The storytelling project is being spearheaded at the University of California, Irvine, by a course called the Vietnamese American Experience. Recently, Professor Thuy Vo Dang held class inside a temporary trailer on the overcrowded campus. It’s a small, warm room. It makes you drowsy. Students nodded off; others did not do their homework.

Professor Dang discussed a short story she had assigned her students about a young Vietnamese refugee in America and his efforts to fit in. Dang asked questions, but the students kept quiet, maybe because the story seemed foreign to many of them. They were all born in the United States.

But Dang has figured out a way to wake her class up. Getting students—many in the class are of Vietnamese descent—to turn to their own relatives for their stories.

Sophomore Vince Vu was born in the States, but his parents came as refugees in 1975, during the first wave of Vietnamese migration after the Vietnam War and the fall of Saigon. Vu always wanted to interview his dad, and this class, he said, is the push to do just that.

“At first it was easy, because my parents are older and I think they wanted to get their story out somehow,” Vu said. “The hard part was trying to get them to remember certain things like racial segregation, stuff like that, specific stories.”

Vu struggled to squeeze details from his dad, and he isn’t the only one here trying to get older generations to open up, even if they’ve been living in the US for decades. Even Professor Dang found it tough to get her dad to speak candidly about his life, especially during wartime Vietnam.

“When it comes to private life and home space, that’s where we see the silences, and the ghostly haunting of the Vietnam War,” Dang said.

Recent studies confirm that. Researchers at UC Irvine say that Vietnamese who came to the United States as political refugees suffer from higher rates of mental health problems than white Americans. Near the university, there is an area known as Little Saigon, Vietnamese-Americans are successful in business and education, but depression, anxiety, and a fear to get medical help can also run rampant among the older generations.

“If you think about refugee trauma and refugee experience, people have left everything behind and have gone through really terrifying experiences in order to build a new life, a better life,” Dang said. “And what that actually means is that the new home space that they create is really incompatible for these sorts of stories to emerge.”

Dang added that young Vietnamese-Americans want to hear these stories and, after they stop clamming up, older Vietnamese are eager to share their memories.

Christopher Phan and his mother Thrinh. Phan came to Southern California in the 1980s, he’s a former Navy officer, and lawyer.

Phan remembered his first moments in the United States. It was deep into winter. “We had our first snowstorm and it was just phenomenal,” he said. “I had never seen snow in my entire life. It was awesome.”

Following oral history protocol, Lam took field notes. “He smiled for a majority of our conversation,” Lam later wrote. He added: “And rather than an interview, it seemed more like a conversation amongst friends.”

When Lam asked Phan what he missed from Vietnam, Phan thought of the durian fruit and said, “I don’t know if you’re familiar, Andrew, but durian is either very aromatic to some, and very pungent to others. But I’m a huge fan of that and I can eat five, six perhaps, if you would let me.”

In Phan’s oral history, he also talks about how he used to collect crickets as a young child in Vietnam, and how he served as a Navy attorney in Fallujah, Iraq. He also talks about the Vietnam War and how his family’s political involvement led to their persecution and the confiscation of their property, and what it means to him to be Vietnamese-American.

The story archive is still growing. So far, it contains oral histories from Nguyen Thi Hanh Nhon, a great-grandmother in her 90s who trained female soldiers; Ha Bich Van, the head chef of a successful Vietnamese-French fusion restaurant in California; and Thanh Ngoc Nguyen, who escaped Vietnam by boat in 1982 and passed through refugee camps in Malaysia and the Philippines before arriving in the US.

At the University of California, Irvine, students are engaged in an oral history project to collect the stories of Vietnamese immigrants, many of whom arrived here after the Vietnam War. We include three of the students’ oral history recordings here:

It’s a situation that has Venezuelans on edge, playing out like a Latin American magic realism novel, or one of the country’s popular telenovelas.

It started on December 10th, when President Hugo Chávez traveled to Cuba for his fourth cancer surgery. Since then, he has disappeared from the public and is believed to be in grave condition. Meanwhile, his inauguration—the start of his 14th year in power, his third term in office—was slated for January 10. The presidents of Uruguay and Bolivia said that they will be there. But Chávez? He won’t show.

