Little Saigon, The Community That Built Itself Along Bolsa Avenue

Westminster, California, in nineteen seventy-five was a modest Orange County suburb with affordable commercial rents along a boulevard called Bolsa Avenue. It was not anyone's vision of a new beginning. It was cheap. In American immigration history, cheap is often more consequential than scenic.

The Vietnamese families who settled in Westminster after processing through Camp Pendleton were not, in most cases, choosing it over alternatives. They were choosing it because the churches and families who had sponsored them were nearby, because the rent was manageable on entry-level wages, and because word moved quickly through a community trying to reconstitute itself that this stretch of Orange County was where people were going. By nineteen seventy-six, twelve thousand Vietnamese people were living in Orange County. They were not uniformly welcomed by the county's existing white residents, a history documented in oral accounts and local press coverage from the period.

The first Vietnamese businesses appeared along Bolsa Avenue around nineteen seventy-eight. The names were direct: Saigon Market, Hoa Binh Market, a pharmacy where a Vietnamese-speaking pharmacist meant that a family could actually communicate about a child's fever. These were functional institutions before they were cultural ones. By the mid-nineteen eighties, the concentration of Vietnamese-owned businesses had produced a commercial corridor recognizable to anyone who had grown up in a Vietnamese city. In nineteen eighty-eight, the city of Westminster gave it a formal name: Little Saigon.

The community today is home to more than three thousand five hundred businesses and is the largest Vietnamese diaspora community outside Vietnam. It was built in a county that did not anticipate it, on a boulevard nobody would have chosen if they had been given options, by people whose only available resource at the starting point was each other.