The Little Saigon Storytelling Initiative: Spotlight on DENVER CREATES Fund Grantee, CAPU

In Denver's Federal Boulevard corridor, a neighborhood built by refugees and immigrants hums with the energy of family-owned restaurants, small businesses and decades of community life. This neighborhood is Little Saigon, and for the people whose lives revolved around it, preserving its story is urgent.

Colorado Asian Pacific United’s (CAPU) Little Saigon Storytelling Initiative is a community-led effort to document and share the experiences of Southeast and East Asian communities who have shaped Denver and the Federal Boulevard neighborhood through multimodal storytelling that spans oral histories, visual art, exhibition and film. At every step, the work has been driven not by outside experts, but by the very people whose stories are being told.

"We really try to move at the speed of trust of that community," said Jasmine Chu, CAPU's Programs Manager. "What that looked like for us was going to Little Saigon and doing community listening sessions, figuring out how people wanted their stories to be told."

Those listening sessions evolved into a partnership with History Colorado's Museum of Memory, through which CAPU collected 36 oral histories from refugees and immigrants in the Little Saigon community. Crucially, the process was guided by community liaisons, trusted members of Little Saigon who not only gathered stories but shared their own.

"It was kind of a give and take," Chu said, "which was so important in a community that is often really hesitant to open up."

Those oral histories became the foundation for Big Dreams in Denver’s Little Saigon, an exhibition now on view at the History Colorado Center.

The exhibit is the product of a true co-curatorial process: paid community partners worked alongside History Colorado's curatorial team to select every text panel, label, photograph and object. The result is an experience as multisensory as the neighborhood itself, organized around the sights, smells, sounds and stories of Little Saigon, with original commissioned artworks and bilingual programming in English, Spanish and Vietnamese.

For Ivy Ha, an oral historian of the Little Saigon community, the impact of the exhibit and seeing her story told was profound. “I've been suffering, hiding all this inside my heart, and I just thought, ‘I ignore, I don't want to talk,’” Ha said. But once she told her story for the Little Saigon Memory Project, things changed. “I was crying. I'm really thankful.”

The impact isn't staying inside the museum walls, either. Business owners in Little Saigon have reported visitors arriving at their shops wearing History Colorado stickers. It’s a small but meaningful sign that the exhibition is actively driving connection between Denver's cultural institutions and the community whose story it tells.

Additionally, a teacher professional development workshop is planned for July at History Colorado, bringing educators into the exhibition to develop lesson plans on Little Saigon's history for their classrooms.

The initiative has also grown to include a feature-length documentary, There's a Lane for Us Here, directed by Hannah Tran of Lionheart Motion Works, a filmmaker with her own ties to Little Saigon. What started as a planned 30-minute short expanded when Tran's vision grew to match the magnitude of the stories she was collecting.

CAPU has been working alongside her ever since to help realize that vision, most recently hiring archival producer Hannah Tsai Kim, whose credits include Hope in High Water, a documentary currently streaming on Peacock, to gather the historical materials, photographs and documentation that give the film its foundation. A Vietnamese-speaking research assistant has also recently joined the team, ensuring that materials can be collected in the language people feel most comfortable using.

A 20-minute preview of the film will be screened this September at the 2026 Asian & Pacific Islander Americans in Historic Preservation Forum, which is making is taking place in Colorado for the first time ever, a fitting setting for work this rooted in preservation. A full release of the feature-length film is anticipated in 2027.

None of this would have been possible at the scale it has reached without the DENVER CREATES Fund, one of Denver Arts & Venues' investment in the city's cultural community. The grant has supported CAPU in paying community liaisons, compensating co-curators and pursuing the kind of deep, time-intensive community partnership that this work requires.

"It's truly about telling stories that haven't been told before, or feeling like there is a comfortable space to tell those stories,” said Shanna Shelby, program manager at Denver Arts & Venues who helps manage the fund. "CAPU is working to not only tell the story visually through the exhibition, but also through filmmaking, which is an expensive process. It’s really important to try and support where we can."

For Chu, the measure of success is simple: "The stories of Little Saigon are important because the contributions of refugees and immigrants who built this neighborhood are so vital to the culture, creativity, business and really the fabric of Denver and Colorado as a whole."

The work isn't slowing down. CAPU recently published a community preservation study for Little Saigon that translates years of community listening into six concrete recommendations for addressing the pressures facing the neighborhood.

“As we were listening to these stories, we were listening to folks’ fears, concerns, and real problems that they’re having in this neighborhood as well as their ideas and their hopes for the future,” Chu said. “We couldn’t just listen to these stories and not try to do something about this and support this neighborhood.”

“If you are seeing press about various pressures in the neighborhood, there is something that you can do,” Chu emphasized. “There are ways that we can support growing together and really centering the people most impacted by these changes.

The Little Saigon Preservation Study can be downloaded at tinyurl.com/LittleSaigonStudy. The Big Dreams in Denver’s Little Saigon exhibition is on view at the History Colorado Center through October 5, 2026. Plan your visit at historycolorado.org, and follow CAPU at coloradoasianpacificunited.org for updates on the film and upcoming programming.