On a Saturday morning in south Stockton, before the Central Valley heat has fully arrived, the courtyard of Wat Dhammararam fills with the smell of incense and grilled lemongrass. Monks in saffron move between ninety painted statues; families lay out lotus blossoms and rice. To understand the Cambodians in Stockton, California, you start here, at a temple raised by refugees on Carpenter Road, and you work backwards through one of the hardest journeys any community in America has survived.
The Place
Stockton sits at the head of the San Joaquin River, eighty miles inland from San Francisco, where a deepwater channel cuts through the delta. A German immigrant, Charles Weber, founded the town in 1849 on a Mexican land grant, and it grew first as a supply port for miners headed to the southern gold fields.
When the gold thinned out, the soil saved the city. The peat-rich delta around Stockton became one of the most productive farm belts in the world, growing asparagus, cherries, tomatoes, walnuts and wine grapes. In 1933 the Port of Stockton opened as California’s first inland seaport, and canneries and packing houses gave the city a working spine.
That history of labour and arrival made Stockton a place where newcomers could find a foothold. In January 2020, U.S. News & World Report named it the most racially and ethnically diverse big city in the United States, a city of roughly 310,000 people that is part Latino, part Asian, part Black, part white, and entirely itself. The same valley resettlement story shaped Sikh and South Asian communities to the south, including the Sikhs of Fremont across the bay.
How It Became Cambodian
The Cambodians in Stockton did not come looking for opportunity. They came fleeing one of the twentieth century’s worst crimes.
The killing fields
Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot emptied Cambodia’s cities, abolished money and schools, and worked, starved or executed an estimated 1.5 million people, roughly a fifth of the entire population. Doctors, teachers, monks and anyone who wore glasses were targets. Families were torn apart and scattered across forced-labour communes.
In January 1979, the Vietnamese army invaded and toppled the Khmer Rouge, but the collapse brought famine and fresh fighting rather than peace. That spring, around 140,000 Cambodians crossed the border into Thailand.
The camps on the Thai border
Most of Stockton’s Cambodians passed through the refugee camps strung along the Thai-Cambodian frontier. The best known, Khao-I-Dang, opened in late 1979 and at its peak sheltered nearly 140,000 people in a vast compound of bamboo and thatch. It was the only major camp run by the United Nations refugee agency rather than an armed faction, which made it the gateway for resettlement abroad.
An estimated 200,000 refugees moved through Khao-I-Dang alone, some returning home, others starting again in France, Australia or the United States. For tens of thousands of Cambodians, the next stop was a country they had never seen, sponsored by churches and federal resettlement agencies.
Why Stockton
The Refugee Act of 1980 formalised America’s resettlement system, and by 1994, when the Cambodian programme ended, about 150,000 Cambodian refugees had been admitted to the country. Resettlement agencies identified Stockton as a city where a large Southeast Asian community could put down roots, in part because earlier arrivals were already there and the agricultural economy offered entry-level work.
Cambodians arrived alongside Lao, Hmong and Vietnamese refugees through the late 1970s and the 1980s, part of the same Southeast Asian resettlement wave that reshaped the wider Central Valley and built the Hmong community in nearby Sacramento. By 1989, about one in six Stockton residents had been born in Southeast Asia, an extraordinary share for any American city. Today Stockton holds the fifth-largest Cambodian population in the nation and the second-largest in California, with roughly 9,000 Cambodian Americans in the metropolitan area.
The hardest year
The community’s early years in Stockton were not easy, and one morning marked them permanently. On 17 January 1989, a gunman opened fire on the playground of Cleveland Elementary School, killing five children and wounding more than thirty others before taking his own life. Four of the five children killed were Cambodian, the fifth Vietnamese, all of them children of refugees who had fled violence only to meet it again.
The massacre shocked the nation and led directly to the Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Control Act, signed in May 1989, California’s first ban on certain semi-automatic weapons. For Stockton’s Cambodians, it was a wound layered onto older ones, and it pushed the community toward organising for itself.
Building from inside
Out of those hard early years came institutions. In 1989, a group of thirty-five Cambodian refugee families founded APSARA, the Asian Pacific Self-Development and Residential Association, after families ended up in unsafe housing such as the Park Village Apartments. APSARA became, in its own description, the last remaining affordable-housing property collectively owned by Cambodian refugees in the United States.
From a base at 3830 Alvarado Avenue, APSARA grew into an anchor for the wider Southeast Asian community, taking on everything from deportation defence to healthcare access and youth leadership. It is the kind of organisation that exists because a community decided no one else was going to look after it.
The Landmarks
Wat Dhammararam, 3732 East Carpenter Road. Founded in 1982 by Cambodian refugees, this is the spiritual heart of Cambodian Stockton. Its grounds hold more than ninety jewel-coloured statues telling the life of the Buddha, anchored by a reclining Buddha roughly fifty feet long, the largest display of its kind in California. Admission is free, and visitors are welcome during daylight hours.
Cambodian New Year at Wat Dhammararam, every April. Each spring the temple hosts a multi-day Cambodian New Year celebration of food, classical and folk dance, and Khmer delicacies. It is one of San Joaquin County’s largest cultural events, drawing tens of thousands of visitors across the weekend to a corner of Stockton that becomes, briefly, a piece of Cambodia.
