A week before the fall of Saigon, Dinh K. Le and his family were airlifted out of war-torn Vietnam and flown to a refugee camp in San Diego.
Next week, Le, 60, and a colleague, Mai Cong, 57, both of Santa Ana, Calif., will become the first Vietnam-born delegates to attend a Democratic National Convention.
They are among a handful of immigrant delegates, many of whom fled communist and totalitarian regimes, who are coming to Chicago to play a high-profile role in the democratic process of choosing an American president.
By participating in the convention, they hope to voice the concerns of their communities, where most also work to register immigrants for citizenship and to vote. They view their delegate roles as an honor, especially since many were excluded from the political process in their homelands.
Le and Cong co-founded the Vietnamese American Committee for Clinton in 1992 after Cong wrote then-Gov. Bill Clinton seeking his stance on human rights and democracy in Vietnam. When Clinton wrote back expressing concern for the causes, Le and Cong used his letter to generate support in their community for his presidential bid.
“It was kind of a revolution when we started the committee for Clinton,” said Le, noting that when they started 95 percent of the Vietnamese voters in heavily Republican Orange County were affiliated with the GOP.
Today, Le said, for every three Vietnamese in the county calling themselves Republicans, there are two Democrats of Vietnamese descent. Le, Cong and others try to recruit other Democrats through an organization formed after the 1992 election, the Vietnamese American Democratic League.
Florida delegate Jacques Despinosse, 50, a native of Haiti, left his country in 1968 when the late dictator Francois Duvalier ruled by fear with his Tonton Macoute, a paramilitary force created to intimidate and kill political opponents.
“My family was very afraid of what was going on in Haiti,” said Despinosse, who lived in New York City before moving to Miami.
In south Florida, he noticed the political power of other ethnic communities.
“I looked at the Cuban community, the Jewish, the Irish, Polish and Italian. They all overcame their problems by participating in the political process,” said Despinosse, who now owns a small business in Miami’s Little Haiti and advocates for citizenship and voter registration on a weekly radio program.
“It’s about money and the vote. If you don’t have those two things you’re just nobody,” added Despinosse, who will be attending his third Democratic convention.
Illinois delegate Amalia Rioja’s father left poverty-stricken and politically unstable Bolivia in the late 1960s to obtain his medical license in the United States. The rest of the family joined him in Chicago 1970 when Amalia was 2 years old.
“At that time there was a lot of turmoil,” said Rioja of the nation that has seen several military juntas since the 1960s.
Now a lawyer, Rioja also is working as a volunteer in the U.S. Senate campaign of Democrat Dick Durbin.
“Our party includes all the communities that reflect what the U.S. is about,” said Rioja, 28.
Texas delegate Connie Liem was 4 when her family fled Indonesia’s political unrest in 1972. A military coup several years earlier resulted in the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people in that country, most suspected of being communists or sympathizers.
Many of the Chinese Indonesians, who represented the commercial class, lived in fear. Liem’s father, a Chinese physician, was able to secure a work visa and brought his family to the U.S., settling in Texas.
Now a lawyer with the Gulf Coast Legal Foundation in Houston and a member of the Asian American Democrats of Texas, Liem said participating in the political process is a duty that came with her U.S. citizenship.
“A lot of immigrants come from Third World countries where they do not trust the government,” said Liem, 28, who will be attending her first convention. “We are a country of immigrants, and ethnic minorities need to be represented in the government. We have a responsibility.”
Other delegates, like Consuelo “Connie” Salas of Illinois, hope that issues of concern to immigrants will be addressed during the convention.
“I hope we will be able to speak about it,” said Salas, 60, a board member and past president of the Mexican Civic Society of Illinois, a group that coordinates the annual Mexican Independence Day parade in Chicago. “I’m very much concerned about issues of immigration.”
Salas was 7 years old when she emigrated with her parents from Mexico, where the same political party, the PRI, has dominated politics for most of this century.
“Like many immigrants they wanted to give us a better life than the one we had,” said Salas, a supervisor in the Cook County assessor’s branch office in Skokie.
Salas, attending her first Democratic convention, said her parents encouraged her to become a citizen when she turned 18.
“They saw it as very important in obtaining our rights,” said Salas. “We knew we were never going back to Mexico.”
In the mid-1960s, California delegate Chopin Chopra found himself locked out of his native Kenya when he tried to return after studying in England. He was refused entry because his race, Indian, and religion, Hindu, made him a minority in the former British-ruled east African country.
Chopra, 56, came to the U.S. in 1980 after living in Europe. The resident of Anaheim Hills, Calif., also is a first-time delegate. He hopes that Americans will not shut the door on immigrants and wishes politicians would stop what he considers immigrant-bashing.
“This country was built on immigrants; some who came 200 years ago and some who came recently,” Chopra said. “I believe in America and am grateful to America. She has given us all opportunity.”
