Leap of Faith

While the exhibition marks the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon in 1975, many of its featured stories began even earlier, in the twilight of the French colonial empire in Southeast Asia. Making It Home opens with artifacts from this first period of displacement, when the partition of Vietnam in 1954 led hundreds of thousands of villagers from the newly communist north to flee to US-supported South Vietnam. A photograph from this period shows North Vietnamese refugees boarding a naval ship to move south, while a poster produced by the United States Information Agency declares in Vietnamese that communism means terrorism.

Two decades of war followed, as reflected in the exhibition by South Vietnamese military uniforms, a US Silver Star medal awarded to South Vietnamese solder Cường Văn Nguyễn, and a photo of an airstrike on a Việt Cộng hideout. Some 2.7 million US troops eventually served in Vietnam, and a 1969 image of an antiwar protest at Tulane University captures the domestic tumult that resulted. The end of this period is represented by footage of President Gerald Ford’s 1975 speech, also at Tulane, declaring that the Vietnam War was “finished as far as America is concerned.” 

The refugees’ journey from Vietnam to the US was a difficult and dangerous one. For some, it came immediately on the heels of the fall of Saigon in 1975. Others undertook the trip in the 1980s or even ‘90s, fleeing human rights abuses or hoping to reunite with relatives already settled in the States. Many families first had to endure the privations of refugee camps in Singapore and the Philippines before arriving in US relocation centers like Fort Chaffee, Arkansas.  

In an attempt to speed their assimilation into US society, the government deposited most first-wave Vietnamese refugee families into towns across the country. In New Orleans, thanks to Catholic Charities’ preexisting resettlement program for Cuban refugees, several thousand Vietnamese people were placed together in apartment complexes, so they could help each other adjust to their new environment. They quickly established tight-knit enclaves, especially in the New Orleans East neighborhood that would come to be known as Versailles. 

A recently acquired collection of photographs by Mark J. Sindler, who lived in Versailles, provides an intimate view of the Vietnamese community during the first decade of resettlement. Sindler documented his neighbors’ efforts to establish gardens, businesses, and the Church of the Vietnamese Martyrs, which later became Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church, one of the first Vietnamese parishes in the US. Photos and family heirlooms provided by members of the community also illustrate how the next generations left their mark on the city’s landscape and culture. 

Making It Home includes interactive replicas of a living room and kitchen, where visitors can listen to Viet Chronicle oral histories and watch video clips that recount the journey to the US, the experience of starting over, and even the influence of the local new wave music scene on American identity. Excerpts from Leo Chiang’s video documentary A Village Called VersaillesOpens in new tab reveal how the community rebuilt itself after the Hurricane Katrina levee failures, only to have to fight the city’s placement of a toxic landfill nearby. 

The 50th anniversary of the arrival of Vietnamese refugees presents an opportunity to look back on how that generation, and subsequent ones, navigated trauma and displacement to establish a rooted community here in New Orleans. Making It Home continues HNOC’s commitment to documenting and sharing the experiences of this community.