On a Saturday morning in Antioch, a woman pushes a trolley past sacks of glutinous rice stacked to shoulder height, picks up a bag of dried galangal, and orders papaya salad from a kitchen at the back of the shop. Nobody switches to English. This is what the Laotians in Nashville built out of an arrival that began with fifty five people stepping off a plane in 1980, and it is one of the largest Lao communities in the United States.
The Place
Nashville is a city of about 700,000 people in Davidson County, wrapped by a metropolitan region of roughly two million. Its reputation abroad is country music, hot chicken and Lower Broadway. That is downtown, and downtown is not where this story happens.
The Lao story happens seven miles south east, along Nolensville Pike, Antioch Pike and Murfreesboro Road, in the low brick strip centres and 1970s ranch subdivisions of South Nashville and Antioch. Nolensville Pike is now the most internationally mixed commercial corridor in Tennessee.
Keep going south east and the county line gives way to Rutherford County, to La Vergne, Smyrna and Murfreesboro. The Lao community does not stop at that line. It never has.
How It Became Laotian
The war nobody named, 1964 to 1975
Between 1964 and 1973 the United States dropped more than two million tons of ordnance on Laos, a country of roughly three million people, in a campaign that was never formally acknowledged. It was fought alongside Lao allies on the understanding that those allies would not be abandoned.
In December 1975 the Pathet Lao abolished the monarchy and declared the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. Officers, civil servants, teachers and anyone who had worked with the Americans were summoned to re-education seminars in the north east. Many did not return.
So people walked to the Mekong. They crossed at night, some on inner tubes, some paying boatmen, and came ashore in Thailand at Nong Khai. Between 1975 and the early 1990s something close to a tenth of the population of Laos left.
Nashville says yes, 1975 to 1985
On 23 May 1975 President Gerald Ford signed the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, which put Lao, Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees into a category the United States could admit. Nashville already had the necessary hands. Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Nashville had formally established a resettlement programme in 1972 at the request of the United States Catholic Conference, and from August 1975 it was funded to bring Southeast Asian families to Middle Tennessee. Between 1978 and the early 1980s the agency resettled roughly 3,000 refugees, most of them from Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia.
On 9 April 1980, fifty five Lao refugees landed in Nashville. They had come from camps in Thailand, and they arrived into a city that had almost no Southeast Asian population, no Lao grocer, no monk and no temple.
There had been one earlier. Chantho Sourinho reached the United States in 1972 as a student, and when Laos fell three years later he stayed and set about helping others come. That is the pattern almost everywhere Lao families settled: one person with English and paperwork, then a hundred behind them.
The jobs that held them, 1985 to 2000
Federal policy in the late 1970s deliberately scattered refugees across the country to avoid concentrating them. It did not hold. Within a few years families began moving to be near each other, and the reason Middle Tennessee drew them was industrial. Nissan opened its Smyrna assembly plant in 1983, twenty miles down Murfreesboro Road. Bridgestone was hiring. Samsonite ran a plant in Murfreesboro for years. These were jobs that paid without demanding fluent English or American credentials, and they were reachable from cheap housing in Antioch and La Vergne.
The community organised itself along that south eastern axis, from Nashville through La Vergne and Smyrna to Murfreesboro, which is roughly the shape it still has. Groups such as the Laotian Refugee Resettlement Association did the unglamorous work of interpreting, form filling and funeral arrangements.
Building the temple, 1995 onwards
A Lao community without a wat is a community holding its breath. In 1995 a group of Lao Buddhist refugees founded Wat Lao Buddharam on Old Nashville Highway in Murfreesboro. It now serves more than 200 families and a resident community of monks, and it functions as the region’s Lao centre of gravity.
Its Pi Mai Lao celebration, held over three days in May, has grown into one of the largest Lao New Year festivals in America, drawing crowds well past ten thousand. Alms are given at dawn, water is poured over Buddha images and then over each other, and the car parks fill with families from several states.
Nashville proper got its own temple later. Wat Lao Buddhapathip was founded in 2010 on Glenmont Drive in South Nashville, close enough to Nolensville Pike that you can do the week’s shopping and make merit in the same trip.
Buddhism is not the whole picture. Tennessee has roughly ten Lao churches, most of them Baptist and most with congregations between forty and a hundred. The oldest is Lighthouse Lao Thai Baptist Church in Antioch. Lao families in Middle Tennessee are frequently split across a wat and a Baptist church, and they attend each other’s occasions without much fuss.
Calling it Lao, 2015 onwards
For thirty years Lao restaurateurs in Nashville hung signs that said Thai. Americans knew what Thai food was, and a menu that said Lao meant explaining the country before you could sell the sticky rice.
That has changed within the last decade. Younger owners and second generation cooks began putting larb, jeow bong, sai oua and tam mak hoong on the board under their own names, and Nashville, which had spent those thirty years quietly eating Lao food and calling it Thai, turned out not to mind at all.
The Landmarks
Wat Lao Buddhapathip, 104 Glenmont Drive, Nashville. Founded in 2010, this is the Lao temple inside the city limits, tucked into a residential street off Glenrose Avenue in South Nashville. It is modest by the standards of temple architecture in Laos and entirely unmistakable once you find it, and it is where Nashville Lao families come for ordinations, funerals and the small weekly business of merit.
Wat Lao Buddharam, 5214 Old Nashville Highway, Murfreesboro. Founded in 1995 by Lao Buddhist refugees who wanted somewhere to practise, it has grown into a compound of shrine halls, sculpture and a mausoleum serving over 200 families. Its three day Pi Mai Lao festival in May is the biggest annual gathering of Lao people in the American South.
