Linda Vista Asks, ‘Whose Community Is This?’

Old-timers will tell you that America’s very first shopping mall was in this San Diego suburb and that Eleanor Roosevelt came out to open it in 1942.

The original mall is gone, replaced by something a bit more contemporary. And, in place of the first mall supermarket--a Safeway--there’s Vien-Dong, which sells Buddhas and bran flakes, fish heads and Fudgsicles.

It is perhaps a metaphor for Linda Vista.

Early in World War II, this was an instant boom town--3,000 housing units built by the Work Project Administration for military personnel, aircraft and defense workers and their families descending on San Diego.

Those newcomers had much in common: They worked for the Allied cause (the B-24 Liberator was built at Consolidated Aircraft). And almost all of them were white.

Today’s Linda Vista, reshaped by another war, is a polyglot community of 45,000 where 26 languages are spoken and people of Asian descent make up about one-fourth of the population. Vietnamese, Hmongs, Laotians and Cambodians, brought here under a government-sponsored refugee resettlement program, live in those non-descript stucco-and-frame buildings.

The first big wave of Southeast Asian immigrants came in the mid-’70s, after the fall of Saigon.

In Linda Vista, as in hundreds of communities nationwide, everyday life has been turned upside down for old-timers and recent arrivals alike. The neighbors might not speak English. There are new sights and sounds and smells.

To learn more about how immigrants and longtime residents view their evolving community, the California Council for the Humanities chose Linda Vista as one of five sites for its “Searching for San Diego” project.

In a series of “neighborhood days,” which together attracted an audience of about 500, San Diegans old and new came together to discuss how things were and how things are. The Linda Vista program was held in the library.

There, Yen Le Espiritu, who fled Vietnam as a child in 1976 and is now an assistant professor of ethnic studies and sociology at UC San Diego, summed up the basic uneasiness: “Many people are beginning to ask, ‘Whose community is this, anyhow?’ ”

Because it is near Camp Pendleton, which was a major refugee resettlement center after the Vietnam War, Linda Vista was for many the first stop in America. Sandra Camarillo, who owns the local McDonald’s, had worried: Would these newcomers know hamburgers? (They learned.) Today she says, “I think I’m the only McDonald’s on the mainland that serves steamed rice.”

The real Americans “can’t help but feel a sense of loss,” Espiritu said. Their libraries, their stores, their restaurants “no longer cater to their needs.”

But, she pointed out, immigrants have lost their country, their past. And they still find much about their new homeland bewildering.

Are the immigrants the bad guys? Not necessarily, she suggested, noting that in Linda Vista there were landlords eager to oust tenants and seize the chance to get the higher rents guaranteed by the government in the resettlement. For the landlords, there was added incentive: The refugees promised to be a stable population, having neither the job nor the language skills to move out.

Finally, she said, “Newcomers have a funny way of becoming old-timers very quickly.” The definition of newcomers somehow becomes “the people who came later than us.”

Regina Smith, a 30-year resident who heads the Friends of the Library, said of the Southeast Asian influx, “It was a shocking change for us.” She added, “It’s turned out to be a wonderful change.”

But, said Margarita Castro, at first, “there was a lot of resentment” of the newcomers. “It hasn’t been a bed of roses.”

Castro, a Linda Vistan for 26 years and a former member of its Planning Commission, said she’s seen everything--including an Indochinese family slaughtering a pig by hitting it with sticks. Neighbors had to explain, “We don’t do that in the United States.”

She told how some women would sit bare-breasted on their porches. She told of the emergence of Vietnamese and Laotian and Cambodian gangs. And of price gouging by some immigrant merchants who found a captive market. (Sitting on a mesa north of Mission Valley, Linda Vista is somewhat isolated for those who don’t drive.)

The Castros have a paid-up home, but she doubts that any of their three children--one a doctor, one in college, one still at home--will want to live in Linda Vista.

Still, Castro said, “Wherever my kids go, they’ll be able to get along with anybody. That’s what Linda Vista offers.”

For lunch on the library patio, there were egg rolls and noodles--and Yum-Yum doughnuts.

Afterward, The Hmong/Lao Dance Group performed inside the library. Last Fourth of July, Smith recalled, a U.S. military tank was brought into this library. She’ll never forget how the elderly Indochinese women came up to touch it, to peek inside.

They’d last seen one of those in Vietnam.

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“Searching for San Diego” will conclude with the 1993 public humanities lecture by Pulitzer Prize-winning author N. Scott Momaday. He will speak on “Power of Place” at 8 p.m. June 4 at San Diego City College. Information: (619) 685-5952.