Organization
Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church
Also known as: MQVN, Nhà thờ Đức Mẹ Việt Nam
The largest Vietnamese Catholic parish in the United States — founded 1985 in the Village de l'Est / Versailles neighborhood of New Orleans East as the religious-and-civic anchor of the post-1975 Vietnamese refugee community. The parish operates the Saturday-morning Vietnamese farmers market (every Saturday since the early 1980s, well before the parish's formal founding), a parish school, and Saigon Drive (the parish's adjacent commercial corridor). Father Vien The Nguyen led the parish through Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath — coordinating evacuation, rebuilding, and the successful 2006 fight to close the Chef Menteur landfill that the city had sited adjacent to the neighborhood. The parish remains the institutional center of Vietnamese-American civic life in the lower Mississippi delta.
What's happening now
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Practical
Address: 14001 Dwyer Boulevard, [[french-quarter|New Orleans]], LA 70129. Mass schedule includes Vietnamese-language and English-language services daily; the Sunday 10:00 a.m. Vietnamese Mass is the parish’s principal weekly liturgy and typically draws 1,500+ worshipers.
The parish operates Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Elementary School (PreK–8) on the same campus.
The Saturday Vietnamese [[farmers-market|Farmers Market]] — open Saturday mornings 6 a.m.–9 a.m. on the parish grounds — predates the formal parish and has been continuous since the early 1980s. Vendors sell Vietnamese vegetables grown in community backyard gardens (water [[spinach|spinach]], bitter melon, Asian eggplant, lemongrass, perilla, multiple bok choy varieties, Vietnamese coriander), live and dressed poultry, fresh-caught fish from the community’s Lake Borgne and Gulf commercial-fishing fleet, and prepared foods (bánh mì, xôi, chè). The market is open to all but operates almost entirely in Vietnamese; non-Vietnamese-speaking visitors are welcome and learn quickly.
The parish-led 2006 Chef Menteur landfill campaign is documented in A Village Called [[vietnamese-creole-new-orleans-east|Versailles]] (2009, dir. S. Leo Chiang), which won the Audience Award at the [[french-quarter|New Orleans]] Film Festival and is the principal documentary record of the post-Katrina community-organizing era at MQVN.
See also
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- Member of: [[organization]]
- Contained by: [[vietnamese-creole-new-orleans-east]] · [[new-orleans]]
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Cultural
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- Vietnamese-Creole New Orleans East the largest Vietnamese Catholic parish in the United States and the institutional anchor of the community
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