In Venezuela, Chávez supporters are holding street rallies to show their support. They’re chanting, “The constitution is the revolution!” They wave what’s known as the “Little Blue Book,” a pocket-sized copy of Venezuela’s constitution, which Chávez revamped after taking power in 1999. But those revamped laws are up for debate. Critics said that Chávez and his supporters are stretching the constitution to protect the president’s power.

Asdrúbal Aguiar is a Venezuelan law professor and former judge with the Interamerican Court of Human Rights. In an interview with Globovisión, a TV channel critical of Chávez, he said, “The first thing to prove is, was he elected by popular vote? Yes. Was he declared president? Yes. Has he been sworn in? No, not yet,” he said. “So, if this doesn’t happen on January 10th, we need to revise the constitutions of 1961, 1952, 1947, 1936. We must check all of our constitutions.”

To Venezuelans in the United States, it can look confusing. “They’re not really creating a climate of institutional authority in Venezuela,” said Otto Scheuren, an advertising executive in Los Angeles. He left Venezuela for a better job in the U.S. 11 years ago, shortly after the 2002 failed coup attempt against Chávez. He keeps up with the news back home through friends, family, and Venezuelan papers online.

“Now that Chávez is sick, it’s even more obvious,” said Scheuren. “We have a constitution, but now he’s asked for an extension and was granted one. So then why do we even have a constitution? We Venezuelans have no idea where we’re headed to—we haven’t known for years.”

Scheuren is disheartened. Venezuela’s rule of law is vanishing, he said, and he wonders what will happen after January 10th. Will the country follow the constitution and respect a 90-day temporary ruling period by the head of Venezuela’s Congress? And then what? What if Chávez still can’t return? Will there be new elections?

Meantime, in Venezuela, Chávez’s political rivals are fueling concerns. Henrique Capriles Radonski, who lost to Chávez in October’s elections, worries about the military’s role in a political transition. Chávez is a former colonel—close to the military. And so is Diosdado Cabello, who leads Venezuela’s congress and would assume power if Chávez can’t. Cabello is also loyal to chavismo—the president’s anti-capitalist, hard-left ideology—and will stick to it, he said, with or without Chávez.

The thought of a post-Chávez Venezuela led by the military gives Edgardo Ochoa chills. He’s from Venezuela’s city of Valencia and moved to Los Angeles in 1996. “I don’t see what’s going to happen in the next month or two,” Ochoa said. “The status quo, for me, is going to stay. It doesn’t make a huge difference is Chávez is dead or if he’s not dead, because the problem is the people—the people that he has there ruling the country.”

But can the revolution survive without its leader? Luis Duno-Gottberg believes so. He is a Venezuelan professor of Hispanic Studies at Rice University in Houston. Duno-Gottberg said that Chávez’s long rule has transformed Venezuela’s society—and that his brand of politics, chavismo, can endure. After all, he said, Venezuelans have voted for Chávez’s socialist rule and protested to defend his rule.

But there are complications: possible splits within the military. And loyalties might fade without Chávez’s spirit. It is a political drama that turns off many Venezuelans who have found more stability in the United States. Advertising executive Otto Scheuren sums it up this way:

“The country where you were born is like your mother: you cannot choose your mother. Regardless, you love her very much. But the country where you choose to live is like your wife—you do get to choose whom you marry. And I feel that, in my case, Venezuela is my home country, my mother—but I just can’t live with her anymore.”

Scheuren said that he has no plans to return to Venezuela, even if Chávez isn’t there anymore.

“We’re walking forward with a broken compass,” Scheuren said. He added that it will take a lot more than new presidential elections for Venezuela to find a political path that feels right to him again.

“Maybe I was 22 or 23 when I was in college,” says Iqbal, recalling how it all started. “After one or two years, I started drinking a couple of beers in the evening, or a couple of shots—not every day, but on and off.”

