Making It Home: From Vietnam to New Orleans
It has been 50 years since Vietnamese refugees began arriving in New Orleans following the 1975 fall of Saigon. This spring, HNOC will commemorate this important anniversary as well as the many contributions of the Vietnamese community to New Orleans’s culture with the exhibition Making It Home: From Vietnam to New Orleans. This topic will also serve as the prompt for this year’s Student Writing Contest.
The Vietnam Conflict was a bloody civil war in Southeast Asia that grew to involve a dozen other nations, claiming millions of lives in the process. In the conflict’s aftermath, roughly 140,000 Vietnamese people fled the country, often with little more than what they could carry in a suitcase or on their backs. Evacuated by the US military, they stayed in Army housing before being sent to host communities across the United States, many with strong Catholic ties. New Orleans was one such destination.
Contest Guidelines
The submission period opens December 5, 2024. The deadline to submit is February 28, 2025 at 11:59 p.m. CST.
- Contest is open to all students in grades 3–12 in the United States and US territories.
- Each student may submit only one entry.
- Entries should be submitted through the submission form below.
- Each entry should be 750 words or less.
- Each entry must be a wholly original work composed by the submitter. Any entry that is found to be plagiarized in whole or in part will be immediately disqualified.
Essay Prompt
For this year’s Student Writing Contest, the Historic New Orleans Collection wants you to write about an experience related to forced migration, real or hypothetical. You can draw from your life, your family history, current events, and/or other historical migrations—the Great Migration, Exodus, the African Diaspora, etc. Answer some or all of the following questions in the form of an essay.
- Have you ever been forced to leave your home suddenly, and why? To escape storms or natural disasters or, like many of the Vietnamese who came to New Orleans, because the place you were living was no longer safe?
- What did you take with you and why? Were you able to bring a lot of things or could you only grab a few select items?
- Do you have family members or ancestors who emigrated to other countries or uprooted their lives in search of a new home? What was that like for them and how did it shape your family history?
- If you do not have a personal example to draw from, why do you think people often bring certain items or objects along with them when they move or relocate when it might be easier to leave everything behind?
Contest Awards
A judging panel of HNOC staff will select winning elementary (grades 3–5), middle school (grades 6–8), and high school (grades 9–12) entries. The winning writers from each category will receive $350 for first place, $250 for second place, and $150 for third place. In addition, all winning entries will be published on HNOC.org.
Winners will be announced by March 31, 2025.
Questions? Contact Curator of Education Collin Makamson.