“Deportation = Genocide”

Abstract

Long Beach–based Khmer Girls in Action (KGA) puts young women’s leadership at the center to demand refugee, gender, racial, and economic justice. The three-year leadership training teaches Khmer youth to interrogate the category “refugees” and the very concept of the United States as a “refuge.” The curriculum helps KGA youth organizers connect their histories of displacement from Southeast Asia to the deportation of Khmer refugees, turned criminal aliens, from the United States. KGA frames the deportation of Khmer refugees as yet another chapter of genocide. The frame brings to the surface the genocidal structures of settler colonialism directed at Gabrielino/Tongva, the traditional caretakers of the Los Angeles basin and the Southern Channel Islands. The chapter places Khmer and Tongva struggles side by side to examine the workings of settler carceral power.