Abstract
Holy mothers, specifically the Vietnamese-looking Our Lady of Lavang and Caodai Mother Goddess, are the crucibles of faith for many Vietnamese Catholics and Caodaists. Based on ethnographic data collected in California, which has the largest overseas Vietnamese population, I argue that Vietnamese refugees and their US-reared descendants have been able to re-centralize their fragmented communities through the innovative adaptation of holy mother worship. In particular, Vietnamese Catholics in the US have transformed the European image of Our Lady of Lavang into a Vietnamese woman and exported it to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, Vietnamese American Caodaists have revived traditional religious rituals for the Caodai Mother Goddess which were repressed and prohibited for many years under communism in Vietnam. Through their shared devotion to holy mothers, these Vietnamese American faithful have also rebuilt relations with co-ethnic co-religionists living throughout the world. For both the Vietnamese Catholic and Caodai groups, holy mothers have emerged as emblems of their deterritorialized nation in the diaspora.
Highlights
On the eight month of each lunar calendar year, Vietnamese Catholics and Caodaists flock in large numbers to the sacred sites of their holy mothers in Vietnam, the Vietnamese-looking Our Lady of Lavang and the Asian-looking Caodai Mother Goddess, respectively
In 1998, upon the commemoration of two hundred years after the first apparition of Our Lady of Lavang was reported, Vietnamese Catholics replaced this Western image with a Vietnamese version created by Vietnamese American sculptor, Nhan Van, who made the first Vietnamese image of the Virgin Mary outside of Vietnam (Ninh 2017)
As of 2016, there were more than 2 million Vietnamese Americans (U.S Census Bureau 2016), most of whom had arrived in the US as refugees after the fall of South Vietnam to communism in 1975 or were US-born descendants of these Vietnamese refugees
Summary
On the eight month of each lunar calendar year, Vietnamese Catholics and Caodaists flock in large numbers to the sacred sites of their holy mothers in Vietnam, the Vietnamese-looking Our Lady of Lavang and the Asian-looking Caodai Mother Goddess, respectively. Vietnamese American Catholics have visually transformed the European image of Our Lady of Lavang into a Vietnamese woman and exported it to the rest of the world, including Vietnam, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, France, the Netherlands, and Germany Their co-ethnic American Caodai counterparts have revitalized traditional Mother Goddess practices in order to preserve religious purity outside of the homeland. Figures emerge most vividly in contexts of pain, suffering, and mourning associated with displacement, isolation, and migration (Castañeda-Liles 2018; Ninh 2017; Truitt 2017; Fjelstad and Hien 2011) These are individual experiences, but spiritual mothers can conjoin refugees and immigrants across borders by facilitating sympathy, acceptance, and solace.
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