When Phanat Xanamane was growing up in New Iberia, the Lao community didn’t gather primarily at a temple. Instead, people gathered on porches, in garages and around gardens, everyday spaces remade from memories of a homeland left behind.
For Xanamane, those informal spaces are more than childhood memories. They are the foundation of his research and the message he hopes to share: That culture is not preserved only in monuments or institutions, but in the ordinary places where people live, gather and adapt. Through his work, Xanamane seeks to show how immigrant communities sustain identity not by resisting change, but by reshaping their surroundings to make room for tradition.
Born in a refugee camp in Thailand and raised in New Iberia, Xanamane grew up learning the story of how his parents fled Laos as refugees in the 1970s and immigrated to the United States in 1981…