King Market and Laos Thai Cafe, 1801 Antioch Pike, Nashville. A family owned Lao and Thai grocery with a kitchen at the back, trading here for well over fifteen years. You shop for fish sauce and frozen pandan leaves in the front and eat papaya salad at a formica table behind the shelves, which is exactly how this kind of place works in Vientiane too.
C.R. Noodle House, 5270 Murfreesboro Road, La Vergne. Somphong Rattanavong reached the United States in 1981, sponsored by a church in New Mexico, and came to Tennessee in 1990. He opened this restaurant in a converted Asian grocery and named it for his children, Crystal and Ron. Ron runs it now, while his father still cooks the pho three times a week.
Nolensville Pike, South Nashville. Not a building but the spine of the whole thing, running south from downtown into Antioch. Along a few miles of it you can find Lao, Thai, Vietnamese, Kurdish, Mexican, Somali and Nepali groceries, which is why locals treat an afternoon on the Pike as the city’s real international quarter.
Lighthouse Lao Thai Baptist Church, Antioch. The oldest Lao church in Tennessee, and the reason a good number of Lao Nashvillians grew up with hymnals rather than sutras. Congregations like this one did much of the early work of English classes and driving lessons that nobody was paid for.
Catholic Charities of Tennessee, 2806 McGavock Pike, Nashville. The agency that met the plane in 1980 and thousands of arrivals afterwards. By 1995 it had assisted more than 10,000 refugees, and in 2008 it was chosen to run federal refugee funding for the whole state after Tennessee declined to administer the programme itself.
Where They Came From
The Lao of Middle Tennessee are overwhelmingly lowland Lao, the ethnic majority of the Mekong valley, rather than Hmong or Khmu or Mien. Their home provinces are the river ones: Vientiane, Savannakhet, Champasak and the towns strung along the water down to the Cambodian border.
That matters, because it is a different diaspora from the Hmong one. Hmong refugees from the northern highlands mostly went to Minnesota, Wisconsin and California, as in our piece on the Hmong of St Paul, Minnesota. The lowland Lao went to Fresno, the Dallas suburbs, and Middle Tennessee.
Almost everyone came the same way. Across the Mekong into Thailand, then months or years in a camp at Nong Khai or Napho, then a sponsorship form and a city they had never heard of. The Cambodians who filled the mill towns of New England, as in our account of the Cambodians in Lowell, Massachusetts, made a near identical journey.
Nashville Today
Census figures put around 6,300 Laotian Americans in Tennessee, and community estimates run closer to 7,000 once you count children and grandchildren who tick more than one box. It is a small number that behaves like a large one, because it is concentrated rather than scattered, and because the temple gives it a fixed address.
The pressures are the ordinary American ones. Antioch is no longer cheap. The 1980s arrivals are in their seventies now, and the monolingual Lao speakers among them depend on children who read English better than they read Lao script.
But the second generation has not left the room. Sophia Luangrath sits on the board of API Middle Tennessee. Chay Sengkhounmany is lead immigration attorney at the Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee, which is a very Lao Nashville career path: you get out, and then you turn around. Nokie Bayluangrath, who came from a Thai refugee camp to Alabama at the age of three and to Nashville in 1992, spent years cooking Lao food from a truck before opening a restaurant of her own.
Nashville has other communities that came through the same door. The city holds the largest Kurdish population in the United States, a story we tell in the Kurds in Nashville, Tennessee, alongside older layers such as the Jews of East Memphis and the newer professional migration in the Indians in Franklin, Tennessee. Nolensville Pike is where they meet.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Laotians live in Nashville?
Census figures record roughly 6,300 Laotian Americans in Tennessee, the large majority of them in the Nashville region. Community organisations put the working figure for Laotians in Nashville and Middle Tennessee nearer 7,000, which makes it one of the largest Lao concentrations in the country.
Where do Laotians live in Nashville?
The community is centred on South Nashville and Antioch, particularly around Nolensville Pike, Antioch Pike and Murfreesboro Road, and it extends south east into La Vergne, Smyrna and Murfreesboro in Rutherford County. Cheap 1970s housing and access to factory work built that corridor.
Why did Laotians settle in Tennessee?
Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Nashville was resettling Southeast Asian refugees from 1975, and it placed thousands of Lao, Vietnamese and Cambodian families in Middle Tennessee. Industrial employers including Nissan in Smyrna and Bridgestone then made it worth staying, and family sponsorship did the rest.
Is there a Lao Buddhist temple in Nashville?
Yes. Wat Lao Buddhapathip at 104 Glenmont Drive in South Nashville was founded in 2010. The larger regional temple is Wat Lao Buddharam at 5214 Old Nashville Highway in Murfreesboro, founded in 1995, which serves more than 200 families.
When is the Lao New Year festival near Nashville?
Wat Lao Buddharam in Murfreesboro holds its Pi Mai Lao celebration over three days in May, and it regularly draws more than ten thousand people, making it one of the largest Lao New Year festivals in the United States. The Lao calendar new year itself falls in mid April.
Where can you eat Lao food in Nashville?
King Market and Laos Thai Cafe at 1801 Antioch Pike is the classic grocery and kitchen combination, and C.R. Noodle House at 5270 Murfreesboro Road in La Vergne has been run by the Rattanavong family for over a decade. Many Lao owned restaurants in the area still trade under Thai branding, a habit from the years when Lao food had no name in America.
If your family’s story passed through Nashville, or any of the places Laotians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village on the Mekong in Savannakhet to a brick storefront on Antioch Pike, to wherever you are now.