McDonald, O’Connor or Kennedy,” Yem stated.

In 2021 he ran to signify the standard immigrant neighborhood, now closely Latino and residential to Southeast Asians. Yem received by 69 votes, defeating David Ouellette, whose French Canadian surname is thought by everybody crossing the Ouellette Bridge.

Yem, 69, is among the many educated class of the refugees that gave the neighborhood a leg up in enterprise and politics. He fled Cambodia in 1975 when Pol Pot and his brutal Khmer Rouge forces took management of the nation. Yem misplaced his father, mom, aunt, uncle, grandmother and two cousins in the course of the conflict, to homicide, hunger and sickness.

In 1981, after two years in Southern California, he went to Revere, north of Boston, to work for a reduction company serving Southeast Asian refugees.

Veesoth Hor, a member of a Cambodian dance group in Lowell, in the course of the Khmer New Year celebration.

(Anik Rahman / For The Times)

Back then, as lately, there have been rising incidents of violence concentrating on Asian Americans, a response partially to the manufacturing troubles at house and the financial ascendance of Japan. Yem remembered being known as on Christmas Eve in 1986, when a number of Cambodian households had been left homeless after their building was firebombed.

But Yem thinks Lowell has been a better place for Southeast Asians to succeed due to the town’s lengthy history of welcoming immigrants; monuments encompass City Hall, honoring Cambodians, Laotians, Armenians and Lithuanians, in addition to Irish and others from Europe. More lately, Lowell and close by cities have obtained tons of of Afghan evacuees and anticipate to assist resettle Ukrainians.

Yem stated that though many Cambodian households right here and throughout the country are still struggling, “now Lowell has become a model that other Cambodian communities can learn from.”

And not essentially only for Cambodians. Robinson hopes youthful adults within the Black neighborhood will turn out to be “more engaged, more involved.”

Maria Aybar, a Dominican Republic native and operations supervisor for the Latinx Community Center, holds related aspirations for her neighborhood. Latinos have had few political successes right here, reflecting what consultants say are extra divisions and different management challenges for a culturally numerous and extra transitory neighborhood.

Not a single Latino ran for City Council final November. “It’s a question we ask ourselves a lot,” stated Aybar, 26.

The Cambodians in Lowell had the great fortune of higher timing and broader political assist. Then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis and his spouse, Kitty, had been massive supporters of resettling Southeast Asian refugees.

“So not only did you have organizations, you also had political will,” stated Phitsamay Uy, a UMass-Lowell training professor and herself a refugee from Laos. That’s partly why the neighborhood discovered it simpler to advance in Lowell, in contrast with locations comparable to Long Beach, which elected its first Cambodian American councilmember, Suely Saro, in 2020.

A lady prays whereas others wait in line for meals in the course of the Khmer New Year celebration.

(Anik Rahman / For The Times)

Even with the help and plenty of discovering employment on the now-defunct Wang laptop firm’s vegetation right here, the newcomers endured poverty and the challenges of beginning over.

Richard P. Howe Jr. witnessed their hardships firsthand when he accompanied his father, then Lowell’s mayor, to one of many packed buildings that housed Cambodian households within the Nineteen Eighties.

“We went in, and it was like on each floor, every room had cloth partitions, like blankets held from the ceiling, subdividing it into multiple residents’ cubes. And there would be huge bags of rice, and it was clear that there was just an awful lot of people living in this one house,” Howe recalled.

Even so, “no immigrant group achieved homeownership faster than Cambodians,” stated Howe, register of deeds for the Lowell space.

Though it’s a close-knit neighborhood, there are variations — and they’re coming to the floor now that Cambodians take pleasure in extra political energy.

Some Khmer neighborhood leaders need Chau to talk out towards Hun Sen, Cambodia’s longtime autocratic ruler. They embrace Rithy Uong, 61, a former college steering counselor who helped quiet Lowell’s youth gang downside within the Nineties and was elected as the primary Cambodian to the City Council underneath the outdated system in 1999.

“It doesn’t take that much work to fix stoplights and fill the potholes,” Uong stated. “We have to do [what’s] more valuable and meaningful for democracy.”

Chau says his mission is to do a “good job for my fellow residents,” to not wade into homeland politics. “I’m not a U.S. senator or congressman,” he stated.

Audience members donate cash to the Cambodian dance group on the Khmer New Year occasion.

(Anik Rahman / For The Times)

Chau got here as a 9-year-old in 1981, and doesn’t keep in mind a lot about Cambodia, besides that his household made a dangerous escape. His mom had saved her seven kids alive for 4 years, surviving land mines and jungles. His father, a captain within the Cambodian military, was executed by the Khmer Rouge.

While Chau’s siblings labored in native factories, he excelled in class, incomes scholarships to the unique Phillips Academy in close by Andover, after which Macalester College in Minnesota.

Chau stated he had by no means considered getting into politics, however felt he may very well be a bridge linking elder Cambodians and the youthful technology that features his two teenage sons.

On a current Tuesday night, he sat in his desk in City Hall, making ready for a protracted night time of conferences. Behind him had been photos of his gray-haired mom, who died two weeks after his election victory, and of his young-looking father in uniform.

“I feel strongly that it’s time for the Cambodian community,” he stated.

Later, Chau recalled that first City Council assembly in January, when he didn’t rap the mayor’s gavel. No extra.

“Now,” he stated, “I use the gavel to get their attention.”