The couple, who live in Newport, have a 12-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter. Ratsabout, who came to Minnesota as a three-year-old refugee, considers his new position “a kind of homecoming for our family.” His wife, Gao Lee, who is Hmong, grew up visiting the location when it was still the original Arlington Hills Library. 6, overseeing four staff members, including an associate director, operations/finance manager and two staffers assigned to the East Side Housing Justice Project.
On Sunday, Rachleff and his wife Beth Cleary announced that following a year-long transition and selection process, the board had unanimously chosen Ratsabout to be East Side Freedom Library’s next executive director out of a pool of 28 applicants. Instead, Ratsabout, 41, cast his name into the proverbial hat. Paul’s Greenbrier Street, only to step down once he discovered that founding director Peter Rachleff was moving on from his leadership role.
FREEDOME HOMES ARCHIVE
In the early days of the pandemic, he joined the board of the East Side Freedom Library, an archive of immigrant and labor history established inside a 1917 Carnegie Library on St. With those kinds of immigration dichotomies in mind, Ratsabout plans to set out on a new frontier of his own. Undated courtesy photo, circa August 2022, of Saengmany Ratsabout, who has been appointed as the new executive director of the East Side Freedom Library on St. In Laos, Ratsabout discovered much the opposite - Laotian-Americans and Hmong-Americans in their 20s, 30s and 40s who had returned to Southeast Asia to reconnect with their ancestral roots and work jobs in their parents’ homeland.
“They’re struggling with the language and the culture, but also with the stigma of having been in the U.S., having had an opportunity, and being arrested and removed from the U.S.” “They’re struggling,” said Ratsabout, who has spent the past 10 years researching voluntary and involuntary migrations through leadership positions at both the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Advanced Study and the university’s Immigration History Research Center. What he found were young men struggling to adjust to a country and culture they had no memory of, as well as a language that in some cases was almost equally unfamiliar. When a number of Cambodian-Americans were deported from Minnesota, Saengmany Ratsabout took a brief side trip from Laos a few years ago to check in with them.
0 kommentar(er)
