As we commemorate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month at LISC, we are turning the spotlight on San Diego’s Little Saigon, a Vietnamese American cultural and business district that is forging resiliency, visibility and an inclusive future within the city’s ethnically diverse City Heights neighborhood.
(Images courtesy AjA Project and Little Saigon Stories)
In the late 1970s and through the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of people from Vietnam arrived as refugees in the United States, in search of safety and opportunity in the wake of the two-decade war that ravaged their homeland. The great majority came to California and built new lives there, including some 40,000 who settled in San Diego.
By the mid-1980s, a Vietnamese enclave had taken root in the City Heights neighborhood of San Diego, along El Cajon Boulevard, but it wasn’t until 2013 that the city officially recognized the “Little Saigon Cultural and Commercial District”—acknowledging years of lived history and placemaking in the area by Vietnamese immigrants and their children. According to San Diego’s Little Saigon Foundation, the district “has become a collective memory, collective past, and a sense of identity, reconnecting to what Vietnamese have left behind.”
Little Saigon, in fact, is part of the city’s most ethnically diverse area: City Heights is home to refugee and immigrant communities from Cambodia, Laos, Somalia and across Latin America. Within that mosaic, members of the Vietnamese community have been working hard to lift the cultural and commercial profile of Little Saigon, and celebrate its history, and LISC has been part of that story, too. Since 2009, LISC San Diego has invested more than $1 million in grants in organizations working together as the City Heights Economic Development Collaborative (CHEDC).
In 2018, CHEDC members including the El Cajon Boulevard Business Improvement Association, AjA Project, and Media Arts Center San Diego, collaborated in launching Little Saigon Stories, a visual storytelling project that engaged Vietnamese American youth to photograph and write about the experiences of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants. The works were exhibited at Fair@44 (an outdoor market and community space conceived by the CHEDC) and “provide first-hand perspective on the process of migration, resettlement, and home-making amongst old and new residents who have chosen City Heights to call home,” according to its organizers.
Building on the success of this project, LISC and our CHEDC partners convened a Little Saigon working group to promote economic development, improve safety and walkability, and honor the cultural heritage of the district. Avital Aboody, a LISC San Diego program officer (who has a deep history in the neighborhood herself), facilitated the working group for one year, helping its members develop ways to collaborate effectively, set priorities and engage the community in carrying out projects they wanted to see in their neighborhood. (LISC received a $250,000 Bank of America Neighborhood Builders Award to support the implementation of community-led placemaking projects in Little Saigon.)
Of course, COVID-19 put a temporary pause on the Collaborative’s work. But in the midst of the pandemic, LISC invested an additional $25,000 in HUD Section 4 funding to create a new, part-time community organizer position at City Heights CDC, staffed by a native Vietnamese speaker who is dedicated to supporting business owners and residents in Little Saigon, and is continuing to facilitate the working group. Part of the community organizer’s work has entailed helping Little Saigon’s business owners apply for relief grants and loans, stay informed about COVID-19 health guidelines, get sidewalk dining permits to transition to outdoor dining and set up online ordering for pick-up and delivery.
To help Little Saigon’s entrepreneurs, many of them restaurant owners, counter the economic fallout of the pandemic, LISC also helped launch Saigon Nights, a First Friday event featuring late night outdoor dining and performances in the district. LISC San Diego funded outdoor seating, lighting, heat lamps, decor, and barriers that helped restaurateurs safely activate their new outdoor dining rooms while maintaining social distancing.
Today, the working group is collaborating with local Vietnamese artists and architects to develop simulations of placemaking initiatives and gather community feedback, via pop-up events and surveys, to determine which project to move forward. Each proposal promotes cultural branding via public art, walkability and enhanced transit options, alongside more outdoor dining and gathering spaces in Little Saigon. LISC will invest in the projects that garner the most community support and that will help bring about inclusive economic recovery and resilience in the neighborhood. As Little Saigon celebrates its history, it is also forging a unique Vietnamese American future—that beckons to the rest of City Heights, to San Diego, and beyond.