From Sài Gon to Little Saigon

Vietnamese communities have formed all across the United States since the end of the Vietnam-American War in 1975. Vietnamese people are now the fourth largest Asian American and Pacific Islander group in the United States, after Chinese, Indian, and Filipino. The largest concentration of Vietnamese Americans can be found in and around the Little Saigon district in suburban Orange County, California, in the cities of Westminster and Garden Grove. Situated in unceded ancestral lands of the Juaneño/Acjachemen and Gabrielino/Tongva Nations, the region later became Spanish and then Mexican land before white settlers claimed ownership. While Vietnamese Americans are relative newcomers to this area, they are part of Asian American history there, connected to the Chinese and Japanese Americans who built the infrastructure for Orange County through their labor on the railroads and farm fields.

The now “not-so-little” Little Saigon has helped bolster the region’s economy with tourism and business. According to 2020 Census figures, the Vietnamese American population in Southern California is close to four hundred thousand, by far the largest concentration outside of Vietnam.

Although the American government attempted to disperse refugees all over the United States, many Vietnamese people exerted agency over their lives by migrating from their first resettlement areas to be among others that shared similar histories, cultural backgrounds, and language. This process, called secondary migration, led to the formation of Little Saigon districts throughout the country.

Orange County’s Little Saigon is situated about sixty miles north of the Marine Corps base Camp Pendleton, the first of four emergency processing centers set up to receive evacuees from South Vietnam and Cambodia in April 1975. About fifty thousand Vietnamese people were processed through the makeshift “tent cities” of Camp Pendleton, and from there, many resettled in the Orange County area to work in the nearby defense and high-tech industries and in small entrepreneurial enterprises.

Southern California’s warm climate and, then-affordable housing and real estate, provided additional incentives for secondary migrations into the region. Faith-based organizations led the effort in meeting the needs of the newly arrived refugees.

Outside of Orange County, the second largest concentration of Vietnamese Americans can be found in San Jose and surrounding cities in Northern California. Like other Asian American workers, Vietnamese Americans were drawn to the area by the ascension of Silicon Valley in the latter half of the twentieth century, which provided ample job opportunities in the high-tech sector and assembly lines.

The third largest concentration of Vietnamese Americans can be found in Houston, Texas, represented by the four-mile stretch of Bellaire Boulevard. After the war, many Vietnamese settled in the Gulf Coast, with some eventually relocating to nearby Houston, drawn to the fishing industry and the warm climate. As this community grew in the late 1970s, white fisherfolk saw Vietnamese people as a threat to their businesses.

The Ku Klux Klan threatened them, but they persisted. In the early 2000s, Houston’s Vietnamese American population increase has been attributed to outmigration from California due to high home prices and cost of living. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 also displaced many Vietnamese Americans in the Louisiana region to seek out new livelihoods in Texas.

In New Orleans, Louisiana, Vietnamese Americans are concentrated in the area of Versailles, where they are primarily united through their membership in the Catholic community. Vietnamese people were drawn to the region because of active recruitment by Catholic parishes, the availability of jobs in the service sector, and the fishing and shrimping industry. When Hurricane Katrina toppled communities in New Orleans East, Vietnamese Americans became much more politicized and actively reconstructed their communities through church- and youth-led efforts.

The media sometimes considers this Vietnamese community to be triply-displaced, from Vietnam to America and then by this natural disaster, yet somehow remaining fiercely resilient. However, this praise is a double-edged sword as it is often juxtaposed with comparisons to African Americans’ slower rates of rebuilding in New Orleans.

This narrative reinforces model minority stereotypes, which fuel anti-Black racism by misdirecting blame towards Black communities rather than systemic causes. In reality, natural disasters disproportionately impact communities of color more because of these systemic outcomes. Despite these divisive narratives, there have been examples of joint organizing between Vietnamese and Black communities in the wake of Katrina. These efforts provide a roadmap to learning from racial solidarity.

On the East Coast, Vietnamese Americans gather in areas such as Fields Corner in Boston, Massachusetts, and Eden Center in Falls Church, Virginia. When Vietnamese Americans do not lay geographical claim to a particular neighborhood or section of a city, they often integrate into other established, or pan-Asian, business districts.

This is the case for Honolulu Chinatown in Hawaiʻi, which houses many Vietnamese-owned businesses. California’s Los Angeles Chinatown has seen a transition towards a predominant Chinese-Vietnamese population in the latter half of the twentieth century, with physical evidence found in the multilingual business signs and languages spoken among residents and patrons there.

Today, Little Saigon districts offer what scholars have called “institutional completeness” for Vietnamese Americans. This means that the economic, social, linguistic, and cultural needs of the community can be met within its geographical boundaries.