Culture is Politics: Collective Memory and the Geopolitical Roots of an Ethnic Enclave

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5: Ethnic Enclaves

Abstract

This article examines the geopolitical roots of ethnic enclave neighborhoods in the United States. In recent years, urban enclaves have been gradually declining amidst the rise of the ethnoburb, reflecting the growing socioeconomic mobility of ethnic diasporas (Li 2009). Despite these trends, older refugee enclaves continue to endure in Midwestern cities, challenging assumptions about ethnic neighborhoods’ urban decline. In this article, i theorize a Cold War Enclave dynamic, where diasporic neighborhoods formed during the era are defined by the political legacy that created them, rather than their shared ethnic backgrounds. This article traces the development and persistence of the Vietnamese refugee settlement in Chicago in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Unlike their larger diaspora counterparts in coastal cities or suburbs, small Midwest enclaves often lack the cultural-economic infrastructure that protect against displacement. Yet, Chicago’s Little Saigon continues to exist despite demographic decline and gentrification pressures. This raises a central question: Why do refugee enclaves persist under urban precarity without the forces that originally created them? Drawing on three years of ethnographic observations and interviews, I offer an alternative mechanism of how enclave communities sustain itself against urban change beyond economic or cultural explanations. I find that cultural reproduction and political reproduction are deeply entangled: the enclave functions as the last territorial space where South Vietnam exists as a lived political entity; Thus, sustaining it requires not only preserving cultural heritage but the (geo)political narrative of loss, displacement, and anticommunism that defines the diaspora. I illustrate a geopolitical dimension of the enclave community, where shared political history becomes both a driving force for solidarity and cause of its contention.

Author

• Xuan Thai Thanh Nguyen, University of Wisconsin-Madison