Biography
Mitchell I. Bonner has been active in the San Francisco Bay area's Southeast Asian American communities since 1975, when the first Lao and Hmong refugees moved to the area. Over the years Bonner has documented both daily life and special community events, through photographing private and public activities in the Southeast Asian community. His photographs include images dating from a 1975 Christmas party for Vietnamese refugees at San Francisco's International Student Center, to a 2000 Laos New Year's celebration in Richmond, California.
Bonner has traveled to Laos four times, and has helped to organize various Laotian festivals and dances. He was a volunteer with the International Student Center in San Francisco until it closed at the end of 1976. Many Vietnamese refugee students used the center, which offered inexpensive cultural and recreational activities and a dining room for international students at San Francisco colleges and universities. It was there that Bonner met a Lao-Vietnamese man, who introduced him to the arriving Lao and Hmong refugees being settled into San Francisco. Bonner was also introduced to Southeast Asian refugees in the San Francisco neighborhood where he lived, which was the original receiving neighborhood in that city for Southeast Asian refugees. Bonner owns a personal Southeast Asia collection of over 3,000 items on Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, including books, audio and video recordings, documents and maps, and handicraft items.
From the guide to the Mitchell I. Bonner photographs and ephemera, 1975-2002, (Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries)
