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Geoforum 39 (2008) 13331346

www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

Church-based social capital, networks and geographical scale:

Katrina evacuation, relocation, and recovery in a New
Orleans Vietnamese American community
Christopher A. Airriess a,*, Wei Li b, Karen J. Leong c, Angela Chia-Chen Chen d,
Verna M. Keith e
a
Department of Geography, Ball State University, Muncie, IN 47306, USA
Asian Pacic American Studies Program and School of Geographical Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA
c
Asian Pacic American Studies Program, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA
d
College of Nursing and Healthcare Innovation, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ 85004, USA
e
Department of Sociology and Center for Demography and Population Health, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA
b

Received 9 May 2007; received in revised form 8 November 2007

Abstract
This research examines the role of social capital and networks to explain the evacuation, relocation, and recovery experiences of a
Vietnamese American community in New Orleans, Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. As the single largest community
institution, the parish churchs complex bonding and bridging social capital and networks proved particularly critical in part because
of its historically based ontological security. The process of evacuation, but especially relocation and recovery, was dependent on deploying co-ethnic social capital and networks at a variety of geographical scales. Beyond the local or community scale, extra-local, regional,
and national scales of social capital and networks reproduced a spatially redened Vietnamese American community. Part of the recovery process included constructing discursive place-based collective-action frames to successfully contest a nearby landll that in turn
engendered social capital and networks crossing ethnic boundaries to include the extra-local African American community. Engaging
social capital and networks beyond the local geographical scale cultivated a Vietnamese American community with an emergent
post-Katrina cultural and political identity.
2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Hurricane Katrina; Vietnamese Americans; Social capital and networks; Geographical scale; Community

1. Introduction
The devastating ood caused by Hurricane Katrinas
storm surge and resulting breaks or overtopping of levees
in New Orleans on August 29, 2005 was the greatest
human-induced technological disaster in United States history. The most impacted large scale section of the city was
New Orleans East, encompassing two-thirds of the citys
territory where some entire neighborhoods experienced

Corresponding author.
E-mail address: cairries@bsu.edu (C.A. Airriess).

0016-7185/$ - see front matter 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2007.11.003

oodwaters reaching 78 feet. With 97,000 mostly African

American residents equal to approximately 20% of the preKatrina population of the city, and median household
incomes above the city average, New Orleans East is still
perceived by the citys White population as somewhat of
a ghetto despite its varied socio-demographic composition
(Johnson, 2003).
At the far eastern end of New Orleans is a suburban
development informally referred to as Versailles which in
2000 was inhabited by 10,699 individuals, with African
Americans and Asians (primarily Vietnamese) comprising
50.9% and 43.3% of the total population, respectively.
While dwarfed by the Vietnamese populations of such

1334

C.A. Airriess et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 13331346

metropolitan areas as Los Angeles, San Jose, and Houston,

Versailles is the most densely settled large concentration of
Vietnamese in the United States (Airriess, 2002). Unlike
much of New Orleans East, however, post-Katrina evacuee
return rates among Versailles Vietnamese were both early
and sustained. As a result, attention to both the immediate
post-Katrina experiences and the rapid rebuilding process
of this Vietnamese American community was given widespread coverage by both local, regional and national news
organizations in the months following Katrinas landfall.
More specically, it was the role of the Vietnamese Catholic parish centered on Mary Queen of Vietnam Church
(MQVC) that attracted the attention of journalists.
Research shows that the social capital and networks
based on kin and friends in the context of community were
vital to providing social and economic support after Hurricane Andrew (Hurlbert et al., 2000). While we explore
these important individually based co-ethnic networks of
social capital, we specically examine the role of churchcentered institutionalized social capital and networks in
the successful evacuation, relocation, and recovery process
of the community. We chose church-based social capital
and networks in part because the parish church is the only
large public institution in the community able to coordinate such eorts in an eective manner owing to its strong
pre-immigration foundations. Equally important, we also
conceptually tie the various forms of bonding and bridging
church-based social capital and networks to their attendant
geographies in the sense that each possesses a geographical
scale. Depending on a particular community goal with reference to Katrina evacuation, relocation and recovery, particular forms of church-based and co-ethnic social capital
and networks are harnessed at local (community), extralocal (urban region), regional, and national scales. As a
result, the traditional conception of community occupying
local space geographically expanded to include Vietnamese
at the regional and national scales. Part of the recovery
process involved the community contesting a nearby landll, and this engendered the deployment of social capital
and networks crossing ethnic boundaries based on discursive place-based collective action frames, which in turn
created a new sense of an extended community at the
extra-local and national geographical scales.
The results of our research are derived from both quantitative and qualitative methods. Anchoring the quantitative sources is a survey comprised of forced-choice
questions addressing various issues including sources of
information concerning the storms impending landfall,
sources of emergency assistance during evacuation, and
return and recovery experiences. The surveys were administered to 104 respondents, the majority of which were
attending a community Tet or New Year Festival in early
February, 2006; the remaining were largely among those
yet-to-return during a community function in Houston,
TX in March 2006. Tet Festival respondents had either
returned to the community permanently or were living in
the New Orleans region and waiting to return. This form

of sampling is referred to as purposive sampling whose goal

is to obtain a specic sample size and engage in intensive
analysis of a target group in research that is of an exploratory nature (Bailey, 1994) and where sample representativeness may not be the primary concern (Trochim,
2006). While respondents were given the choice of lling
out surveys in either English or Vietnamese, we paired with
bilingual Vietnamese research assistants to recruit participants who speak no or limited English to improve sample
diversity. We understand that relying on Tet Festival participants as the primary source of information biases the
sample in favor of those who had already returned to the
community or those with transport to attend the festival.
Information derived from qualitative methods was
obtained through two methods. The rst was in the form
of a single focus group held in the community and was
comprised of six individuals equally split between female
and male whose ages ranged from 18 to 65. Because one
focus group participant was a non-English speaker, the
focus group audio tapes were transcribed and translated
by a bilingual research team member. Additional qualitative information was obtained either from ve in-depth
interviews with key community informants or from informal interviews with community residents during eldwork
conducted in December 2005, and February, May, June
and November 2006 by at least one member of the research
team and lasting between 3 and 7 days each. In addition,
we also relied on interviews with community leaders and
residents by both local and national journalists as sources
of not only factual information, but the Katrina experiences of residents as well.
2. The refugee past and present socio-demographic contours
Approximately 80% of Versailles Vietnamese are
Roman Catholic. In the early 1990s, some 60% of adults
originated from just two Catholic diocese in former North
Vietnam (Airriess, 2002). These two diocese were characterized by many exclusively Catholic villages where priests
organized agricultural activities and provided all manner of
social services that provided an environment of social cohesion and action (Haas and Nguyen, 1971). Forced to ee to
South Vietnam as a result of the 1954 Geneva Agreement
politically dividing northern and southern Vietnam, these
villagers re-grouped under the leadership of their respective
priests in fortied strategic hamlets to engage the Communist insurgency (Haas and Nguyen, 1971). In 1975 after
the fall of Saigon, a core of Versailles Vietnamese migrated
to the US as refugees and then to New Orleans under the
sponsorship of the New Orleans Associated Catholic
Charities.
The Versailles Vietnamese ethnic cluster is comprised of
two contiguous census tracts (17.41 and 17.42) whose population occupied structures that are primarily single family
dwellings, both owned and rented (Fig. 1). In the 2000 Census, the 4460 Versailles Vietnamese account for approximately 30% of the New Orleans Metropolitan Statistical