APSARA, 3830 Alvarado Avenue, Suite C. Founded by thirty-five refugee families in 1989, this grassroots membership organisation sits at the heart of the largest concentrated Southeast Asian population in the city. It runs youth programmes, healthcare navigation and legal support, and remains collectively owned by the community it serves.
Golden Villa Farmers’ Market, 255 South Sutter Street. Open early on Saturday mornings, this downtown market traces its roots to 1979 and draws close to 3,000 shoppers a week. More than eighty vendors sell Cambodian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Indian and Korean groceries, from seafood and soy products to mountains of fresh vegetables. Arrive early, because the best stalls sell out by mid-morning.
Angel Cruz Park, north Stockton. For more than thirty years, the southern end of this park has transformed on weekends into an open-air Southeast Asian food market, thick with grill smoke and karaoke. Cambodian and Hmong vendors cook to order: beef and chicken sticks, sausage, stuffed chicken, papaya salad. Long-time cooks such as Rotana Lach have worked the park for over a decade, joined now by a younger generation experimenting with boba and waffles alongside the classics.
Angkor Asian Market, 4753 North Pershing Avenue. Named for the temple complex that is Cambodia’s national symbol, this grocery is one of several Cambodian-oriented markets in the city, stocking the lemongrass, prahok, palm sugar and dried fish that home cooking requires. It is the kind of everyday landmark that keeps a cuisine, and a memory of home, alive between festivals.
Cleveland Elementary School. The site of the 1989 schoolyard shooting remains a place of memory for Stockton’s Cambodian families. The names of the children killed, most of them Cambodian, are carried forward in the community’s commemorations, a reminder of both the loss and the resilience that followed.
Where They Came From
Stockton’s Cambodians come overwhelmingly from the generation that lived through the Khmer Rouge years and their children. Their origins span Cambodia, from the capital, Phnom Penh, to the rice provinces of the north and west, because the regime uprooted and mixed the entire population. The shared homeland is less a single province than a shared survival.
The route to Stockton ran through the Thai border camps and the American resettlement system of the 1980s and early 1990s. Families were sponsored by faith groups and refugee agencies, often arriving with almost nothing, and reunited slowly as relatives still in camps were cleared to follow. Chain migration did the rest, drawing kin toward the place where cousins and former neighbours had already landed.
That is why Stockton, an inland farm port with no obvious connection to Southeast Asia, became one of the densest Cambodian communities in America. People do not move toward jobs alone. They move toward each other.
Stockton Today
Cambodian Stockton is now into its third and fourth generations. The elders who survived the camps are ageing, and many of their grandchildren have never seen Cambodia, growing up instead as Stocktonians who speak Khmer at home and English everywhere else. The temple, the markets and APSARA hold the threads between them.
The community still carries real burdens. Stockton has long struggled with poverty and crime, and Cambodian refugees, many arriving with deep trauma and little formal schooling, faced steep odds. Deportation policies that target old criminal convictions have fallen hard on Cambodian American men who came as small children, which is why legal defence sits at the centre of APSARA’s work.
And yet the texture of the place is unmistakably alive. The farmers’ markets and Angel Cruz Park stalls show a younger generation taking Cambodian food public and making it their own. Cambodian New Year at Wat Dhammararam draws crowds that include curious neighbours of every background, in a city that has learned to wear its diversity as identity. Stockton did not choose to become a Cambodian city, and Cambodians did not choose Stockton, but together they built something that outlasted the catastrophe that brought them here. You can read that story across the wider Roots series, from the Cambodians who anchored Long Beach to the Cambodian community in Lowell, Massachusetts.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Cambodians live in Stockton?
The Stockton metropolitan area is home to roughly 9,000 Cambodian Americans. That gives Stockton the fifth-largest Cambodian population of any city in the nation and the second-largest in California, after Long Beach.
Why did Cambodians settle in Stockton, California?
The Cambodians in Stockton are largely refugees of the Khmer Rouge genocide who arrived in the 1980s and early 1990s. Federal resettlement agencies steered refugees to Stockton because the city already had a growing Southeast Asian community and an agricultural economy offering entry-level work, and chain migration drew relatives to follow.
What is Wat Dhammararam?
Wat Dhammararam is the Cambodian Buddhist temple at 3732 East Carpenter Road, founded by refugees in 1982. Its grounds hold more than ninety painted statues and a roughly fifty-foot reclining Buddha, and it hosts Stockton’s Cambodian New Year celebration every April.
When is Cambodian New Year celebrated in Stockton?
Cambodian New Year is celebrated in mid-April. Wat Dhammararam hosts a multi-day festival of food, music and traditional dance that is free to attend and draws tens of thousands of visitors to Stockton each year.
What was the 1989 Cleveland Elementary School shooting?
On 17 January 1989, a gunman killed five children and wounded more than thirty others at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton before killing himself. Four of the children killed were Cambodian and one was Vietnamese, all children of refugees. The attack led to California’s Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Control Act later that year.
Where can you find Cambodian food in Stockton?
The Golden Villa Farmers’ Market on South Sutter Street and the weekend food stalls at Angel Cruz Park are the best places to eat Cambodian dishes made to order, while markets such as Angkor Asian Market on North Pershing Avenue stock the ingredients for home cooking. These spots anchor the everyday life of the Cambodians in Stockton, California.
If your family’s story passed through Stockton, or any of the places Cambodians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the rice provinces of Cambodia and the camps along the Thai border, to a temple on Carpenter Road, to wherever you are now.