Place

Vietnamese-Creole New Orleans East

Also known as: Versailles, Village de l'Est, Vietnamese New Orleans

Tightly-knit Vietnamese-American community of ~14,000 people in the Versailles / Village de l'Est neighborhoods of New Orleans East — one of the most successful refugee-resettlement-and-community-building stories in late-20th-century America. The original community was settled in 1975 by Catholic refugees from Vũng Tàu and other coastal Vietnamese fishing communities, brought to New Orleans through Catholic Charities and the Archdiocese of New Orleans because the climate, latitude, and lower-Mississippi-delta wetland ecology approximated their home. Within 30 years the community had built Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church (the largest Vietnamese Catholic parish in the United States), a Vietnamese-language farmers market every Saturday morning, dozens of family-run restaurants and groceries, and a substantial commercial-fishing fleet operating out of Lake Borgne and the Gulf. After Hurricane Katrina destroyed the neighborhood in 2005 and the city tried to site a 100-acre toxic-debris landfill on its eastern edge in 2006, the community led one of the first and most successful post-Katrina civic-organizing campaigns and forced the landfill closure within months.

Cultural

The community traces to a 1975 resettlement organized by Archbishop Philip Hannan of [[french-quarter|New Orleans]] through Catholic Charities. Roughly 1,000 Vietnamese refugees — most from Vũng Tàu and the surrounding coastal fishing communities, most Catholic — were placed in the then-new Versailles Arms apartment complex in eastern [[french-quarter|New Orleans]]. The site was chosen because it was affordable, because the brackish-marsh-and-Lake Borgne wetland ecology approximated home, and because the Archdiocese had infrastructure ready (a parish, a school, a community center).

The community grew through ongoing Vietnamese resettlement (the 1980s boat-people generation, the 1990s Orderly Departure Program arrivals, and continuing family chain migration) to ~14,000 by 2005. [[mary-queen-of-vietnam-catholic-church|Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church]] (founded 1985) became the largest Vietnamese Catholic parish in the United States; the parish-anchored Saturday [[farmers-market|farmers market]] — operating every Saturday morning since the early 1980s — sells Vietnamese vegetables (water spinach, bitter melon, Asian eggplant, lemongrass, perilla, bok choy) grown in backyard gardens and small commercial plots in the surrounding land, plus fresh-caught fish from the community’s commercial-fishing fleet.

Hurricane Katrina destroyed the neighborhood in August 2005. Father Vien The Nguyen of Mary Queen of Vietnam organized the return — the parish hall became the rebuilding command post, the church bused residents back from Houston and Atlanta, and within 18 months the community had re-occupied the neighborhood at higher rates than any other comparably-flooded part of [[french-quarter|New Orleans]].

In April 2006 the Nagin administration sited a 100-acre construction-debris landfill (the Chef Menteur landfill) directly adjacent to the Vietnamese-American community, accepting Hurricane Katrina debris that contained asbestos, lead-painted demolition material, and other industrial-and-residential waste. The community organized the Vietnamese-American Young Leaders Association (VAYLA-NO, founded 2006), held weekly protest marches between Versailles and City Hall, filed federal civil-rights complaints, and forced [[san-francisco|the city]] to close the landfill in August 2006 — one of the fastest successful environmental-justice campaigns in U.S. history. VAYLA-NO continues today as a multi-issue civic-organizing group focused on Asian-American Pacific-Islander civic engagement, climate justice, and intergenerational community organizing.

What links here, and how

Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.

Cultural

parallels

Edges and ecotones Vietnamese-Catholic-and-Cajun-Creole edge community in eastern New Orleans — productivity at a refugee-and-host cultural boundary

contained by

Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church the religious-and-civic anchor of the Vietnamese-American community

contains

New Orleans the Vietnamese-American community of ~14,000 in New Orleans East

3 inbound links · 4 outbound

Cultural

See also

What links here, and how