C.A. Airriess et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 13331346

1335

Micho
ud Blv
d.

Alcee Fortier Dr.

Dwyer Blvd.

Village de l'Est

Versailles
Gardens

0
0

Versailles
Arms

.25 miles
.25 km
Chef Menteur Highway

90

Legend
10

in

hartra
e Pontc

Lak

Vietnamese Commercial

90

Legend

New
Orleans
CBD

510

Mi

ssi

ssi

ppi

R.

5 Miles

Vegetable Gardens

Study Site

Abandoned Vegetable Gardens

Landfill Site

Forested/Marsh

Intracoastal Waterway

5 Kilometers
West Bank

Mary Queen of Vietnam Church

Church of Vietnamese Martyrs
Buddhist Temple

Fig. 1. Versailles and its metropolitan setting. Source: adapted from Airriess, (2008).

Areas (MSA) total Vietnamese population of 14,868. Versailles is thus a true immigrant cluster (Pamuk, 2004)
dened as a group of spatially contiguous census tracts
where the ethnic population in at least one of those tracts
is at least 10 percentage points greater than the countys
total population for that immigrant group. Poverty rates
in 2000 stood at 31.3% with lower incomes and educational
attainment when compared to co-ethnics in the New
Orleans urban region. As a result of low educational attainment, 63.3% of Versailles adults are relegated to lower
wage production, service, and sales and oce occupations.
No doubt a contributing factor to poor economic adaptation to the larger urban economy is that approximately
67% of Versailles Vietnamese adults were foreign born in
2000 and 36.7% of households are linguistically isolated,
that is, no individual in the household 14 years or older
speaks only English at home or speaks English very well.
3. Social capital, networks and geographical scale
Although the term social capital is a much contested and
misunderstood term (Bankston and Zhou, 2002; Mohan
and Mohan, 2002; DeFilippis, 2001), we adopt two work-

ing denitions that suit our particular purpose. Social capital is broadly dened as social networks, the reciprocities
that arise from them, and the value of these for achieving
certain goals (Schuller et al., 2000, p. 1) or the trust,
mutual understanding, and shared values and behaviors
that bind the members of human networks and communities and make cooperative action possible (Cohen and
Prusak, 2001, p. 4). A more targeted denition with reference to disaster research is networks of social capital facilitate a ow of information providing a basis for action and
assisting in individual and community goal attainment
(Ritchie and Gill, 2007, p. 109). Social capital, however,
is not a thing possessed by a community because a community is an outcome of social relationships; only individuals
or institutions are able to possess social capital (DeFilippis,
2001).
For this research, the parish church as an institution in
the context of Katrina is an actor that possesses and generates social capital because [I]nstitutional structures can
make a dierence to levels of participation and thereby,
inuence the formation of social capital (Mohan and
Mohan, 2002, p. 197). Indeed, ethnic/immigrant-tied religious institutions have functioned not only as sources of

1336

C.A. Airriess et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 13331346

identity and solidarity, but also as foci of social capital and

networks in this particular Vietnamese settlement (Airriess,
2002; Bankston and Zhou, 1996) and countless other ethnic
communities as well (MacDonald and MacDonald, 1964;
Williams, 1998; Min, 1992; Smith, 2004). This is not surprising because in ethnically diverse societies, levels of
social trust are often greater within ethnic communities
when compared to larger scale institutions such as governments (Fennema and Tillie, 2001). Especially important are
the parish priests, who as actors within the institutional
context, have drawn on pre-existing social capital and networks during the Katrina evacuation and relocation process and have created social capital through establishing
new networks to successfully rebuild the Versailles community. When secular institutions are recreant in providing
even basic needs to victims of technological disasters, and
this is certainly the case in the Katrina context, it is often
churches that aord the ontological security of safety
and continuity (Ritchie and Gill, 2007). During the immediate post-Hurricane Andrew period, for example,
churches were often the only initiators of relief eorts in
particular neighborhoods in Miami (Morrow and Peacock,
1997).
Because of the central role of parish clergy as network
actors in the evacuation and especially the recovery process, it is worthwhile to speak of priests as possessing pastoral power. While churches certainly provided pastoral
care or the mobilization of the churchs resources (i.e.
material, spiritual, emotional, and informational) to assist
individuals and families in crisis and in facing the commonplace problems of living (Taylor and Chatters, 1998, p.
193), pastoral power is conceptually dierent. Harnessing
a Foucaldian perspective, Rose (1996) speaks of churchbased pastoral power being anchored in moral ties that
engender social solidarity in what is referred to as the shepherdock model. Pastoral power is top-down and paternalistic in nature as the shepherd or priest views the ock
as particularly weak and vulnerable (Airriess, 2005).
Indeed, studies have shown that when compared to other
denominations, Catholics depend far more on clergy and
the church as an institution for both formal and informal
support resources (Taylor and Chatters, 1998). In Versailles, the ties between church and ock are accentuated
because refugees require more pastoral care when compared to economic immigrants. Expressive of both pastoral
care and especially pastoral power is the often-used phrase
my people by MQVCs pastor when interviewed by the
media as well as the authors. Indeed, the pastoral power
of priests in Vietnamese Catholicism is heightened because
of the perception of the church as the primary social institution and the persistent role of a pre-Catholic Confucianist culture with its attendant values of authority and
tradition (Phan, 2001).
The critical role of church-based social capital and networking in the context of Katrina evacuation, return and
recovery is in part historically based; indeed like class
and race, [religion] must be a matter for historical and

