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Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free: Music and the Vietnamese Refugee Experience, by Adelaida Reyes. 1999. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, xix, 218 pp, musical examples, photographs, figures, tables, appendices, bibliography, index. ISBN: 1-56639-686-7 (Paperback)
What do Johann Strauss Jr.'s "By the Beautiful Blue Danube," Vietnamese polyphonic singing, tango, cha-cha, and rhumba rhythms, songs sung in Catholic mass, Pham Duy's "Songs of the Refugee's Road," and rock 'n' roll music mean to the Vietnamese refugee communities? More specifically, in what way are these diverse musical genres socially meaningful to the heterogeneous refugee communities? With these questions in mind, Adelaida Reyes explores the complex social and musical cultures of Vietnamese refugee communities in four distinct arenas: the Vietnamese Refugee Center on the island of Palawan (The Philippines), the Philippine Refugee Processing Center in Bataan, the Jersey City-Hoboken area in New Jersey, and Orange County in California, USA. In this way, Reyes explores the changing meanings and values of music production and reception in the shifting social, political, and cultural spaces that shape the experiences of a Vietnamese refugee. Written with an acute interpretation of everyday practices and public cultural performances, Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free is an exemplary ethnography of how music reflects and shapes the social identities of different groups of Vietnamese refugees at varying stages of their journey from the asylum camps to the passage of preparing for resettlement, and finally, relocation in their host countries.
The book is divided into two parts. Titled, "The Journey," Part I examines the social and musical contexts of the Vietnamese...