By Frederick Melo | August 8th, 2022
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. 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.
“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. “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.”
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. In short, a voluntary reverse migration.
With those kinds of immigration dichotomies in mind, Ratsabout plans to set out on a new frontier of his own. 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. Paul’s Greenbrier Street, only to step down once he discovered that founding director Peter Rachleff was moving on from his leadership role.
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. Paul’s Greenbrier Street. (Courtesy of Saengmany Ratsabout)
Instead, Ratsabout, 41, cast his name into the proverbial hat. 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.
He’ll begin the job Sept. 6, overseeing four staff members, including an associate director, operations/finance manager and two staffers assigned to the East Side Housing Justice Project.
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. The couple, who live in Newport, have a 12-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter.
Rachleff and Cleary began leasing the Carnegie Library from the city in 2014, a few weeks before the city’s $14 million community center housing a modern lending library and rec center facilities opened at Payne and Maryland avenues.
Ratsabout said he met the couple — Rachleff was a labor historian at Macalester College, Cleary chaired the college’s theater and dance department — as they were beginning to launch the library. It has since grown to encompass an immigrant women’s weaving circle overseen by the Karen Organization of Minnesota, meditation groups, community meetings, housing advocacy, neighborhood walking tours and more.
Peter Rachleff, a co-founder of the East Side Freedom Library in St. Paul, is excited as he shows a volunteer a Paul Robeson LP that just came in on July 10, 2019. The library has a catalog of 20,000 books and other materials on labor, immigration, and social movement history. (Jean Pieri / Pioneer Press)
He’d like to see some of that programming “move beyond some of the walls of the library” and go on the road, or at least the Internet. At the Immigration History Research Center, he helped launch the “Immigrant Stories” digital storytelling project, which documented the experiences of immigrants of widely different backgrounds and ages in three-to-five minute videos narrated by the immigrants themselves.
“My conversation with the weaving group is to how to elevate some of that narrative — the stories of the women themselves, and how they’re using that program to train the new generation of weavers in their community, and also as entrepreneurs,” Ratsabout said.
“It reminds me of the early days of the Hmong in Minnesota,” he added. “Hmong women were selling their handicrafts and ultimately able to open some stores in the ’80s and ’90s. We saw Hmong (shopping plazas) and farmers’ markets. There’s similarities between the two groups.”
Ratsabout said he can foresee formalizing relationships with partner organizations such as the Housing Justice Project and focusing on the fundraising and administrative work that goes into taking a nonprofit library out of its start-up phase. While Rachleff was a labor historian by trade, he’ll draw from his personal immigrant roots. “That refugee experience is still in me,” he said.
Rachleff — who has been leading walking tours of the neighborhood from the library — isn’t going far, and he and his wife are both expected to stick around in some capacity, perhaps prominently.
“We’ll be continuing to do the stuff we love to do the most,” said Rachleff, who teaches labor history in person and virtually in classes based at the library. “And that means not writing grants.”
Cleary, who teaches yoga and writing workshops, said the couple live a mile from the library and have some special projects in mind. Rachleff and Cleary will maintain non-voting seats on the board, and Rachleff said he hopes to be appointed intern supervisor. He continues, he said, to take out the trash and recycling.
“It won’t be a dramatic shift,” Ratsabout said, referring to his own vision for the space. “It will still stay true to the foundation of the library — labor history, immigrant history, but also how do we connect those histories to what’s happening in the present?”
“The role of the library is to be supportive of our partners, and to really help incubate ideas,” he added. “We’re happy to bring people together and to help build relationships.”