Iqbal and his family moved to Los Angeles in the ‘80s and he soon realized that alcohol was easy to get. By 1997, he could no longer function without alcohol.

On a recent weeknight, Iqbal and his wife sit down to dinner. They eat on the floor over a plastic mat, following their custom, and drink water and coconut juice. His wife offers him a gentle smile as Iqbal talks candidly about how the pressures to succeed in America led him to depression and alcoholism. The only time he could stop drinking, was during the holy month of Ramadan.

“I would quit for a month or 40 days or 50 days, but as soon as it’d be over again, I’d start,” he says. “One time I quit for almost a year without any help. I had two DUIs … but last DUI, when they held me in a cell, I decided ‘no, this is over.’ I’d hit my bottom.”

He knew he had to do something. He ran a small grocery store – and it was now going bankrupt because of his drinking habit. So his college-age son, Shafi, encouraged him to head to Alcoholics Anonymous.

“You know? I always thought of it as a human problem, so it didn’t shock me,” says Shafi, who knew of his dad’s drinking even though the family did not talk about it.

“I’ve always seen that in our community—in many religious communities—there’s things that are said and done in public, and there’s a different reality in private.”

But going public about drinking in Islam can be tantamount to denouncing one’s faith. The Koran prohibits drinking alcohol, and making or selling it. Breaking those rules can bring shame, says Mona Amer, a psychology professor at the American University of Cairo. She focuses on mental health and substance abuse among Muslims.

“Often times the concern amongst people who are using alcohol is not the religious prohibition per se, but more of the stigma within the community,” she explains

There is little public health research about substance abuse among Muslims. But findings so far point to a trend: most Muslims who do abuse alcohol, start around college-age, like Iqbal. In her workshops in the US, Amer has found parents in denial about their kids’ drinking and worried their mosques will also judge them.

Those worries are what led Yassir Fazaga to become a family therapist. An immigrant from Eritrea, Fazaga is also an imam at the Orange County Islamic Foundation, where he would hear from families worried about their alcoholic relatives.

“That is when I felt I was very deficient, and I think that I also felt a bit dishonest, because it takes a lot within the community for people to come out and say: ‘I have this problem’” says Fazaga. “Imams are very trusted in the community, so what do you do at that point?”

Back then, he felt he couldn’t do much besides listen and encourage abstinence, like most religious leaders would. Now, Fazaga suggests more, like rehab and therapy programs. And he makes sure that alcoholics know that their faith will help in their recovery.

Khalid Iqbal has been sober for five years now. After some initial struggle Alcoholics Anonymous eventually worked for him. AA has roots in Christianity and the Bible, but Iqbal doesn’t mind that, at all.

“AA doesn’t talk about religion—it started that way, but they say, you have to have some kind of faith,” he explains. “That “supreme power” can come from anywhere. I’m a religious person from the beginning, so I have faith in God, so for me it was not hard to go back and practice on that.”

Iqbal’s history of alcoholism has made him eager to help fellow Muslims in need. But it’s not easy to get people to talk and seek therapy. For now, there’s a newer 12-step program called “Millati Islami.” It started in Baltimore in 1989 and is like AA, but rooted in the teachings of the Koran. But many mosques in the US are still somewhat resistant to it.

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Death threats from the maras — or gangs — in his native Guatemala are the reason Ronald Aldana said he left. The son of farmers from the rural Santa Ana region said it started when he was 16-years-old. He was studying auto mechanics at a trade school when he heard that his cousin was murdered alongside a road. Aldana and his dad reported the crime to the police and helped with his burial. Within hours, Aldana started getting threats that escalated into attacks.

“We just couldn’t deal with it anymore,” Aldana said. “The first time they tried to kill me, I’d gone out to pick up some books and as I headed home, a group of men on the street started shooting in my direction, but I jumped towards a ravine behind me.”

Aldana survived the attempts on his life. But his father decided it was time for him to leave — for good. Aldana said, “[My father] hugged me and said, ‘Son, you know I love you, but you cannot stay here. I’d rather die than have you killed.’”