place-specic analysis (Kong, 2001, p. 226). Based upon

these common religious and historical-based experiences
that engendered a shared emotional connection (Prezza
and Costantini, 1998, p. 182) among residents, coupled
with a shared territory, Versailles constitutes a community of faith (Nash, 1992). While we recognize that a
sense of community is often imagined, particularly in
an urban and post-industrial context (Alleyne, 2002), religious faith and membership in a community religious
institution is a basic factor in promoting a sense of community (Farrell et al., 2004), especially when identity formation is co-ethnic in nature (Smith, 2004). Indeed, many
individuals in the Versailles Vietnamese community perceived their community as being very dierent from other
Vietnamese American communities in the New Orleans
urban region, as well as other metropolitan regions of
the country (Airriess, 2002; Airriess and Clawson, 1994).
The sense of community as an urban village (Gans,
1962) is captured in the term village commonly used
by co-ethnics not residing in Versailles as well as those
Vietnamese in Versailles to refer to the Versailles community as a cultural and geographically distinct place. With
community identity anchored in historical experiences,
ethnicity, and religious institutions, the opportunities for
church-based social capital and network formation to
successfully address the complex problems associated with
technological disasters such as Katrina are only
heightened.
The church centered social capital that allowed for the
successful evacuation and recovery of the Versailles community was deployed through existing pre-Katrina and
developed post-Katrina social networks. A social network
is dened as a specic set of linkages among a dened
set of persons, with the additional property that the characteristics of these linkages as a whole may be used to
interpret the social behavior of the persons involved
(Mitchell, 1969, p. 2, in Bridge, 2002, p. 8). A more tailored denition of social networks specic to our Katrina
research is that they facilitate a ow of information providing a basis for action and assisting in individual and
community goal attainment (Ritchie and Gill, 2007, p.
109). In the context of church-based social capital, networks take two forms. The rst is bonding social capital
that is based on persistent and personal inward oriented
networks between members of the same social or ethnic
sodality. The second is bridging social capital based on
weaker and impersonal external networks between
heterogeneous individuals and institutions (Bridge, 2002;
Wuthnow, 2002).
These inward and external oriented networks and their
attendant forms of social capital possess diering geographical scales. Recent geographical literature argues that
the ontological existence of spatial or geographical scales
particularly with reference to size and level should be questioned (Marston et al., 2005; Howitt, 1998). Yet we adopt a
more conventional concept of geographical scale that
examines the role of actors embedded in sites that are local,

C.A. Airriess et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 13331346

extra-local, regional and national in scale (Hoee, 2006).

This more conventional approach is better suited to this
research because while these dierent scales can be conceived as spatially or vertically nested, there exists no structurally based top-down hierarchy of economic and political
power that lies at the heart of the critique of scale (Leitner
and Miller, 2007). In contrast, the role of human and institutional agency within the multi-scalar dynamics of social
networks plays a critical role in the communitys Katrina
experiences. In this sense, networks are socially constructed
because the church became a scale-builder in an attempt
to mobilize social capital to access economic and political
resources for the recovery process (Howitt, 2003). An
equally valuable conceptualization of geographical scale
for this research is the resolution at which a given phenomenon is thought of, acted on or studied (Agnew,
1997, p. 100). These networks exist between co-ethnic individuals, co-ethnic institutions and individuals, as well
between two or more co-ethnic institutions. While these
social capital-based networks are heterogeneous in the
sense that they encompass or cut across a variety of scales
depending upon a desired goal, particular networks tend to
be, for the most part, scale specic (Chamlee-Wright,
2006).
Local scale networks comprise bonding social capital
between the church and individual parishioners as well
as between parishioners that was critical to both the evacuation and recovery process. Extra-local scale networks
encompass bonding social capital between kin and family
in Versailles and the rest of the New Orleans urban region.
Regional capital networks include both bonding and
bridging social capital whereby other Catholic churches,
co-ethnic institutions, and individuals provided evacuees
shelter. National scale bridging social capital networks
include co-ethnic organizations, co-ethnic media, as well
as non-co-ethnic institutions that networked with the
church and were critically important to rebuilding the
community, especially with reference to contesting a landll located in close proximity to Versailles. At both the
local and especially regional and national scales, the traditional notion of ethnic community based on territory and
personal relations becomes spatially redened to include
the broader community of Vietnamese America. In addition, we are able to conceptualize, in the context of Katrina, that the local occupied spaces or scales of
dependence were reliant in many ways upon regional
and national external spaces or scales of engagement
where social capital resources could be harnessed (Jonas,
2006).

1337

Fig. 2. Flooded homes and cars after Katrina made landfall. Source:
Father Vien The Nguyen.

0 to 4.5 feet1 (Fig. 2). Some homes did not have any standing water in part because of elevational relief or being built
atop earthen ll, but most homes had between half a foot
to a foot and half of standing water. While Versailles did
not experience the high ood depths that many other areas
of the city experienced, rebuilding the community became
just as much of a challenge because mold quickly spread
throughout ooded houses because residents were not
allowed to return immediately. Unlike other areas of
New Orleans East, however, only one fatality from the
storm was recorded in Versailles by state ocials.2
Unlike some communities in New Orleans East, 93.8%
of Versailles Vietnamese respondents in our survey evacuated before Katrinas landfall and 95.0% did so by automobile. Respondents learned of Katrinas landfall from
various sources. Most important were the media (40.71%)
and family (20.35%), government (21.24%); the church
was a less important source of information (5.31%). This
is understandable because evacuation generally took place
on Friday and Saturday before Sunday morning mass.
Nevertheless, the church was instrumental to promoting
the safety of its ock during the evacuation period based
on an existing administrative structure from their villages
in Vietnam whereby parish council members were administratively responsible for particular hamlets each named
after a patron saint; in Versailles, hamlets were replaced
by neighborhoods centered on major streets (Interview, 5
November 2006).
A Versailles ooding story that attracted the most media
attention is the role of MQVC in providing sanctuary for

4. Evacuating the storm

1

Unlike much of the rest of the city that ooded because

of levee failure, ooding in New Orleans East, including
Versailles, was the result of storm surge of 1822 feet overtopping the levees of the Intracoastal Waterway (Fig. 1).
Flood depths in the study area varied substantially from

The source of ood depths in the study area was obtained from http://
katrina.lsu.edu/products_reports_download.asp. The specic link is
Depth Grid for Orleans, Jeerson and St. Bernard Parishes. Because
the ood depth data is from September 2, three days after the ooding
commenced, real ood depths were a bit higher.
2
Victims of Katrina: Where They Were Found. New Orleans Times
Picayune, Tuesday, December 27, 2005, A-6.

