UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the impact of Vietnam's Great Migration. During a 300-day period between 1954 and 1955, over 860,000 people, many of them Catholic, fled from northern Vietnam to the South. The transmigration profoundly reshaped Vietnamese society and politics. Representing nearly 4% of the entire population of Vietnam in 1954, the refugees arrived in the South homeless, jobless and often separated from family. The overwhelmed regime struggled to resettle migrants in hundreds of haphazard villages in South Vietnam. These villages consisted entirely of northern migrants, often from a single parish or village in the North, and directed by northern Catholic priests. The new villages quickly adopted regional and religious customs peculiar to the homes their inhabitants left behind. At the same time, southerners resented the recent arrivals as carpetbaggers favored by the government. This prompted the government to withdraw assistance to these new villages. As a result, ironically, northern migrants became even more reliant on traditional regional customs and religious institutions in order to overcome the many pressures and struggles they faced in this new land. Finally, the migration and resettlement left indelible marks on the culture, arts, politics and society of Vietnam that are still felt today.

This dissertation differs from existing scholarship on the subject in its emphasis both on Vietnamese actors as agents of history and the migration as a crisis that affected every aspect of southern society. Instead of portraying the northern migrant community as the privileged loyalist bloc of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime, this project reveals how the refugees faced countless struggles and disappointments in places that proved inhospitable. Moreover, this project challenges the long held assumption of a close alliance between Diem and the Catholic Church in Vietnam. The migration and resettlement process caused deep division in all aspects of society and contributed to the regime's ultimate collapse.