How This Cultural District in St. Paul Is Fighting Displacement

This piece is part of our Stories of Belonging series, which highlights people who have stepped up to protect their communities from displacement — of residents, small businesses, and the culture that makes a place home.

For most of the 20th century, St. Paul's Rondo neighborhood was home to a thriving Black community. Tucked into St. Paul's Summit-University district, Rondo's religious institutions, community centers, and businesses comprised a neighborhood that served as a hub for Black culture, housing, and economic prosperity across the entire Twin Cities metropolitan area — until the 1950s and ‘60s. That's when the government displaced roughly 650 families and wiped out businesses to construct Interstate 94, bisecting and decimating the beloved community in the process.

In 2006, when the Twin Cities' Metropolitan Council decided to extend Minneapolis' light rail to St. Paul via University Avenue, Va-Meng Thoj and other local business owners and community members were concerned, to say the least. Known as Little Mekong, a portion of St. Paul's University Avenue near the Minnesota State Capitol serves as a cultural hub for the Twin Cities' Southeast Asian community. After the Vietnam War, the U.S. government resettled the ethnic groups that partnered in the war efforts, and many refugees — Hmong, Lao, and Vietnamese — ended up in St. Paul. Amid lingering memories of what happened to Rondo, “many businesses, including Asian-owned businesses, felt that this was history repeating itself,†Thoj says.

So, in the years before Metro Transit's Light Rail Green Line construction began in 2011, Thoj and others with an interest in preserving the community that connects them to their homelands got together. They decided that they would need to advocate for themselves to ensure that the project would benefit them and that any harm it caused would be actively mitigated.

“We were just a collection of small business owners coming together to make sure that our voices were heard,†Thoj recalls. In 2009, with construction looming, the group decided they needed to establish a formal organization to have as much leverage as possible. That's when they became a formal nonprofit, calling themselves the Asian Economic Development Association, AEDA for short. Thoj is AEDA's founder and CEO.

The Green Line was completed in 2013. The community's advocacy, which included suing the federal government and pushing for more stops along the Green Line, ensured Little Mekong was not completely bypassed. Two rail line stops were added in the neighborhood.

Many businesses did perish during the construction, and those that survived are now facing higher rents as surrounding property values have increased. But, thanks in large part to AEDA's efforts, Little Mekong survived — it still exists as a cultural destination for the Southeast Asian community and beyond. “What AEDA has achieved is really the recognition that the Southeast Asian commercial corridor is worth preserving,†Thoj reflects.

Today, some 16 years later, AEDA is still serving the metro area's Southeast Asian community.

“We work with businesses that are under-capitalized by providing our own capital, leveraging the little amount of funding we have in the form of microloans, credit builder loans, and small grants so that they can access traditional capital,†Thoj explains. AEDA also provides entrepreneurs and small businesses with trainings that cover everything from business planning and operations to marketing, financial management, and recordkeeping, as well as one-on-one technical assistance. More than 300 Asian entrepreneurs have been supported by these services since 2018.

AEDA's work has also focused heavily on creative placemaking — the organization was responsible for branding the Little Mekong area in the first place. Through efforts like improving storefront facades, creating public spaces and public art, organizing large night markets, and running a cafe and bookstore, AEDA ensures that Little Mekong continues to be the vibrant cultural corridor that it is.

The organization also runs the Little Mekong Night Market, an annual event that it touts as Minnesota's largest summer street festival. In 2025, the market brought together more than 50 food, crafts, and merch vendors, and featured live performances and interactive art.

“These small business districts are really vital economically and culturally for their cities, providing important contributions that shape the local neighborhood fabric with unique identities and vibrant street activity. These communities are also immigrant gateways that provide opportunities for new and old immigrants to have housing they can afford and access to jobs and services,†explains Roy Chan, director of neighborhood and place-based strategies at National CAPACD, a nonprofit that supports a coalition of AAPI communities like AEDA across the country, chiefly those that are also low-income.

Through its Cultural Anchors program, National CAPACD offers members like AEDA the opportunity to connect with and learn from peer place-based organizations that advance comprehensive community development in Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities. “We are the conduit that provides the [opportunities for] learning so that members can learn best practices and lessons through engagement with each other,†Chan says.

The ability to come together, connect and learn, and move forward stronger that comes from the convenings has been particularly useful in the ICE era, during which AEDA members have been hit particularly hard in Minnesota.

When the ICE raids began in the Twin Cities early this year, AEDA closed its doors, its programs, and its bookstore-café for three weeks. “The intimidation was something we were not prepared for,†Thoj says. “We needed to be quiet so our people could be safe.†But the silence didn't last long.

After a few weeks, AEDA's staff trained as constitutional observers and began working with organizers in the neighborhood to go door to door to talk to families and document what was happening to them. Xia, the bookstore-café, opened back up as a support center where protestors could make signs and where people — anyone — could gather in order to be in community during a trying time. AEDA also launched a $100,000 small business support fund to try to close the gap created by the loss of customers and revenue caused by the raids for 20 local businesses that kept countless immigrants afraid and inside their homes for months.

Thoj says that it's going to take a long time for everyone, from immigrant businesses to the Twin Cities as a whole, to recover from the trauma they suffered (and are still suffering) from the brutal ICE raids they endured. But as they do, they'll be able to share what they've gone through and what they've learned with other organizations in their Cultural Anchors cohort — a small silver lining shining through a dark chapter in this country's history.

From surviving the displacement caused by major transportation projects that don't adequately consider the communities they're impacting to surviving the anti-immigrant violence of an authoritarian regime, value lies in survival itself. “Culture has an economic value,†Thoj says. “For many of us, we realize that as a given, but it's hard to put into practice. So it has to be intentional — leveraging the arts and culture of your particular community to combat gentrification, to preserve your small businesses, or to just increase community identity and pride.â€

Cinnamon Janzer is a freelance journalist based in Minneapolis. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, U.S. News & World Report, Rewire.news, and more. She holds an MA in Social Design, with a specialization in intervention design, from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a BA in Cultural Anthropology and Fine Art from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

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