1338

C.A. Airriess et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 13331346

some 200300 individuals (mostly Vietnamese with some

African Americans) who did not evacuate. While sanctuary
was based on local church-centered social capital and networks, important assistance was engendered through coethnic bridging social capital at the regional and national
levels (Fig. 3). The pastor had contacted the Saigon Radio
station in Houston and informed them that while most
Vietnamese had evacuated before Katrinas landfall, many
sought sanctuary in the church (Interview, 4 December,
2005). This message was then relayed from Houston to
the Radio Saigon station in Orange County, California.
On September 1, 3 days after Katrina made landfall, a
Vietnamese American woman in Arlington, TX was able
to contact her mothers friend in Versailles by a land line
to learn of the condition of the stranded population. This
Arlington woman began e-mailing the Coast Guard, the
Red Cross and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. These
e-mails were then accessed by the National Congress of
Vietnamese Americans (NCVA) in northern Virginia and

provided a threaded discussion forum on its homepage to

keep those interested informed of this dire situation.
News from the church was forwarded to NCVA and from
there to the organizations network of action (NCVA,
2006).
This network of action refers to the larger Vietnamese
American population, whether they be individuals or ethnic organizations who then contacted the Louisiana Governors Oce, the Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA), the Coast Guard, the Red Cross, and The United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops or any other organizations that might lend assistance. This particular relationship between the local and the co-ethnic regional and
national institutions provides a dierent dimension to the
concept of networks of social capital in the sense that ethnic media and the internet rescaled a wider sense of ethnic
community identity in a unied space of networks. By the
following day, all were rescued by the National Guard with
large trucks.

NATIONAL
SIERRA CLUB

AAPII

REGIONAL

NAVASA

REP. HONDA

EXTRA LOCAL
LEAN

SCLC
BISHOP
LUONG

HONG KONG
MALL
HOUSTON

LOCAL
SAVE
N.O. EAST

MQVN
CDC

NAVASA
FELLOWS

MQVN

VIETNAMESE
RESIDENTS
HOUSTON

VAYLA

SAIGON RADIO
ORANGE COUNTY
RESIDENTS

VIETNAMESE
RESIDENTS
ORANGE
COUNTY
NVCA

CHURCHES &
TEMPLES
HOUSTON

SAIGON
RADIO
HOUSTON

WEST BANK
RELATIVES &
FRIENDS
SOSBP
HOUSTON

Fig. 3. Geographical scales of social capital and networks.

C.A. Airriess et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 13331346

5. Evacuee relocation
Much like most of New Orleans evacuees, Versailles
Vietnamese evacuated to a number of cities within the Central Gulf region. The most important destination was Houston, TX. While many New Orleanians possessed a Houston
connection through family and friends, the Versailles
Houston connection is somewhat distinctive because Houston is home to approximately 55,000 people of Vietnamese
ancestry. With many more Vietnamese cultural amenities
than Versailles and the larger New Orleans region, Houston
possesses signicantly high levels of co-ethnic symbolic capital and is the Vietnamese cultural capital of the Gulf Coast
region. This in part explains why Houston was the rst
evacuation stop for 36.28% of survey respondents.
Versailles evacuees sources of emergency assistance in
Houston were diverse, reecting the complex networks of
bridging social capital at the regional scale (Fig. 3). The
sources of emergency assistance for those who made Houston their rst evacuation stop were primarily the government (50.0%), church (23.9%), and family (10.9%). While
government sources of emergency assistance predominate,
delivery of these services was weeks late, forcing evacuees
to seek help centered on co-ethnic and religious spaces.
One of the earliest centers of emergency assistance was
the Hong Kong Mall, Houstons premier Vietnamese
American shopping complex. Evacuees arrived at the mall
and Radio Saigon in Houston immediately began organizing relief eorts (ASN, 2005). The Vietnamese American
community in Houston began delivering clothing and food
and oering housing assistance to the 1000 evacuees who
visited the mall each day (Tran, 2005). The oce of BPSOS
(Boat People SOS), an organization that provides practical
assistance to Vietnamese immigrants, was also located in
the mall and they too attended to 100 evacuees per day
by giving them Hepatitis A shots and assistance in lling
out FEMA forms (Lin, 2005). Vietnamese Catholic
churches and Buddhist temples also opened their doors
to evacuees. One Vietnamese Catholic convent, for example, sheltered 200 evacuees sustained by food and clothing
donations from co-ethnics in Houston (Lam, 2005a). As an
ideal example of bridging social capital, those evacuees on
one of the trucks leaving Versailles all agreed to meet at
one of the Vietnamese Catholic Churches in Houston
(NCVA, 2006).
If the Vietnamese American ethnic media was instrumental in rescuing those at MQVC, the bridging social capital and networks at the national scale that intersected with
the regional scale in Houston were even more critical in
meeting the immediate material needs of evacuees. In this
sense, Houston too became a space of dependence on the
larger national Vietnamese American community. A web
page on Nguoi Viet, the largest Vietnamese language newspaper in the country, was created to assist individuals in
locating friends and relatives that were evacuees. Co-ethnic
organizations such as The National Alliance of Vietnamese
American Service Agencies (NAVASA), the Viet Heritage

