Massachusetts Had Nation’s First Cambodian-American Mayor

Less than one percent (0.1 percent) of the U.S. population is of Cambodian ancestry or ethnic origin – roughly 361,769 people, according to the most recent census data.

Southern New England is home to many of the Cambodian Americans.

According to the Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America by Carl L. Bankston III, most of the population of people of Cambodian descent reside in California, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.

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The U.S. Census Bureau reported the states with the highest concentration of Cambodian American residents are Rhode Island (0.5 percent; 5,176), Massachusetts (0.4 percent; 25.387), Washington (0.3 percent; 19,101), California (0.2 percent; 86,244) and Minnesota (0.2 percent; 7,850).

Boston.com says Lowell has the second-highest population of Cambodian Americans in the U.S. and is a center of the Cambodian population on the East Coast. Roughly 13 percent of Lowell's population is of Cambodian descent.

Don Lee wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "In recent years, the (Lowell) Cambodian community took the lead in transforming a community that had been all-white for nearly its entire history into an 11-member (city council) panel that includes three Cambodians and one Black councilor."

Lee wrote that "It (the city council), in turn, elected the city's first mayor of color," Sokhary Chau, who became the first Cambodian American mayor in the United States. Chau served as Lowell's mayor from 2022-2024.

Thousands of Cambodians emigrated to America following the Vietnam War and the "Killing Fields" – the Cambodian Civil War, when more than two million Cambodians were killed or died of starvation and disease in less than four years.