Should Long Beach create a Cambodian American Cultural Center? City Council to weigh in

3 years ago 330

Long Beach could beryllium connected its mode to creating a Cambodian American Cultural Center.

The City Council volition ballot astatine its Tuesday, Sept. 7, gathering connected whether to inquire the metropolis manager to enactment with assemblage members to make a imaginativeness and feasibility program for specified a site.

Councilwoman Suely Saro, who is the archetypal Cambodian American to service connected the Long Beach City Council, brought the thought to the panel. In a memo accompanying the docket item, Saro wrote that it’s important to sphere Cambodian culture, peculiarly successful Long Beach, which has the largest attraction of Cambodians extracurricular the state itself.

Long Beach has agelong celebrated its diversity, and Saro pointed to the Museum of Latin American Art, the Pacific Island Ethnic Art Museum, the Homeland Cultural Center and the Long Beach Japanese Cultural Center arsenic portion of that tradition.

Long Beach besides precocious developed an African American Cultural Center and is successful the process of exploring a imaginable Latino taste district.

For Saro, it’s clip for a installation dedicated to Cambodian civilization to articulation those ranks.

And the crushed wherefore Long Beach has specified a ample Cambodian population, she wrote, is further impervious of wherefore taste preservation is necessary.

More than 2 cardinal radical died successful the Cambodian genocide successful the 1970s, and galore of those fleeing the unit coiled up settling successful Long Beach.

“The Cambodian genocide was a quality tragedy,” Saro wrote. “Cambodian creation and civilization were astir mislaid everlastingly during the Khmer Rouge period. Therefore, it is imperative to person a Cambodian Cultural Center that not lone beforehand but besides sphere Cambodian art, culture, and history.”