Lowell has the second largest Cambodian community in the United States, and almost nobody who built it chose Lowell on purpose

The first families arrived in the early 1980s through federal refugee resettlement after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Policy at the time deliberately scattered arrivals across dozens of American cities, so people landed in Texas, California, Ohio, wherever there was a sponsor. Then word started moving through relatives already here. There was work in Massachusetts. Wang Laboratories was hiring hard, the mill city had housing nobody else wanted, and families began packing up and coming east to find each other. Demographers call that secondary migration. The people doing it called it going where your cousin is. 🏠

What they rebuilt in a collapsed textile city is still standing. Cambodia Town runs along Branch and Middlesex Streets with groceries, jewelry shops and restaurants. Temples anchor the neighborhood and the calendar, and Cambodian New Year in April fills the streets. For years the Southeast Asian Water Festival has brought dragon boat crews out onto the Merrimack, the same river that pulled Irish, French Canadian, Greek and Portuguese workers to the same mills a century before. 🚣

Lowell did not rescue these families. They arrived in a city that had lost its industry and was losing people, took the worst housing stock in the Merrimack Valley, and made a neighborhood out of it. If your family came through Lowell in those years, I would like to hear which street you landed on first.