A collaboration of three Arlington organizations will create a full-color booklet to document Little Saigon, a community of Southeast Asian immigrants that sprang up in Arlington after South Vietnam fell in 1975. The booklet is titled “Echoes of Little Saigon: Southeast Asian Immigration and the Changing Faces of Arlington.”
Funded by a $9,000 grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (VFH), the booklet will document and interpret the impact of Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian immigrants who concentrated around the faded pre-Metro commercial center of Clarendon in the mid-1970s.
The grant is the largest made by the foundation last year; it will fund a collaboration led by the County’s Cultural Affairs Division, working with the Historic Preservation Program and Arlington Public Library’s Center for Local History.
Publication is expected this fall in conjunction with a community forum featuring those who worked and frequented the businesses comprising Little Saigon during its cultural heyday. The three county organizations also teamed up last year for a series of events celebrating Arlington’s Vietnamese heritage.
The booklet’s makers envision it as the first in a series that will focus on the cultural heritage of different ethnic groups within the county.
The Center for Local History at Central Library is Arlington’s official community archives.