Little Saigons: Staying Vietnamese in America (review)

For those working in Southeast Asian American studies, and specifically on Vietnamese Americans or other more recent refugee and immigrant communities, Karin Aguilar-San Juan’s comparative approach to bicoastal urban and postsuburban Little Saigons in Fields Corner/Boston, Massachusetts, and Orange County, California, respectively, is a highly anticipated and delightfully welcome arrival.

The book is organized around five varied and colorful chapters covering ethnic community production and construction, racialization and racial formation, memory and history, cultural commodification, and the theoretical implications of place-making and community. These rich chapters are flanked by an introduction entitled “Where Does Viet Nam End and America Begin?” and the brief conclusion, “How Do You Stay Vietnamese in America?” I must speculate that these opening and closing subtitles are meant to be playful or facetious, because they do not do justice to the analytically thick and provocative contents embedded within them. In the former, Aguilar-San Juan lays out the intended contributions of the text; most notable of these is her reorientation of previous sociological work on community building to focus attention on the metamorphic nature of locality and the potential effects of detachment from place. In another penetrating dual gesture, she forces racial formation theories to engage with ethnic suburbia and spatial mobility, while demanding urban sociology sharpen and invest more heavily in its treatment of race, space, and place. Her fine eye for the shifting and changeable conditions under which “place buttresses community” allows her to avoid personal and psychological accounts of traumatized “Vietnameseness,” in order to render them instead conscious agents of their current positionalities and their futures. She describes this act as one of constant “recalibration” and of self-legitimizing and empowering storytelling at the “mesolevel of community.”

Chapter 1 creatively reframes earlier Vietnamese American immigration and resettlement history and scholarship under a new theory of purposefully built “architecture.” Her crafted architectonics remap the densely loaded political historical relationships between mainstream America and its Vietnamese refugees and immigrants to reterritorialize the pervasive and complex political and cultural assumptions such history brings to bear.

The second chapter, “Q: Nationality? A: Asian,” takes up the bulk of the racialization discussion foregrounded above with its most incisive observations involving the tensions between ethnicity, race, privilege, and culture (with a capital “C”) in Louisiana’s Versailles neighborhood. Aguilar-San Juan masterfully combines the work of Michael Omi and Howard Winant, and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Yen Le Espiritu, among others, to ask refreshingly different questions about community responses to both race and ethnicity in hate crimes, about ethnic Chinese Vietnamese economies of “platiality,” and about the “glocality” of community-based organizations. While other Vietnamese Americanists repeatedly emphasize the diversity of Vietnamese America with “Vietnamese American communities, plural,” often exaggerated exactly in this manner, Aguilar-San Juan takes that multiplicity as an obvious given and only a starting point for her study.

The third chapter treads in some of the familiar territory of commemoration and rhetorical pasts, but anchors them interestingly in place-making discursive maneuvers like “local memory” and “disciplining memory.” Chapter 4 confronts the global marketplace multiculturalism of “packaging and selling Vietnamese America” to move beyond older ethnic enclave entrepreneurship models, finally culminating in chapter 5’s disciplinary, methodological, and historical implications for future “platializing” of community, race, and ethnicity.

If there is one shortcoming, it lies perhaps in Aguilar-San Juan’s humility in articulating her desired goals for the study. She suggests that the book is not about retaining or “replicating” a Vietnamese cultural identity elsewhere, but rather it involves different and often difficult attempts to move “toward a state of equilibrium that, though always in flux, allows refugees, immigrants, and their U.S. born offspring to recalibrate their sense of self in order to become Vietnamese anew in places far from their presumed geographic home.” In doing so, throughout the book she interjects critical insights about ongoing anthropological and sociological scholarship on the shifting racial, spatial...