assistance provided for the building of mosques in their communities that serve as vital landmarks of Cham localities and bulwarks of their religious culture. The Cham Muslim society can thus be considered as fluid and adaptive, where boundaries are constantly negotiated and transcended in attempts to reinforce and preserve their ethnic identity. The Chams regard themselves as among the earlier settlers to the Mekong Delta region, as opposed to state narratives of Vietnamese majorities’ expansion to the South. Historical French, Vietnamese, and Cham sources studied by Weber (2011) gave a vivid account of Cham and Malay military colonies created in the 18th century in Vietnam’s southwestern provinces. The Chams and Malays from Cambodia were migrated or displaced to the Tay Ninh and Chau Doc areas by the Vietnamese in order to establish Viet-controlled settlements for frontier defense. Attempts were made by the French after the dismantlement of the settlements to isolate these non-Viet and Vietnamese communities, which resulted in tensions arising between them. This sheds considerable light on the migratory cycle of the Chams over the centuries into and out of Cambodia that Taylor (2007) alluded to, and the tensions that still exist today between the various ethnic groups of the Mekong Delta, providing an alternative view of the Chams as the “later arrivals”. The Cham Economic Life The Cham Muslim communities in the Mekong Delta have generally been viewed as “poor” and “backward”, residing in remote areas, isolated physically from the economic centers of the country amidst a web of waterways, and socially from their neighbors resulting from a strict observance of their religious practices, engaging in a “subsistence-oriented” localist economy. Their relatively low education levels and minimal participation in the modern market economy as compared to the other ethnic groups, have been thought to have contributed to their economic situation. Their religious traditions paradoxically have been regarded to have both hindered and assisted their engagement in trade. The economic reforms of the state and open-door market policies of the state were not able to achieve much in alleviating the Cham’s economic standing but instead have further marginalized them. They were unable to participate in rice export and in large-scale rice farming due to the falling prices of rice and to land being lost following the state’s land redistribution policies of the 1970s; unable to engage in the emerging aquaculture business of fish-rearing due to lack of capital; and