Little Saigon, Orange County

Little Saigon in Orange County, California is the largest Little Saigon in the United States. Saigon is the former name of the capital of the former South Vietnam, where a large number of first-generation Vietnamese immigrants originate.

The oldest, largest, and most prominent Little Saigon is centered in Orange County, California, where over 189,000 Vietnamese Americans reside. With the other five counties (listed below) that make up the bulk of the Southern California mega-region, this region constitutes the largest Vietnamese American (VA) population outside of Vietnam.

The community originally started emerging in Westminster, and quickly spread to the adjacent city of Garden Grove. Today, these two cities rank as the highest concentration of Vietnamese-Americans of any cities in the United States at 37.1% and 31.1%, respectively (according to the 2011 American Community Survey). Despite its original roots along the bustling Bolsa and Brookhurst corridors, the borders of Orange County’s Greater Little Saigon community has grown to nearby cities. The chart below shows the Vietnamese American (VA) population of central Orange County cities that either borders, or is one jurisdiction away from Westminster, CA:

About 45 miles (72 km) south of Los Angeles, Westminster was once a predominantly White middle-class suburban city of Orange County with ample farmland, but the city later experienced a decline by the 1970s. Since 1978, the nucleus of Little Saigon has long been Bolsa Avenue, where early pioneers Danh Quach and Frank Jao established businesses. During that year, the well-known Nguoi Viet Daily News also began publishing from a home in Garden Grove. Other new Vietnamese-American arrivals soon revitalized the area by opening their own businesses in old, formerly white-owned storefronts, and investors constructed large shopping centers containing a mix of businesses. The Vietnamese community and businesses later spread into adjacent Garden Grove, Stanton, Fountain Valley, Anaheim, and Santa Ana.

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