Vietnamese DFW: Forty Years of Roots

In April and May of nineteen seventy-five, as Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces and the American evacuation of South Vietnam concluded in a chaotic final week, the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex began receiving Vietnamese refugees. Catholic Charities of Dallas and local Protestant congregations sponsored families, processed paperwork, and helped newly arrived people find housing. The initial concentrations were in East Dallas and Garland, working-class neighborhoods where rents were accessible and the existing social infrastructure of churches and schools could absorb new families.

The DFW Vietnamese community built, over the following decades, one of the most economically developed immigrant enclaves in Texas. Restaurant corridors, nail salon chains, wholesale grocery operations, and professional practices established an ethnic economy that was largely self-sustaining by the nineteen nineties. The community organized politically through a strong anti-Communist identity that aligned them, in the Texas context, with Republican politics: a political home that distinguished DFW's Vietnamese community from their counterparts in California, who organized differently and landed differently on the political spectrum.

By two thousand, the community had become a substantial presence in the eastern suburbs, particularly in Garland and parts of Arlington. The story they brought with them, of a war, a flight, and a rebuilding, belongs to the full history of this city as much as the Cowboys, the oil money, and the cattle drives.

D Magazine and KERA-FM have both produced longform features on this community and its forty years of North Texas roots. The record is there for anyone who looks.