Before dawn on Point Cadet, the diesel engines cough and catch one by one, and the green trawl nets hang like Spanish moss from the booms. A man checks his rigging in the dark, the way his father did on a different sea, half a world away. The boat names are painted in two alphabets. The shrimp are the same shrimp the Croatians chased a century ago, and the Cajuns after them, and now the Vietnamese chase them too, out past Deer Island into the warm green water of the Sound.
The Vietnamese in Biloxi did not come for the casinos or the beach. They came because the water here felt like home, and because the work was the work they already knew.
Point Cadet: The Place
Point Cadet is the eastern tip of the Biloxi peninsula, where the Back Bay meets the Mississippi Sound and the working harbor crowds against the shore. East Biloxi runs west from there along Howard Avenue and Oak Street, a low grid of shotgun houses, seafood docks, and small markets between US-90 and the bay. The land sits barely above the tide, a few feet of sand and shell between the neighborhood and the Gulf. Deer Island lies just offshore, a green smudge that breaks the horizon.
How Point Cadet Became Vietnamese
Before the Vietnamese
Point Cadet was nearly empty until the seafood industry arrived. The first shrimp and oyster cannery opened on the Point in 1882, and others followed fast, and the factories needed hands. Owners shipped in seasonal workers from Baltimore, brought in Cajun families from southwest Louisiana, and recruited Croatians and other Slavs from the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic, fishermen fleeing the troubled Austro-Hungarian empire for work they already understood.
About 250 of those Slavic families settled the peninsula, first in cannery camp housing, then in cottages they built themselves. They raised St. Michael’s, the Fishermen’s Church, as a mission in 1907, and dedicated the Slavonian Lodge on First Street in 1938. By the time the Vietnamese arrived, Point Cadet had been an immigrant seafood neighborhood for nearly a hundred years. The newcomers were stepping into a pattern, not breaking one.
The Vietnamese Arrive
The first family came on a recruiter’s promise. In 1977 Richard Gollott, who ran Golden Gulf Coast Packing in Biloxi, needed people to shuck oysters and heard that Vietnamese refugees were working the seafood plants in New Orleans. He shuttled laborers across the state line for a week, then persuaded one family to move to Biloxi for good. They were among the boat people who had fled after the fall of Saigon in 1975, many of them coastal fishing families from central and southern Vietnam.
Chain migration did the rest. One family wrote to another, a cousin followed a cousin, and the warm-water fishery that had felt impossibly foreign to the first arrivals began to feel familiar. They settled in East Biloxi’s Point Cadet and along the Back Bay, where the docks were close and the rent was cheap. They picked shrimp and shucked oysters on the factory line, long hours at piece rates, and they saved.
What they were saving for was a boat. Ownership came faster than anyone expected. A family would buy an old trawler, work it as a crew, then buy another, and the money stayed inside the network of relatives and parishioners who had crossed the ocean together. By the 1990s the Vietnamese owned a large and growing share of the Gulf shrimp fleet, and a 2009 federal survey found that roughly a quarter of permitted Gulf shrimp boats were owned by people with Southeast Asian surnames. Today the Vietnamese make up the majority of Biloxi’s active shrimpers.
Point Cadet at Its Peak
By the early 2000s, Oak Street had become a small Little Saigon. The 2000 census counted 1,717 Vietnamese residents in Biloxi, about three percent of the city, and roughly 2,500 lived in East Biloxi before 2005. There were pho shops and a Vietnamese grocery, a Buddhist temple and a Catholic church within a few blocks of each other, and at Lunar New Year the firecrackers and the smell of incense carried down toward the harbor.
The community kept one foot in the old country and one on the dock. Children translated Coast Guard paperwork for parents who could not read English. Grandmothers grew lemongrass and Thai basil in buckets behind the shotgun houses. The same families who shrimped all week filled the pews of Vietnamese Martyrs on Sunday, and every spring their boats joined the rest of the fleet for the Blessing, a Catholic ritual the Croatians had started in 1929 and the Vietnamese now made their own.
The Change
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina put East Biloxi under water. Point Cadet took the storm surge head on, the casino barges tore loose from their moorings and slammed ashore, and block after block of the Vietnamese neighborhood was reduced to slab and splinters. Boats sank at the dock or ended up in the streets. Nearly the entire community was scattered, and many of the elderly never came back.
The recovery was slow and largely self-organized. Boat People SOS opened a Gulf Coast office to help families repair homes and vessels and navigate the paperwork of disaster aid, and the Steps Coalition formed in 2006 to give East Biloxi a voice in how the coast would be rebuilt. Then, just as the fleet was finding its feet, the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, 2010, and the BP oil spill closed the waters and the season with it. Two body blows in under five years tested whether the neighborhood would survive at all.
The Landmarks of Vietnamese Biloxi
Vietnamese Martyrs Catholic Church (Oak Street, East Biloxi). Founded in 1979 for the new refugees, the parish first worshipped inside St. Michael’s, the old Fishermen’s Church, before building its own home in 2000 under Vietnamese Dominican priests from Calgary. After Katrina it added a shrine to Our Lady of La Vang in 2005, and it remains the spiritual anchor of the community, where boat blessings and funerals and Tet all run through the same doors.
Chua Van Duc Buddhist Temple (179 Oak Street). Biloxi’s Vietnamese Buddhists opened their first pagoda in December 1988, when a visiting monk greeted fifty worshippers, and the congregation later established Chua Van Duc a short walk from the Catholic church. The members paid the passage from Vietnam for their resident nun so the temple would have a spiritual leader of its own. On Oak Street the temple bell and the church bell are almost neighbors.
