Fifty years after the first Southeast Asian refugee families began rebuilding their lives along Memphis's Cleveland Street corridor, the city is throwing them a party. The inaugural Mekong Memphis Festival takes over the Vietnamese Buddhist Association of Memphis at 1368 Jefferson Avenue on Sunday, running from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., with food, music, vendors and performances meant to bridge generations.
The festival marks half a century since Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian and Thai refugee families resettled along the Cleveland Street corridor beginning in 1975, according to Overton Park Shell. As Action News 5 reports, organizers describe the gathering as a reunion across generations and cultures, inviting the entire city to join for food, music, art and community. Thousands of refugee families resettled in Memphis following the wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and many put down roots in the city's Washington Bottoms neighborhood, where they built markets, temples and businesses, per the same report.
The event will take over a portion of Jefferson Avenue, with regional food, music and vendors celebrating the community's heritage, according to WREG. Tickets are $10 at the door, according to WREG.
How Memphis Became Home for Refugee Families
The roots of Sunday's celebration trace back decades. The fall of Saigon in 1975 marked the beginning of a mass migration of Southeast Asian refugees following the end of conflicts the United States had been involved in across Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, according to NBC News. That en masse resettlement, which began in 1975, became the largest mass resettlement of refugees in American history, with more than 1.1 million people resettled over three decades, according to a report from SEARAC.
Some of the refugees who arrived at Fort Chaffee decided to settle in Memphis, with many landing in Midtown near Catholic Charities of West Tennessee, according to a history compiled by From Common Ground. Local organizations that helped with that 1975 resettlement effort included Catholic Charities, the Jewish Welfare Fund, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, the City of Memphis, the Tennessee Department of Human Services and Memphis City Schools, the outlet reports. A second wave of refugees fled Vietnam and Cambodia beginning in 1979, and immigration to Memphis continued through the 1980s and 1990s, per the same account.
A Community That Kept Growing
That migration didn't stop at the first arrivals. The family that founded Memphis restaurant Pho Binh left Vietnam by boat and arrived in the city in 1992, one of many stories woven into the community's decades-long growth, as the same history details. A 2017 account put the number of Vietnamese immigrants in Shelby County at more than 3,100, based on the most recent Census figures then available, according to From Common Ground.
The broader Southeast Asian American community is part of the national picture, too. Vietnamese and Laotian Americans are part of Tennessee's Southeast Asian American community.
Sunday's gathering on Jefferson Avenue folds all of that history into a single afternoon — a half-century after families first arrived in Memphis, with a festival built around food, music and the markets and temples refugee families built in Washington Bottoms.
