VIETNAMESE AMERICAN PLACE MAKING IN NORTHERN VIRGINIA*

ABSTRACT. Vietnamese Americans have made places for themselves in Northern Virginia by reconfiguring the geography of the suburban places they inherited, including former high-order central-place nodes. Vietnamese American residences, churches, cemetery plots, and other distinctive ethnic markers are by and large dispersed and rarely noticeable. Their retail districts, however, serve them in multiple material and symbolic ways, not unlike suburban Chinatowns.