Le Bakery (280 Oak Street). Sue Nguyen-Torjusen, born in San Diego to parents who fled Saigon in 1975, came to Biloxi as a girl when the family drove cross-country in 1982 and stayed. Her father, a chef, died in 1999, and in 2002 she opened a bakery that turns out French baguettes, Vietnamese banh mi, and Southern sweets all from one case. After Katrina flooded the shop, she painted a line on the plywood over the door promising the bread would rise again, and Le Bakery became one of the first places the scattered community gathered to come home.
The Biloxi Small Craft Harbor and the working docks. The shrimp and oyster docks along the Back Bay are the real heart of Vietnamese Biloxi, where the trawlers tie up between trips and the catch comes off the boats. This is where Richard Gollott’s seafood houses bought the labor that started everything, and where the second generation now sells to the same processors their grandparents picked shrimp for. The fleet here has been rebuilt twice in twenty years.
St. Michael Catholic Church (Point Cadet). The Fishermen’s Church began as a 1907 mission for the Slavic and Cajun cannery workers, and its shell-shaped sanctuary still presides over the Point. It hosts the annual Blessing of the Fleet each spring, when boats from every background in Biloxi, including the Vietnamese, file past a priest who sprinkles holy water for a safe and bountiful season. It is the one landmark that ties all of Point Cadet’s immigrant waves into a single line.
Huong Que market. The Le family’s first business, an Asian grocery named for the old country, opened to supply a growing community that could not find fish sauce or rice paper anywhere else on the coast. Stores like it turned Oak Street from a place where Vietnamese families merely lived into a place where they could be Vietnamese. The grocery shelves were a quiet measure of how many had come.
Where the Biloxi Vietnamese Came From
Most arrived in the exodus that followed the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the harder years after, the boat people who left by sea and waited in camps in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Hong Kong before resettlement. A great many were fishing families from the central and southern coast of Vietnam, people who had spent their lives on warm tropical water and recognized the Gulf for what it was.
That recognition is why they stayed. Refugees first landed wherever sponsors and camps sent them, often California or Texas, but those with salt in their blood drifted toward the Gulf Coast, where the climate, the shrimp, and the rhythm of the seasons matched the home they had lost. Biloxi, with its open seafood jobs and cheap dockside housing, caught a steady share of that drift. The same warm-water pull shaped the Vietnamese settlements in Versailles in eastern New Orleans and, far from any shrimp boat, the inland capital of Little Saigon in Westminster, California.
Point Cadet Today
The Vietnamese in Biloxi are still here, and still shrimping, which after Katrina and the spill is its own kind of victory. The fleet is smaller and grayer than it was, squeezed now by cheap imported shrimp and fuel prices more than by any neighbor, and some families have traded the boat for steadier paychecks in the casinos and the shipyards. The early frictions over crowded fishing grounds long ago gave way to a working coast where Vietnamese, Cajun, and Croatian captains share the same docks and the same weather.
Oak Street has thinned but not emptied. Le Bakery still sells out of banh mi, the temple and the church still hold their festivals, and the boats still line up for the Blessing of the Fleet every spring. The second generation grew up bilingual and split their loyalties between the water and the wider world. Some became deckhands and some became doctors, and a few of those doctors keep a parent’s trawler running on the weekends.
What endures on Point Cadet is older than any one community: the conviction that a family can arrive with nothing, work a hard coast, and turn salt water into a future. The Croatians proved it, and the Vietnamese proved it again, and the green nets still hang from the booms at dawn.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Vietnamese settle in Biloxi?
The Vietnamese in Biloxi were drawn first by jobs and then by the water. In 1977 a Biloxi seafood packer recruited the first Vietnamese family to shuck oysters, and the warm Gulf fishery felt familiar to refugees who had been coastal fishermen in Vietnam. Cheap dockside housing in East Biloxi’s Point Cadet sealed the choice.
Is Point Cadet still a Vietnamese neighborhood today?
Yes, though it is smaller than before Hurricane Katrina, which scattered the roughly 2,500 Vietnamese who lived in East Biloxi in 2005. Many families rebuilt, and Oak Street still has its Vietnamese church, Buddhist temple, bakery, and shrimp boats. The Vietnamese remain the majority of Biloxi’s active shrimpers.
What are the most famous Vietnamese landmarks in Biloxi?
The best known are Vietnamese Martyrs Catholic Church and the Chua Van Duc Buddhist temple, both on Oak Street, and Le Bakery, the banh mi institution at 280 Oak Street that helped the community regroup after Katrina. The Back Bay shrimp docks and St. Michael’s Fishermen’s Church, host of the annual Blessing of the Fleet, anchor the wider neighborhood.
Where did the Biloxi Vietnamese come from?
Most came as refugees after the fall of Saigon in 1975, leaving by boat and passing through camps across Southeast Asia before resettlement in the United States. Many were fishing families from the central and southern coast of Vietnam, which is why the warm-water Gulf fishery suited them so well.
When did the Vietnamese first arrive in Biloxi?
The Vietnamese in Biloxi date to the late 1970s, beginning with a single family recruited to a seafood plant in 1977. Chain migration through relatives and parish networks built the community through the 1980s and 1990s, when families moved from factory work into owning their own shrimp boats.
If your family’s story passed through a working harbor like Point Cadet, through a boat, a seafood line, or a parish that crossed an ocean, that history is worth keeping. Other Gulf Coast communities were built the same way, one arrival at a time.