Vietnamese food entrepreneurs in Bangkok’s Baan Yuan: everyday emplacement and ethnoreligious identity in a multicultural historical quarter

This article examines how Vietnamese food entrepreneurs subjectively experience and continuously reconfigure identity and difference through their engagement with the unique spatio-temporalities of Baan Yuan, Samsen – a community characterised by its shared Christian faith, the prominence of Vietnamese cuisine, and the enduring continuity of food entrepreneurship in Bangkok, Thailand. Through the lens of spatio-temporal emplacement, the findings indicate that these entrepreneurs actively negotiate and instrumentalise their ethnoreligious identity – as Vietnamese and/or Catholic Christians – across interrelated forms of othering that emerged from post-World War II geopolitical realignments to transform cultural difference into socio-political and entrepreneurial capital. Everyday entrepreneurial emplacement entails spatio-temporal negotiations, thereby contributing to the construction of porous urban spaces and shaping Bangkok’s cosmopolitan trajectories from below.