Since her first apparition in 1798 in Vietnam, Our Lady of La Vang has been associated with miracles within the contexts of martyrdom and other life-threatening experiences, from curing illnesses to protection from war. In 1901, after more one hundred years since her first apparition, a French Bishop used a French model of Our Lady of Victories to represent Mary with her Vietnamese name -- “Our Lady of La Vang.” It was not until 1998, upon the 200th commemoration of her first apparition, that this statue was replaced. This time, Mary was represented as a Vietnamese woman, an image created by a Vietnamese American Catholic sculptor and largely funded by the Vietnamese Catholic refugee community in California. Although this Vietnamese image is a recent creation and the Vatican has not confirmed the historical accuracy of the apparition of Our Lady of La Vang, it has become popular throughout the world. This presentation focuses on the transplantation of Our Lady of La Vang in Silicon Valley within the context of the globalization of her iconography. This Vietnamese mediation of Marianism is not simply another ethnic reiteration of Mary. This paper argues that Our Lady of La Vang is an emblem of a deterritorialized nation of the Vietnamese Catholic diaspora.