Aldana resisted. But he was familiar with this kind of story, and he knew how it was likely to end: If the gangs target you — you’d better go. His older sister, who’d migrated to Los Angeles years back, said she’d pay the $5,000 smuggler’s fee. Within a day, Aldana started his trek. Once in Mexico, he met other Central American migrants. They walked more and boarded long-distance buses.

“It took us a little more than two days to cross Mexico, too, because there was a lot of police around, and also the Zetas, which are notorious for targeting migrants,” Aldana said. “I don’t know if it’s true, because they didn’t harm us, but that’s what the coyote would tell us.”

Once on the American side, Aldana walked along a freeway, under the hot sun, with nothing but the disheveled clothes he wore. Then, he spotted a crew of construction workers who offered him a lift as far as Las Vegas. But the drivers were also without papers and they were all stopped at a Border Patrol checkpoint. Agents detained Aldana and he told them the truth: that he was fleeing Guatemala’s gang violence.

The agents referred him to Kids In Need of Defense, a pro bono legal and advocacy organization, and transferred him to a children’s shelter in Arizona. Kids In Need of Defense worked with the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of Refugee Resettlement to fact-check Aldana’s story and represent him in court. Eventually, the US government granted him asylum.

“Kids who are represented by counsel are three times more likely to obtain relief from deportation,” said Wendy Young, director of Kids in Need of Defense. She said that Aldana represents a big surge in kids who’ve arrived alone in this country during the last few years. Only a lucky few, she said, gain asylum.

“We primarily work with kids once they’re released from custody. But I have to say, with the number of kids going through the system currently—I’m very concerned,” Young said. “Honestly, my office has been flooded.”

Groups like Kids In Need of Defense said young people like Aldana increasingly need legal help. Without it, they’ll lose the opportunity for a fair hearing, and risk being repatriated back to their home countries — and the dangers they once fled.

Alex Sánchez is a former Salvadoran gang member who runs Homies Unidos, an anti-violence program in Los Angeles. He said that war, poverty and natural disasters have caused young Central Americans to leave their countries for decades. But these days, Sánchez said, the main push factor is rising gang violence.

Sánchez says that “They try to seek these asylum cases in which they get attorneys to fight a case, and usually say that they were force recruited, that they were targeted by local gangs, or that they were targeted by law enforcement, thinking that they were in gangs. So these are people that we see here often, that are fleeing the gang violence — both perpetrated by the gangs and the government.”

More than three years after crossing the border, Ronald Aldana is now 20-years-old. He lives with his girlfriend and her family. Soon, he’ll look for a way to bring his parents and siblings in Guatemala to the United States. But that won’t be easy. First, he’ll need to prove that he has the financial means to support them all.

But now rising wages in China and a resurgent US auto industry are breathing new life into the maquilas in Tijuana. One of the most booming of border businesses is the aerospace industry.

“People’s perception about what cross-border manufacturing, what maquiladoras are like, is still based upon what was happening in the 70s and maybe the 1980s,” said Kenn Morris, president of Crossborder Group, a San Diego-based market research firm.

Morris said the aerospace industry along Mexico’s north-western border is nothing like the stereotype of overcrowded, low-skilled factories.

“The fact is that a lot of the factories,” he said, listing medical devices, aerospace, and electronics, “they’re building in such a way these days, and they’re managed in such a way, that they can be put anywhere on the planet. But they’re coming to Mexico.”

In the past five to 10 years, more than 50 aerospace and defense companies have started operations in Baja California, according to Mexico’s trade ministry. Most of them are American, and they produce everything from electronic components to steel bolts for commercial and military aircraft.

These companies employ more than 10,000 high-tech workers, many of them engineers, technicians and software developers. The companies choose this region for its proximity to the US and to western ports catering to Asian markets.

But the main reason they come here is simple: the cost of even highly skilled labor is roughly half of what it is in the United States. In San Diego, a senior aerospace engineer makes on average $90,000. In Tijuana, an engineer with similar skills earns $35,000 to $45,000.