1339

Society and United Vietnamese Americans coordinated

donations and fund raising through their respective websites (Lam, 2005b). The role of these organizations in providing assistance through social capital and networking in
the absence of government support during the early postKatrina period is captured in a statement by the co-anchor
of Saigon Radio in Houston; the Vietnamese community
often responds faster to calls for emergency help than the
government and [w]e can reach out immediately and
directly because we are closely connected (Lam, 2005b).
Church-based social capital intersecting with ethnic media
at the national scale provided a distinctive form of social
capital and networks beneting evacuees in Houston.
MQVCs rst parish priest was appointed in 2003 as an
auxiliary bishop of Orange County, CA, the commonly
recognized capital of Vietnamese America. As the rst
Vietnamese bishop in the country, he visited Orange
Countys Little Saigon Radio and asked listeners for donations to assist the evacuees in Houston (NamViet, 2005).
Ethnic media in this example and others functioning as
social capital within the larger disaster network, rescaled
the relief eort (Viswanath and Arora, 2000) through the
construction of a virtual community based on shared
identity.
6. Return and recovery
Much like the rest of New Orleans, the return to and
rebuilding of Versailles has been a long term and frustrating process primarily because of the lack of leadership at
the city, state and national levels. Nevertheless, Versailles
Vietnamese returned sooner and in greater numbers when
compared to other devastated communities in New Orleans
East. We explain this rapid return based on the critical role
of local bonding social capital between church and parishioners, a profound attachment to place by the residents,
and also on the ability of the church to construct bridging
social capital with national scale co-ethnic institutional networks (Fig. 3). Part of the recovery process also involved
contesting the opening of a Katrina landll adjacent to
the community. This process involved developing a
church-centered network of bridging social capital with
non-co-ethnic institutions at the extra-local and national
scales (Fig. 3).
Based upon two auto windshield surveys of Versailles
conducted in the rst week of May and the last week of
June of 2006, Vietnamese American residents returned
early and in substantial numbers.3 In the two neighborhoods closest to Mary Queen of Vietnamese Church
where Vietnamese Americans numerically dominate,
approximately 80% of Vietnamese American homes were
3

The windshield survey consisted of slowly driving in a car down every

street in the community and enumerating whether residents were either
actively rebuilding their homes or had already completed the rebuilding
process. Those who were in the process of rebuilding were counted as
returned.

1340

C.A. Airriess et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 13331346

reoccupied in early May and this increased to slightly over

90% by late June. These Vietnamese American house reoccupancy gures are similar to the gure of 80% provided
by the churchs pastor in mid-2006 (Interview, 2 November
2006). Lower Vietnamese American return rates were experienced in primarily mixed Vietnamese/African American
neighborhoods where oodwater depths were greater and
rental properties were more common. By early November
2006, re-occupancy rates in these neighborhoods ranged
from 73% to 88%.4 Those who have not returned tended
to be renters, sherfolk, the inrmed elderly because of
the absence of the continuing absence of nearby hospitals,
and skilled workers whose employers relocated out of the
city (Interview, 26 September 2007).
The re-opening of co-ethnic businesses in Versailles is an
alternative measure of community recovery. By early February 2006, some 25% of the 93 pre-Katrina businesses had
re-opened; this is more than double the percentage of reopened businesses in New Orleans East as a whole for
the same month (Williams, 2006). By May 2006, the number of businesses re-opening increased to 59% and by
December of 2006, the number increased to slightly over
90%. Providing basic co-ethnic needs and wants, the recovery of the business enclave is critical to the future viability
of the Vietnamese community in part because residents did
not rely heavily on regional or national chain stores that in
other parts of the city only began returning in a sustained
manner one year after the storm (Campanella, 2007).
6.1. Local networks of bonding social capital
Versailles residents returned to their neighborhoods to
survey the damage to their homes relatively early after
ood waters receded and the city permitted residents to
return in early October; 37.5% of survey respondents visited within one month, an additional 22.9% within 2
months, and 27.1% after 3 months. Living with friends
and family on the West Bank, which is New Orleans other
large concentration of ethnic-Vietnamese (that only sustained wind damage), 27.7% returned several times a week
to clean and rebuild their homes, and an additional 34.0%
returned several times a month for the same purpose. By
early October, only one month after Katrina made landfall,
4

While this article concerns only ethnic-Vietnamese in Versailles, the

purpose of our larger research project is to compare their recovery
experiences with that of African Americans in Versailles. African
Americans only began returning to their Versailles residences in March,
two full months after the Vietnamese. Some 40% of African American
residents did not returned by March 2007 because they lived in three
apartment complexes that have yet to be rebuilt. Those that have returned
are middle class homeowners. Their late return is in part explained by the
absence of church-based social capital and networks so critical to the early
return of Vietnamese. There existed only one African American-based
church in Versailles and it had yet to re-open by June 2006. In addition,
African Americans attended many dierent churches outside the community. There existed then, less bonding social capital between institutions
like the church and church members that was geographically based in the
Versailles African American community.

the churchs pastor returned with 300 parishioners to begin

the rebuilding process (Interview, 4 December 2005). Providing shelter for this rst group of returnees, MQVC
was the center of recovery activities. In a symbolic statement of the central role of the parish church in the communitys return, the pastor claimed that it is only right and
proper that the church is where we should begin the
rebuilding (Joe, 2005). Indeed, the rst mass was held
on October 9 and the next Sunday mass was attended by
800 parishioners, many from the immediate Katrina diaspora encompassing both extra-local and regional scale
locations (Interview, 4 December 2005). Just as the parish
council assisted in the evacuation process, this neighborhood zone administrative structure brought from Vietnam
and modied, provided a local action network for rebuilding (Interview, 5 November 2006). Groups were given the
dierent and specic tasks of repairing houses, administering tetanus shots and health care, and purchasing food and
preparing meals for the 300 returnees as well as for those
short term returnees (Hauser, 2005).
While these early church centered and organized recovery eorts at the local scale were tied to re-establishing
community as a body of people, the church simultaneously
engaged in aggressive eorts to contest larger power structures that threatened the communities recovery. Fully 2
months after the storm electric power had yet to return
in New Orleans East, and power was unlikely to be
restored in Versailles because of its distant location at the
eastern edge of the urban region. When the churchs pastor
requested that the local utility restore power to Versailles,
the company agreed to do so only if proof was provided
that a sucient number of residents had returned. Within
one week, the pastor gathered 500 signatures and presented
the list to the company; both electrical power and water
service were restored by November (Hill, 2006). The church
also served as an ombudsman for residents contesting
homeowners insurance compensation (Interview, 5
November 2006); such litigation is itself a form of poststorm secondary trauma (Brown and Mikkelson, 1997).
In the context of the Urban Land Institutes recommendation that large swaths of land in New Orleans East be
reborn as green space, the church organized parishioners
to attend a November 2005 downtown meeting of the
Bring New Orleans Back Commission to contest what they
believed was a myopic vision. With approximately 25% of
those in attendance being ethnic-Vietnamese (Campanella,
2006), the pastor contested the top-down decision making
process by claiming that we were never invited to the
table and that we have a right to be part of the community-driven process (Williams, 2005). This top-down decision making power of the city government at the extralocal scale embodied in the Urban Land Institute very
much reduced, however, the power of resistance at the local
scale (Judd, 1998). Fortunately for New Orleans East communities, the Institutes recommendations were not implemented. It is not surprising then that our survey
respondents claimed that when compared to the city, state,

