Abstract
Stories of settling and civilizing a landscape often mask or conceal stories of displacement. Settling stories are often unsettling stories—and scholarship on urban settlement should strive to show both faces of the settlement process. This article analyzes interview excerpts collected between 2010 and 2012 from residents who have been evicted from an urban development site located across the Saigon River from Ho Chi Minh City’s central business district. I highlight how evictees evoke their own histories of settlement as a way of unsettling the triumphalist story of contemporary urban development in the city. Along the way, an unexpected, yet equally unsettling, irony emerges. The settlement stories evictees rely upon to prove their own status as legitimate urban settlers evoke the larger story of Vietnamese manifest destiny, which is also an unsettling tale of conquest, displacement, and settler colonialism.