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Along Lincoln, Nebraska’s North 27th Street, between O Street and Holrege Street, there are groceries and restaurants specializing in global cuisines. There’s Malaysian, Ethiopian, Middle Eastern and North African, Mexican, and various East and Southeast Asian cuisines—most notably, Vietnamese.

“Lincoln has long hosted multicultural communities,” historian Kurt E. Kinbacher writes in the introduction to his book on immigrant communities in Lincoln. “Successive waves of immigrants and migrants have arrived since the city’s founding,” including Volga Germans; members of the Omaha nation; Vietnamese; and, in more recent years, Iraqi, South Sudanese, Kachin, and Yazidi refugees. [1] The three communities that Kinbacher studied—the Volga Germans who arrived in the late 19th century, the Omaha who migrated from the Omaha Reservation in northeast Nebraska during the mid-twentieth century, and the Vietnamese who arrived after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975—formed “urban villages,” or “well-defined ethnic enclaves that offered their residents a variety of important services.”

Lincoln’s Vietnamese urban villages developed around North 27th Street, whose businesses serve as a hub where people living in different residential areas come together and meet. Vietnamese immigrants and refugees began arriving in Lincoln in the 1970s, after the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) prevailed over the U.S.-backed Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) and formed the unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam. In the three decades following the war’s end, more than 1 million Southern Vietnamese people immigrated to or were resettled in the United States, fleeing the sectarian conflicts that continued after unification; by 2000, Lincoln’s Vietnamese population numbered 5,000. [2] The community is not homogenous—families come from different regions and practice different religions and traditions, and there are generational divides—but most of Lincoln’s Vietnamese residents share a common language and a commitment to family. [3] The groceries and food sold along North 27th Street help connect Vietnamese families to their heritage, even as they are involved members of the broader Lincoln community, and engage a broader spectrum of people in their culture. [4]

[1] Kurt E. Kinbacher, Urban Villages and Local Identities: Germans from Russia, Omaha Indians, and Vietnamese in Lincoln, Nebraska (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2015), 3; “Immigration and Refugees,” in Salman Ahmed, Allison Gelman, Tarik Abdel-Monem, et. al., "U.S. Foreign Policy for the Middle Class: Perspectives From Nebraska," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 21, 2020, https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/05/21/immigration-and-refugees-pub-81773.
[2] Kinbacher, Urban Villages, 129-35.
[3] Kinbacher, 139-49; Fred Knapp, “Vietnamese community grows and changes,” Nebraska Public Media, https://nebraskapublicmedia.org/en/news/news-articles/vietnamese-community-grows-and-changes/. See also: Joseph Stimpfl and Ngoc H. Bui, "I'd rather Play the Saxophone: Conflicts in Identity between Vietnamese Students and their Parents," Ethnic Studies Review 19, no. 1 (Feb 28, 1996): 61.
[4] Ibid., 13.

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