C.A. Airriess et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 13331346

and federal governments, it was the church and community

leaders who provided the most benecial assistance to
returnees.
Critically important to the early recovery process as well
was the holding of the annual Lunar New Years Festival
or Tet in early February 2006 on church grounds. Attracting those who had already permanently returned, but many
more who were still part of the Gulf Coast diaspora, the
festival is symbolic of bonding social capital in local space.
In addition, the festival also functioned as a venue to
remind both evacuees and the city government that the
community had returned. In this sense, the Tet festival
was a political act at the local scale.
A partial explanation for the rapid repopulation of Versailles is the attachment to place and community that is
contingent on embedded bonding social capital and networks (Bridge, 2002; Granovetter, 1985). This attachment
is expressed in focus group responses to the question
how did you feel about the neighborhood before
Katrina?
Before Katrina, the neighborhood is a very happy
community.
Before Katrina, all our neighborhood, we talk
together, were just like a family.
I thought it was the best place ever. We know everybody and everything is close by.
I like it because we are so close together. Everybody
is like a family and we know each other very well.
Interviews with returned residents conducted by journalists as well as the authors speak to the same profound
attachment to place and community. In one interview, a
Versailles restaurant server said Texas didnt feel like
home to the Vietnamese in exile there so they hurried back
because [e]ven if your home is nothing, it is still your
sweet home (Shaftel, 2006). The owner of a strip mall said
about returning, [w]e left Vietnam and weve made this
our second home (Williams, 2005). The authors spoke
to a middle aged man with much the same response; Vietnam is my rst country, and New Orleans is my second
country. An interview with the chief of FEMAs disaster
housing operations in Louisiana speaks of social capital
and networks attached to local geographical space;
[t]hey were traumatized when they were mixed with other
groups and [t]hey want to remain together (Hauser,
2005). The churchs pastor spoke the historical dimension
of embedded bonding social capital and networks to partially explain the rapid recovery of the community;
[w]ere talking about 60-year olds knowing each other
since 1975, from the same villages in Vietnam (Hauser,
2005). Indeed, the present networks of social capital in geographical space are often based on past success at collaboration, thus serving as a template for future cooperation
on other issues (Mohan and Mohan, 2002, p. 193).

1341

6.2. National networks of bridging social capital

Rebuilding of the community obviously required a
grassroots eort, that is the recovery of local bonding
social capital and networks. Nonetheless, local scale social
capital and networks for rebuilding were not sucient for
some particular goals of recovery that emerged in the
post-Katrina environment. Generally, these goals address
issues of community economic development and engendering greater political organization to engage extra-local
political structures to meet pressing community needs.
The church has thus purposely reached beyond the placespecic community of Versailles to enlist bridging social
capital and networks in the form of co-ethnic individuals
and organizations at the national scale to assist in the
recovery process (Fig. 3).
External assistance was necessary in part because of the
social nature of the church-led community that was conservative and largely inward oriented, and one that lacked
both the human or bridging social capital to engage the
power structures outside the community to demand that
their needs be met. The power structures of the community
were based on the church parish council which was dominated by older refugees with little experience, talent, or
knowledge of American community and political activism.
In a sense, bridging social capital was required to engender
successful community development and political activism
rather than depending on individuals who possessed bonding social capital and strong emotional place attachment to
the community. When we asked the church pastor about
the recruitment of outsiders rather than existing community members to organize community activism, his
response was that at this critical juncture when the community is beset by many challenges, it was important that
activists possess minds rather than spirits (Interview,
4 February, 2006). This distinction between local bonding
social capital and networks, and national bridging social
capital and networks, in the context of dierent goals is
theoretically instructive. The local bonding social capital
based on the embedded social norms, place attachment,
and characterized by a closed network (Coleman, 1988;
Granovetter, 1985) of the church parish council were ideal
for initial and specic rebuilding purposes; yet because it is
tied to the local scale it also is somewhat of a liability in
more complex and later stages of the rebuilding process
that require the construction of bridging social capital
and networks at larger geographical scales (Bridge, 2002).
Versailles thus occupies a space of dependence within these
larger scale networks (Jonas, 2006).
Deploying co-ethnic bridging social capital and networks at the national scale is expressed in many forms.
One of the most important was NAVASA, a 35 member
mutual assistance group that promotes empowerment of
Vietnamese communities across the country through
greater active citizenship and assists in addressing the
social and economic needs of Vietnamese. NAVASA
assigned numerous interns through its Dan Than (Be the

1342

C.A. Airriess et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 13331346

Change) Corps fellows program, young college graduates

from around the country to Versailles, to provide talent
for community building capacities. Some Dan Than Corps
fellows in fact were young people who applied after traveling to New Orleans soon after Katrina to oer their volunteer services. As an expression of community at the
national scale and co-ethnic bridging social capital, one fellow, a college senior from California, explained I decided
to become a Dan Than fellow because we share the same
goal that the Vietnamese community should have equal
access to resources for recovery and rebuilding
(NAVASA, 2005).
One expression of community building was the
NAVASA fellow-induced establishment of The Vietnamese
American Young Leaders Association of New Orleans
(VAYLA) whose goal is to encourage leadership, service,
and activism in the community. Admitting that there
existed a gap of leadership skills within the community
and the program is to bring in young people to ll these
gaps (LaRose, 2006), the church initially housed and
nancially sponsored VAYLA. The organization now possesses its own meeting space in one of the communitys
commercial strips. Other responsibilities of NAVASA fellows include assisting the church in procuring external
grants for community development as well as developing
rebuilding strategies for local businesses. An additional
goal of community recovery is the May 2006 establishment
of the Mary Queen of Vietnam Community Development
Corporation (MQVN CDC) housed at the church with
six sta members; four of the six co-ethnic sta members
are from outside the community.
Much like the many CDCs across the country (Gittell
and Wilder, 1999), the primary community building goals
of the MVQCDC are varied. The rst is to promote business development through revitalization of the commercial
district. A second goal is to develop a low-income senior
retirement complex on church owned land across the street
from the church. The grandest goal is to re-develop the
community through upgrading the commercial district,
establishing a centrally located twenty-acre community
garden to replace the sometimes scattered and post-Katrina abandoned gardens, and creating a park-like landscape along canals to improve recreational space. This
multifaceted visions goal is to create a Viet Village as
a cultural or ethnic tourism destination for long term community sustainability and development. Much like the
planning of Little Saigon of Westminister in southern
Californias Orange County (McLauglin and Jesilow,
1998), commercial sustainability is unable to rely on a local
co-ethnic customer base, but must reach out to a more geographically diverse population (Eljera, 2004).
7. Contesting the landll
Part of the recovery process that engendered the intersection of bridging social capital and networks at all geographical scales, but most importantly the establishment

