Little Saigon, San Diego is a Vietnamese ethnic enclave in City Heights, San Diego, located on El Cajon Boulevard between Euclid and Highland avenues.
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Little Saigon, San Diego is a Vietnamese ethnic enclave in City Heights, San Diego, located on El Cajon Boulevard between Euclid and Highland avenues.
The Little Saigon San Diego Foundation was established in November 2008 with a stated mission to "revitalize the densely populated Vietnamese business district of El Cajon Boulevard." [1]
On June 4, 2013, City Council approved Little Saigon Cultural and Commercial District in City Heights, which is a six-block section of El Cajon Boulevard from Euclid to Highland avenues. [2] The district would be known as a center for Vietnamese food and culture. Since 2013, the Little Saigon San Diego Foundation has organized one of the Vietnamese new year (Tết) events in the city with the annual Lunar New Year festival at the SDCCU Stadium, where proceeds would go towards developing and promoting the district.
On February 1, 2019, Little Saigon signs near the El Cajon Boulevard exits on Interstate 15 were unveiled. [3] [4] [5]
Interstate 8 (I-8) is an Interstate Highway in the southwestern United States. It runs from the southern edge of Mission Bay at Sunset Cliffs Boulevard in San Diego, California, almost at the Pacific Ocean, to the junction with I-10, just southeast of Casa Grande, Arizona. In California, the freeway travels through the San Diego metropolitan area as the Ocean Beach Freeway and the Mission Valley Freeway before traversing the Cuyamaca Mountains and providing access through the Imperial Valley, including the city of El Centro. Crossing the Colorado River into Arizona, I-8 continues through the city of Yuma across the Sonoran Desert to Casa Grande, in between the cities of Phoenix and Tucson.
Little Saigon is a name given to ethnic enclaves of expatriate Vietnamese mainly in English-speaking countries. Alternate names include Little Vietnam and Little Hanoi, depending on the enclave's political history. To avoid political undertones due to the renaming of Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City, it is occasionally called by the neutral name Vietnamtown. Saigon is the former name of the capital of the former South Vietnam, where a large number of first-generation Vietnamese immigrants emigrating to the United States originate from, whereas Hanoi is the current capital of Vietnam.
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El Cajon Boulevard is a major east–west thoroughfare through San Diego, La Mesa and El Cajon, California. Before the creation of Interstate 8 it was the principal automobile route from San Diego to El Cajon, the Imperial Valley, and points east as U.S. Route 80; it is now signed as a business loop of Interstate 8.
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