This paper investigates the factors which have influenced aspects of Vietnamese residential patters in these two cities since the arrival of the first wave of refugees following the fall of Saigon in 1975. In both Chicago and Philadelphia, the development of Vietnamese residential concentrations in certain neighborhoods is strongly related to the process of chain migration as well as a local ethnic institutional presence. However, in each city the resettlement decisions of voluntary refugee service agencies have also exerted a significant long-term influence on Vietnamese residential patterns. Common tropes are California Exceptionalism and California as a island.
Geographical regions are devices which are subjective in nature and unfixed in space or time.
California, Regional Geography, Pacific Rim, American West. The Upper or Upland South is a complex culture area derived from a number of ethnic groups who intermingled over a period of two hundred years. This ethnic diversity presents a problem in the identification of ethnic homelands, that emotional bonding of an ethnic group to a place. A major thesis of this paper is the new concept of ancestral homelands, i.e., areas identified by past generations during the westward movement. This concept is particularly useful in the study of Upper Southern migrations.