of support networks that crossed ethnic boundaries, was

contesting the opening of a Katrina waste landll approximately one mile from the community (Fig. 1). As a result,
the denition of community was rescaled beyond local and
co-ethnic identities. Two forms of social capital were
required to accomplish this task. The rst is identity bridging social capital that provides a rubric for the kinds of
networks that span such culturally dened dierences such
as race, ethnicity, religious tradition and more and
requires deemphasizing the social constructions of us
and them (Wuthnow, 2002, p. 670). The second is status
bridging social capital that refers to networks that span
vertical arrangements of power, inuence, wealth and prestige and suggests possibilities for those with less inuence
to acquire inuence and other resources through their connections with persons of higher status (Wuthnow, 2002, p.
670). Indeed, the construction of social capital and networks to contest the landll was critical because environmental justice movements are only successful when they
cross cultural and ethnic boundaries and enlist advocates
outside the local community (Allen, 2003).
In April 2006, New Orleans Mayor Nagin circumvented
the normal zoning and public input procedures under postKatrina emergency orders to re-open a landll for postKatrina debris from much of the greater New Orleans
metropolitan region. The city signed a $30 million dollar
contract with the private company Waste Management of
Louisiana and in return, the company was to return 22%
of the landlls gross revenues to the city. Despite claims
that hurricane debris would only consist of various environmentally benign building materials, anti-landll proponents became concerned about toxic waste co-mingled with
building debris such as acid-based lead batteries and
paints, asbestos, creosote, household pesticides and cleaning chemicals. The US Congress has mandated that Municipal Solid Waste landlls possess synthetic liners to
prevent toxic leaching into the water table, and monitor
groundwater, but the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) and Army Corps of Engineers suspended this rule. The anti-landll coalition demanded that
landll runo and soil be tested for leaching and hazards,
but was turned down by both Waste Management and
the LDEQ.
Before directly examining the social capital and networks employed to successfully contest the landll, it is
necessary to explore the local and extra-local scale discourse harnessed by community activists to make their
anti-landll case. Much like the general process of rebuilding the community after Katrina, church-based spokespersons employed discursive collective action framing that
harnessed the communitys shared social and cultural experiences to achieve their goals of closing the landll. More
specically, there existed place-based collective-action
frames that provide[d] a better understanding of how community organizations create a discursive place-identity to
situate and legitimate their activism (Martin, 2003, p.
733).

C.A. Airriess et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 13331346

One of the most common frames in which local place

identities have been constructed are cultural in the sense
that environmental concerns related to groundwater leachate might pose threats to the agricultural spaces and thus
cultural identity spaces of Versailles. Indeed the churchs
pastor is quoted in countless newspaper articles that [r]esidents use that water on the tiny waterside gardens that supply the community with sugar cane and bitter melon and
Vietnamese varieties of vegetables (Eaton, 2006). As rural
folk from Vietnam, elderly residents during the 1980s and
1990s reproduced small scale gardens where over 30 vegetable, tubers, herb and medicinal cultivars supplied the community with much of its leafy green needs (Airriess and
Clawson, 1994). For local newspapers and non-ethnic visitors alike, the green and verdant vegetable gardens became
a sort of iconic cultural landscape of the community.
A similar cultural and place-based frame contesting the
landll centered on community identity also was harnessed
with reference to plans for the Viet Village. Showcased
during the February 2006 Tet festival and presented to
the Bring Back New Orleans Commission, the churchs
pastor argued against the plan employing discourse at multiple geographical scales. At the local scale, the churchs
pastor claimed that the landll not only threatened the success of Viet Village, but that [t]heyre threatening our very
existence (Eaton, 2006). At the extra-local scale, discourse
implicitly includes Vietnamese culture as part of rebuilding
the larger New Orleans culture. The churchs pastor
asserted that [w]e look at those plans as a way to not only
celebrate our culture, but also play a part in the larger,
renewed culture of New OrleansNew Orleans together
as a city, a community, a culture (Etheridge, 2006). Such
discourse asserts that while Versailles may have been an
isolated culture in the past, it is now an integral part of
the citys post-Katrina culture.
A third frame to contest the landll is based on racial
politics, one that relies upon the intersection of local and
extra-local scales to make an argument when contesting
the landll. For example, one young Vietnamese woman
who linked the upcoming mayoral election and the landll
issue was asked by a reporter for her name. She responded
N-g-u-y-e-n, and that you better get used to the spelling
(Elie, 2006). The reporter makes an implicit and very perceptive observation about geographical scale and Versailles
no longer being a territorially isolated and politically inactive community in terms of the larger scale New Orleans
political power structure when he states [t]he citys Vietnamese community is a large one. Nguyen is a common
Vietnamese surname and, by extension, a common New
Orleanian one (Elie, 2006). Similarly, before the mayoral
election, identity bridging social capital at the extra-local
scale was constructed when the Black city councilperson
representing Versailles appointed a NAVASA fellow as
her community liaison.
The construction of an identity and status bridging
social capital platform to racially and thus collectively
frame the contest at both the extra-local and national scales