Cobham, which produces defense systems, made the move to Tijuana in 1997. Inside its factory, workers dressed in royal blue coveralls sit in groups, looking into microscopes, holding tiny tweezers.

“Over here we do the tuning and testing of the product,” said Javier Urquizo, a plant manager at Cobham. But Urquizo can’t tell me exactly what the product is. That’s classified information.

“So after we finalize the assembly, we need to tweak around some components to get the electrical responses required on the different frequencies,” he said.

The company has to apply for special licenses from the State Department to build those components here in Mexico — that’s to make sure the raw materials and parts and the technology don’t get into the wrong hands.

Teresa Jesus Rio Ramos, a production supervisor here, said that aerospace and defense companies offer the most stable, best paid jobs of all the Tijuana maquilas. She makes around $1,800 a month.

“I think our company is pretty financially stable,” she said, “I don’t have to worry from month to month whether I’ll have a job or not. But that’s not true for all maquilas in Tijuana; people get fired and rehired elsewhere all the time.”

When asked whether she’d prefer working on the other side of the border, where she could potentially double her salary, Rio Ramos shook her head.

I’ve gotten a lot of professional training here in Tijuana, she said. I’m not interested in changing the course of my story.

Lopez has been an agent with Grupo Beta for two decades. It’s a Mexican government agency with a mission to protect northbound migrants from smugglers. The agents had the authority to conduct investigations and make arrests.

Carlos Diaz de Leon walks up to Lopez and extends his hand, showing him a folded US deportation slip. The Sonora migrant has just been sent back to Mexico and he asks Lopez for help.

Diaz de Leon said he’s crossed illegally many times over the years, and Grupo Beta was always there for him.

“They have fed me when I was hungry,” Diaz de Leon said. “They’ve given me change when I needed to call home. I think they’re the only ones out there looking out for undocumented migrants.”

There used to be dozens of local smuggling operations here, charging migrants up to $2,000 a head. Beta agent Mario Lopez said with tightened border security, it’s more difficult to smuggle people across.

“Smuggling has decreased through this part of the border by almost 90 percent,” he said. “Now there’s more surveillance, there’s a second border wall, there are guards patrolling by horse, motorcycle, and cars. And there are cameras and sensors.”

Grupo Beta agent Mario Lopez gets into his signature orange Jeep, during his patrol. (Photo: R. Guidi)

On a typical day, Lopez still patrols along the Mexico side of the border. But he no longer conducts investigations and he’s no longer armed. It’s too dangerous. Now he and his fellow agents focus on handing out food and providing first aid to migrants. Grupo Beta has become a force without much power or much of a mission.

It’s not just Grupo Beta that’s pulled back from investigating. Victor Clark Alfaro, director of the Binational Center for Human Rights in Tijuana, said that the violence and insecurity have pushed his group to curtail their work.

“It’s too risky to really research the smuggling business of today,” he said. “It was hard enough in the 1980s and 90s.”

In the past year alone, the bodies of more than 150 migrants were discovered in the state of Tamaulipas, 80 miles south of the Texas border. It was one of the worst mass killings in Mexico in the past decade, and it sparked new concerns about the vulnerability of migrants.

Grupo Beta agent, Mario Lopez, stands near the point where the San Diego-Tijuana border fence meet the Pacific Ocean. (Photo: R. Guidi)

Rafael Hernandez heads the volunteer-run Desert Angels, a 14-year old civilian rescue group on the US side. Hernandez fields calls from family members of migrants lost in the desert. He said crossings here may have fallen to a 40-year low. But those who do make the attempt face greater peril.

“Along the way, they are mugged, kidnapped, raped,” he said. “But groups like ours, we can’t point it out. It’s very compromising to say that we know illegal activity is happening somewhere along the border.”

By compromising, he means dangerous. Hernandez said the consequences of speaking out about smuggling or the violence against migrants would be terrible.

The billions spent on border infrastructure and law enforcement over the past decade have dramatically changed the smuggling business. And in many ways, it’s become a much more dangerous game for everyone involved.

Ruxandra Guidi is a reporter at KPBS