A well-researched, thoughtful, and often eloquent study, Karin Aguilar–San Juan’s multi-site (Orange County and Boston) and multi-generational approach brings historical concreteness to her deployment of theory. Her critical empathy for her subjects enables theorization without erasing their voices.

The writing is lively and engaging.

An important and timely contribution to the comparative and multi-sited study of Vietnamese Americans, and the complexity of crafting selves and creating community.

This study participates wholeheartedly in the continuing struggle for self-articulation and representation for unevenly acculturated, classed, and emplaced members, patrons, residents, and citizens of these two Little Saigon communities. Together with these constituents and their communities, this book will be read, taught, understood, and appreciated.

The book is pitched as an ethnographic and interview-based exploration of two Vietnamese enclaves . . . but its greater contribution comes from the way it conceptually explores the notion of ‘community’ for Vietnamese refugees as it takes form within the local context.

This book makes a number of helpful contributions to the literature on Vietnamese Americans and to the broader literature on ethnic communities. It correctly calls our attention to the fact that Vietnamese residential concentrations are responses to the physical spaces and social structures they confront in this country, and not simply products of migration and settlement. It provides a fresh look at the oft-made observation that the selfidentification of immigrant group members results from the interplay of responses to the cultural and structural setting of the host society and selective memories of the land of origin.

Little Saigons draws upon a large body of literature on race, identity and immigration in the course of its impassioned rebuttal of status quo views of American immigration. Unlike most studies of immigrant populations, Little Saigons is not primarily concerned with recording the standpoint of the immigrant community itself or summarizing its fate in relation to that of other migrant populations. Readers who are already critical of mainstream scholarship may find the book both innovative and satisfying.

Aguilar-San Juan’s book is an especially valuable addition to the Vietnamese-American studies literature as it represents one of the few detailed book-length examinations of the growth and transformation of contemporary Vietnamese enclave communities in the United States.

Aguilar-San Juan’s work in Vietnamese American communities provides much needed insight into immigrant communities in America, and Little Saigons would appeal to those readers particularly interested in immigrant identity formation.

Karin Aguilar-San Juan’s multisited study of one ethnic group in two disparate locations offers an insightful comparative sociological approach to the scholarship on community formation.