UC Irvine

In this first comprehensive study of Vietnamese American place-making and community-building, Karin Aguilar-San Juan bridges the sociology of immigration and place with critical race studies in her Little Saigons: Staying Vietnamese in America. Based on research conducted between 1994 and 2005 in Boston, Massachusetts and Orange County, California, Little Saigons suggests that the process of ethnic place-making in these distinct urban and suburban sites, respectively, reflects a conscious effort by Vietnamese Americans to “stay Vietnamese” in a “multicultural” American society. Yet, rather than embrace an essentialist view of cultural identities as fixed and unchanging, Aguilar-San Juan underscores how the terms and parameters for being Vietnamese in diaspora are being negotiated through the mutually constitutive processes of place-making and communitybuilding. Ethnic places both cushion American ethnics from the violence of racialization while marking them as outsiders to the national polity