Camp Pendleton and the City That Arrived in 1975

Camp Pendleton was established in nineteen forty-two on land that had been the Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores, a Mexican land grant property that was itself layered over Acjachemen territory. The base trained Marines. It occupied the hills and lowlands behind this stretch of coast. For thirty years, its purpose was purely military.

Then came April thirtieth, nineteen seventy-five.

On that date, the last American helicopters lifted off from the roof of the United States Embassy in Saigon and the government of South Vietnam ceased to exist. In the weeks that followed, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people fled by boat, by plane, by whatever means were available, and the United States military found itself responsible for processing tens of thousands of refugees who had nowhere to go. Four military bases across the country were designated processing centers. Camp Pendleton was one of them.

The Marines had roughly forty-eight hours to transform part of a training base into a city. They went as far as Utah to find enough tents. They established medical facilities, food distribution, registration systems, schooling for children. By the time the processing operation closed in October nineteen seventy-five, more than fifty thousand Vietnamese refugees had passed through Camp Pendleton.

What happened next was determined by sponsors. Orange County families, churches, civic organizations, and religious institutions came forward to take in approximately seventy-five percent of the refugees who had come through Camp Pendleton and were looking for a community to settle in. They were drawn partly by affordable housing along Bolsa Avenue in Westminster and Garden Grove, and partly because the subtropical climate of coastal Southern California resembled, in ways that were not trivial to people who had lost everything else, the climate of the country they had left.

By nineteen seventy-six, twelve thousand Vietnamese people were living in Orange County. By nineteen seventy-eight, the first Vietnamese-owned businesses were established along Bolsa Avenue. In nineteen eighty-eight, the city of Westminster officially designated the corridor "Little Saigon." The community it named is now the largest Vietnamese diaspora community outside Vietnam, built from fifty thousand people who arrived at a Marine base and stayed.