The US withdrawal from Vietnam resulted in a wave of Southeast Asian migration to Southern California, aided by changes in American immigration law in 1965. Despite initially welcoming war-weary refugees and people in need, their arrival in Orange County under the watch of a burgeoning and rising conservative movement bent on preserving homogeneity, especially that of language with regards to the American identity, meant students had to fend for themselves as strangers in a strange land. Bilingual education for ethnic minorities was no alien idea itself, but its own positioning in the conservative suburbs of Orange County begs the question of how did new minority groups establish and preserve their language and identity despite a hostile environment to immigrants? Indeed, bilingual education became a front in the region’s “culture wars.” Using newspapers, school board meeting minutes, and government documents, alongside secondary literature on related topics in education, Californian conservatism, and student activism, this project will recover the actions of southeast asian immigrants as they sought to preserve their language within unfavorable political circumstances. Using social history methodology, I argue that the linguistic minorities arriving in Orange County did not completely bow down to the dominant Anglo-centric culture of Orange County but rather advocated for their own linguistic distinction against the thunderous clamor for anglicization and assimilation. Although much of the literature on bilingual education has focused on Spanish, my project will contribute to the existing literature by including Southeast Asian migrants. The expansion of research into less numerous minorities will illuminate a much more complex and multicultural story surrounding how minorities represent, preserve, and advocate for themselves.