9182 Bolsa Avenue, Westminster
In 1978, Danh Quach, a pharmacist from Vietnam, took out a $37,000 loan to open his business across the street from a Japanese nursery and strawberry field. It was a neighborhood that was considered blighted and attracted little interest from developers except for the newest arrivals to the area, Southeast Asian refugees. Danh’s Pharmacy, one of the first Vietnamese businesses on Bolsa, forwarded goods from Vietnamese Americans to their relatives in the homeland during a time when US sanctions prohibited trade relations with Vietnam but allowed the passage of pharmaceutical goods. In 1988, Danh Quach estimated that his business “forwards 10,000 pounds of goods to Vietnam each month.”
In his oral history recorded in 2012, Quach recalled, “Ah the racism, a little bit from the beginning. . . . Orange County was very difficult to set up.” In the 1980s, Westminster residents circulated a petition seeking to limit refugee businesses. After Mayor Kathy Buchoz defended refugees’ rights, one angry resident wrote to the Orange County Register: “Well lady it’s more then [sic] disgusting to us Americans to have so many foreigners in our country they get food stamps, houses, cars, 5 speed bicycles, clothes + etc—they are a very rude race the viets if they want to live in America then you teach them how to speak English.”
Despite the hostile social environment, Vietnamese businesses did take root in Westminster and grew to become Little Saigon, as the fledgling community created businesses to serve their own needs, maintain transnational ties, and foster social belonging. It is the first officially recognized Vietnamese business enclave, replete with “Welcome to Little Saigon” freeway signs along the 22 and 405 freeways (see Site 3–4, Little Saigon Freeway Signs). Over time, as new businesses cropped up in Little Saigon specializing in sending remittances back to the homeland, this pharmacy’s multiple functions narrowed and it became a more traditional medicine dispensary.
To Learn More
- Aguilar-San Juan, Karin. Little Saigons: Staying Vietnamese in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
- Breton, Raymond. “Institutional Completeness of Ethnic Communities and the Personal Relations of Immigrants.” American Journal of Sociology 70, no. 2 (1964): 193–205.
- Quach, Danh Nhut. Oral history interview by Michelle Pham, 2012. Viet Stories: Vietnamese American Oral History Project, Southeast Asian Archive, University of California, Irvine Libraries.
Image: Photo by Brande Jackson, 2020.