The UCI Libraries Southeast Asian Archive and Vietnamese American Oral History Project are crucial sites of knowledge production, as well as repositories of community history and memory. Refugees and immigrants displaced from regions ravaged by war often carry with them stories that contain and reflect the hurts of war, forced migration, and the de facto erasure of their histories. This presentation focuses on the methodological challenges of building a digital oral history collection for the Vietnamese American community in Southern California as the refugee generation is passing away. I also reflect on this current moment of archiving refugee stories and providing access to the public at a time of heightened xenophobia around another “international refugee crisis.” This presentation will focus on oral history practices and the postcustodial approach to building archives as strategies for challenging mainstream archival practices. The event will feature Dr. Thuy Vo Dang, an Archivist for the Southeast Asian Archive in the University of California, Irvine Libraries, leading its new Orange County and Southeast Asian Archive Center (OC & SEAA). She is the inaugural Project Director for the Vietnamese American Oral History Project and Postdoctoral Fellow in UC Irvine’s Department of Asian American Studies.