1343

was implemented through the posting of a website Save

New Orleans East: Citizens for a Strong New Orleans East
whose homepage manager is located at Mary Queen of
Vietnam Church. The coalitions networked members
include Mary Queen of Vietnam Church, Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN), the Sierra Club, and
NAVASA (Fig. 3). The in-house counsel for LEAN is a
White attorney with a pre-Katrina oce in the community
that provided legal services to the Vietnamese refugee population for over one decade. As a form of extra-local scale
nationalism whereby discourse is pan-racial in nature
(Back, 1996), the coalitions mission statement asserts that
Citizens for a Strong New Orleans East is a coalition of
non-prot organizations and faith-based organizations
who want to make sure that the communities of color
who had lived in New Orleans East prior to Katrina can
return home. The collective race frame applies to both
Vietnamese and African Americans; indeed the pre-Katrina population of Versailles as well as New Orleans East
was majority African American. While the future recovery
of Versailles is dependent on the larger and successful
rebuilding process of New Orleans East, the collective
action discourse includes a geographical rescaling of the
landll issue that encompassed the far larger living spaces
of African Americans in New Orleans East. Indeed, mobilization against environmental racism is strong because
numerically dominant Black New Orleans East is home
to two additional landlls.
Race as a discursive frame is expressed in additional
ways. Mary Queen of Vietnam Church organized an antilandll demonstration of 400 people at City Hall on May
10, 2006 (Fig. 4) and developed extra-local bridging social
capital by inviting members of the Black-based Southern
Christian Leadership Conference to participate (Interview,
2 November, 2006) (Fig. 3). This social capital network was
developed in part because the churchs pastor had for
months attended numerous meetings and rallies organized

Fig. 4. May 10th, 2006 anti-landll protestors outside New Orleans city
hall. Source: Mary Beth Black.

1344

C.A. Airriess et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 13331346

by Black community groups to contest right of return

issues as well as the absence of school and health facilities
serving the poor. In addition, MQVC parishioners helped
in the cleanup of nearby African American churches (Interview, 2 November, 2006). Likewise, the regional director
for NAVASA who works out of the parish church claims
that environmental justice issues in New Orleans East is
not just a Vietnamese thing (Tang, 2007). As a result
of the demonstration, Mayor Nagin temporarily closed
the landll, but re-opened it immediately after he won reelection on May 20.
At the national scale and constructing status bridging
social capital, ethnicity and race also played a role in the
anti-landll issue. US Representative Michael Honda (DCA), a Japanese American and Chairman of the Congressional Asian Pacic American Caucus with a large Vietnamese American constituency wrote a strongly worded
letter sub-titled Respect Vietnamese American Community-Protect Environment to the Army Corps of Engineers
on May 24, 2006 expressing concern over the impact of the
landll. Aside from the environmental impacts, Rep. Hondas letter states that I have a keen interest in the rebuilding eort and its eects on regional ethnic communities
(Honda, 2006). In late June, the deputy director of the
White Houses Asian American and Pacic Islander Initiative was sent to Versailles to help mediate a meeting
between local opponents of the landll and local, state,
and federal ocials (Russell, 2006). Despite votes by the
Louisiana Legislature as well as a ruling by a US District
Judge in favor of keeping the landll operational, the landll was eventually closed on August 14, 2006 after the
mayors executive order expired. The next morning, 250
individuals comprising the anti-landll network stood at
the gates of the closed landll and celebrated.
8. Conclusions
This narrative of a church-centered Katrina recovery
process might seem to romanticize the nature of community identity. We contend, however, that a deep historical
memory of refugee experiences, a shared faith, a profound
attachment to place have contributed to the strong community identity, and this coupled with the harnessing of
church-centered social capital across multiple scales was
critical to the post-Katrina recovery (Leong et al., 2007).
There is no doubt that community tensions existed during
the recovery period. For example, a vocal group of American-born and educated community members contested the
churches call for the immediate rebuilding for fear that
their community would later disappear as part of the
New Orleans East green zone proposed by the Bring
New Orleans Back Commission (Interview, 26 September
2007). However, community identity and cohesion has
increased in the post-Katrina period as the elderly refugee
population and the American-born generation have gained
greater appreciation of each other through shared Katrina
experiences and working together to close the landll. Nor

does this narrative implicitly advocate the rescaling of postdisaster responsibility from the national scale to the local
scale under a neoliberal ideology (Varner, 2006) that promotes local social capital as an alternative recovery
resource. In addition, this narrative dispels the Asian
model minority myth of self-reliance and hard work as
a reason of the communitys rapid recovery. This discourse
litters local and national newspaper accounts of the communitys recovery to the exclusion of many Vietnamese
American voices calling for increased government attention
(Leong et al., 2007) as well as the non-recognition that the
community was heavily dependent upon external recovery
assistance. While studies have shown that community
social change as a consequence of a disaster are eeting
in nature (Passerini, 2000), the potential for increased community political organization and action is substantial
(Olson and Drury, 1997). The impact of the communitys
emergent political activism in part explains why Versailles
was chosen by the city as one of the top 17 neighborhoods
to receive additional nancial assistance (Leong et al.,
2007).
This empirical based research engages the scale debate
across a number of dierent dimensions. At the most basic
level, this research adopts a spatial lens to examine social
capital and networks in a multi-scalar context. While some
attention has been given to the spatial dimensions of social
capital, it has primarily come from development and
urban/social geographers with little attention to scale
(Mohan and Mohan, 2002). While this research is
anchored in the concept of scale, we do not privilege scale
to the exclusion of additional spatial concepts such as networks that engage dierent scales, nor place, where the
social practices of everyday life, especially those that are
church-centered, are embedded (Leitner and Miller,
2007). Our research also calls attention to the critical
importance of bottom-up or local scale agency in the social
construction of multi-scaled social capital networks, particularly when larger scale government institutions are
recreant in providing various forms of assistance to communities beset by specic challenges. This form of scale
building through bridging social capital to procure economic and political resources was no more apparent than
in the landll issue whereby exible and placed-based and
collective action discourses were harnessed across multiple
scales to successfully promote co-ethnic and multi-racial
solidarity to achieve a particular goal. Indeed, future
empirically based research on disaster impacted communities, particularly those that are socioeconomically marginalized, should be mindful of the important and
constitutive role of social capital and networks at multiple
geographical scales to theorize the process of disaster evacuation, relocation and recovery.
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by National Science Foundation SGER Grants 0555135 and 0555086. The authors also

C.A. Airriess et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 13331346

thank Father The Vien Nguyen, Cyndi Nguyen, Thu Nguyen, Vietnamese Initiative in Economic Training and Mary
Queen of Vietnam Church for their patience and support
throughout the research process.
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