Little Saigon

Little Saigon (Vietnamese: Sài Gòn nhỏ or Tiểu Sài Gòn) is a name given to ethnic enclaves of expatriate Vietnamese mainly in the United States. Saigon is the former name of the capital of the former South Vietnam (now Ho Chi Minh City), where a large number of first-generation Vietnamese immigrants emigrating to the United States originate from, whereas Hanoi is the current capital of Vietnam. Around 125,000 ethnic Vietnamese escaped Vietnam and immigrated to the United States after the Fall of Saigon to avoid communist occupation in 1975. The most well-established and largest Vietnamese-American enclaves, not all of which are called Little Saigon, are in Orange County, California; San Jose, California; and Houston, Texas. Relatively smaller communities also exist, including the comparatively nascent Vietnamese commercial districts in San Francisco, San Diego, Atlanta, Sacramento, Philadelphia, Denver, Oklahoma City, New Orleans, the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex (Haltom City, Arlington, and Garland), Falls Church, Virginia, Orlando, and Seattle.

The oldest, largest, and most prominent Little Saigon is centered in Orange County, California, where over 189,000 Vietnamese Americans reside. With other Southern California counties, this region constitutes the largest Vietnamese American (VA) population outside of Vietnam. The community originally started emerging in Westminster, and quickly spread to the adjacent city of Garden Grove. Today, these two cities rank as the highest concentration of Vietnamese-Americans of any cities in the United States at 37.1% and 31.1%, respectively (according to the 2011 American Community Survey).

About 45 miles (72 km) south of Los Angeles, Westminster was once a predominantly white middle-class suburban city of Orange County with ample farmland, but the city later experienced a decline by the 1970s. Since 1978, the nucleus of Little Saigon has long been Bolsa Avenue, where early pioneers Danh Quach and Frank Jao established businesses. During that year, the well-known Nguoi Viet Daily News also began publishing from a home in Garden Grove. Other new Vietnamese-American arrivals soon revitalized the area by opening their own businesses in old, formerly white-owned storefronts, and investors constructed large shopping centers containing a mix of businesses. The Vietnamese community and businesses later spread into adjacent Garden Grove, Midway City, Fountain Valley, Stanton, Anaheim, and Santa Ana.

In Orange County, Little Saigon is now a wide, spread-out community dotted with myriad suburban-style strip malls containing a mixture of Vietnamese and Chinese-Vietnamese businesses. It is located southwest of Disneyland between the State Route 22 and Interstate 405. However, the main focus of Little Saigon is Bolsa Avenue (where Asian Garden Mall and Little Saigon Plaza are considered the heart), which runs through Westminster; the street was officially designated Little Saigon by the city council of Westminster in the late 1980s. The borders of Little Saigon can be considered to be Trask Avenue and W McFadden Avenue on the north and south and Euclid Street and Magnolia Street on the east and west, respectively. About three-quarters of the population in this area are Vietnamese.

Westminster is generally considered the main cultural center of the Vietnamese American community with several Vietnamese-language television stations, radio stations, and newspapers originating from Little Saigon and adjacent areas. At least one radio station broadcast 24 hours a day in Vietnamese and 4 television substations broadcasting in Vietnamese 24 hours a day as of 2009, and several newspapers serve the Vietnamese-American community. Little Saigon has also emerged as the prominent center of the Vietnamese pop music industry with several recording studios, and with a recording industry many times larger than in Vietnam itself. Vietnamese music recorded in Westminster are distributed and sold in Vietnamese communities throughout the United States and in Australia, France, and Germany as well as illegally in Vietnam.

Garden Grove Park is the location of an annual Vietnamese Lunar New Year festival held in late January - early February known as Tết. Small amusement park rides, dances, and contests are held in Garden Grove Park which is across the street from Bolsa Grande High School grounds and is hosted by the Union of Vietnamese Student Association (UVSA). Since 2013, the annual festival has been relocated to the OC Fair Grounds in Costa Mesa.

The Vietnamese American population has now begun to diffuse from Little Saigon to traditionally working-class Hispanic cities, such as Santa Ana, and southward to professional middle-class predominantly white cities such as Costa Mesa, Huntington Beach, Irvine, and Orange. Over the years, the vibrant community of Little Saigon has experienced frequent openings and closures of small mom-and-pop Vietnamese businesses, resulting in sights of some abandoned strip plazas. The changing landscape of the Vietnamese American population would bring a more multicultural flavor to Orange County, but as with Chinatowns, could potentially eliminate its identity as a "Little Saigon" as the population of foreign-born Vietnamese old-timers declines and more younger generations of Vietnamese American families attune to mainstream American culture (especially with a preference for fashionable malls over the Vietnamese ethnic malls in Little Saigon) and move on to affluent communities further away from the Little Saigon area.

When the "first wave" of Vietnamese immigrants started to arrive in 1981, many settled in the communities adjacent to San Diego State University, such as City Heights and Talmadge, better known as East San Diego. As families and individuals became more affluent however, many relocated to other communities in the city: Linda Vista, Clairemont, Serra Mesa, etc. (Central San Diego) and what was then brand-new tract communities such as Mira Mesa, Rancho Penasquitos, Rancho Bernardo, etc.