Voting Together: Intergenerational Politics and Civic Engagement among Hmong Americans 9781503600430

Citation preview

Voting Together

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ASIAN A MER ICA A series edited by Gordon H. Chang The increasing size and diversity of the Asian American population, its growing significance in American society and culture, and the expanded appreciation, both popular and scholarly, of the importance of Asian Americans in the country’s present and past—all these developments have converged to stimulate wide interest in scholarly work on topics related to the Asian American experience. The general recognition of the pivotal role that race and ethnicity have played in American life, and in relations between the United States and other countries, has also fostered the heightened ­attention. Although Asian Americans were a subject of serious inquiry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were subsequently ignored by the mainstream scholarly community for several decades. In recent years, however, this neglect has ended, with an increasing number of writers examining a good many aspects of Asian American life and culture. Moreover, many students of American society are recognizing that the study of issues related to Asian America speak to, and may be essential for, many current discussions on the part of the informed public and various scholarly communities. The Stanford series on Asian America seeks to address these interests. The series will include works from the humanities and social sciences, including history, anthropology, political science, American studies, law, literary criticism, sociology and interdisciplinary and policy studies. A full list of titles in the Asian America series can be found online at www.sup.org/asianamerica

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Voting Together I n t er g enera t i o na l P o l i t ics an d C i v ic E n g a g emen t A m o n g H m o n g A mericans

Carolyn Wong

S t an f o r d U ni v ersi t y P ress S t an f o r d , C a l i f o rnia

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior ­University. All rights reserved. This book has been published with the assistance of the University of Massachusetts Boston. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wong, Carolyn, author. Title: Voting together : intergenerational politics and civic engagement among Hmong Americans / Carolyn Wong. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2017. | Series: Asian America | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data ­provided by publisher; resource not viewed. Identifiers: lccn 2016021289 (print) | lccn 2016019337 (ebook) | isbn 9781503600430 () | isbn 9780804782234 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Hmong Americans—Politics and government. | Political participation—United States. | Intergenerational ­relations—Political aspects—United States. | Hmong Americans— Ethnic identity. Classification: lcc e184.h55 (print) | lcc e184.h55 w66 2017 (ebook) | ddc 305.8959/72073—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021289 Typeset by Newgen in 11/14 Garamond

Contents

List of Tables, Figures, and Maps

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Preface

xv



1. Citizenship and Participation

1



2. Reconstructing Identity Narratives

45



3. Participation in Local Contexts

86



4. Views on Politics: From Leadership and the Grassroots

141



5. Human Rights Advocacy Across Borders

185



6. Deepening Intergenerational Participation

214

Appendixes A. Interview Questions for High School Students, 225  B. Interview Responses of High School Students, 228  C. Interview Questions for Adults, 232  D. Interview Responses of Adult Grassroots Participants, 236  E . Interview Responses of Adult Business and Service Professional Individuals Recruited from Phone and Online Directories, 241

Notes

247

Index

269

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Tables, Figures, and Maps

Ta bl es



1.1 Poverty and incomes of selected racial-ethnic groups in the United States



3.1 Hmong Americans in four cities: Social indicators

108



3.2 Hmong Americans in four cities: Economic indicators

112



3.3 Per pupil educational expenditures in four states, 2006–2010 118



3.4 Registered nonprofits by county, 2010

22

124

Fig ures



1.1 Mean per capita income of Asian American ethnic groups

23



1.2 Educational attainment of Asian American ethnic groups

25



1.3 Occupational distributions: US and Hmong population

26



1.4 Common occupations of Hmong Americans: Detailed categories 27



1.5 Two photographs of young campaign volunteers, St. Paul, MN, 2010

31



2.1 A photograph of Tou SaiKo Lee and his grandmother Zhoua Cha

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x

Tables, Figures, and Maps

M aps



1.1 Migration of Hmong Americans across regions of the United States, 1995–2000

18



1.2 In-migration of Hmong Americans to WI, MN, NC, and CA from other states, 1995–2000

19

Acknowledgments

I thank all the community participants who shared parts of their life story and rich insights for contributing to the research. Many colleagues and research assistants helped with this project. Special thanks are owed to Chai Lee, who led a team of undergraduate research assistants from four academic institutions. Chai continually offered inspiration and thoughtful suggestions, helping me learn from literature on the Hmong diaspora, refine the research design, conduct and transcribe interviews, and interpret findings. The team of research assistants was based at Carleton College and also included students from California State University–Fresno, Stanford University, and University of North Carolina–Charlotte. The team members included PaChia Yang, Via Yang, Fue Thao, Pa Lor, Gao Yang, Meena Xiong, Yer Yang, Koua Her, Derek Vang, Bill Vang, Sasah Xiong, Lilian Thaoxaochay, Mai See Vang, Arasely Linares, Lilisee Thao, Malee Yang, Xiao Zhou Zhu, and Claire Yanjing Du. Pao Xiong and Xai Lor provided additional research assistance. Several colleagues and research assistants helped with compilation of data shown in census-based maps and tables: John Her, Xinxin Xie, Meg Her, Wei-shin Fu, and S. S. Rishard. I was fortunate to receive helpful suggestions about the project from many colleagues, including Mai Na Lee, Gary Yia Lee, Kou Yang, Mark Pfeifer, Karthick Ramakrishnan, Andy Aoki, Pei-te Lien, Paul Watanabe, Mae Ngai, Naran Bilik, Zhang Xiao, Yu Xiao Long, Robert Entenmann, Barbara Allen, the late Roy Grow, and Mary Lewis Grow. Lee Pao Xiong

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xii Acknowledgments

led a 2010 study tour to Thailand and Laos, where I was able to learn about the history and contemporary life of the Hmong in these two countries. Neal Thao gave advice on the translation of survey instruments. Parts of the manuscript were presented at panels of two annual meetings of the ­A merican Political Science Association, as well as the Association of Asian American Studies, the Boston Immigration and Urban History Seminar, and a seminar hosted by the Asian American Studies program at the ­University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. I thank the panelists and workshop participants for their excellent comments. Linda Lee and Yang Lor helped me explore the scholarly literature on the Hmong in Asia and the United States when the project was first conceived. I thank Pam Tau Lee and Ben Lee for insights into research questions to pursue. At conferences and during reading groups and dinner conversations, Eric Shih, Hai Binh Nguyen, Linda Tran, Alex Tom, Calvin Miaw, Timmy Lu, Owen Li, Michael Liu, and May Louie joined me in lively conversations about the Hmong American experience and its relationship to Asian American history and American politics. Nou Her, See Yee Yang, Mai Ka Moua, Jay Xiong, Mike Vang, Molina Tang, and Jonathan Eidsvaag contributed to ongoing academic conversations and a research conference at Carleton College on the experience of the Southeast Asian American in 2007. Many of the questions and themes explored in this book were discussed by students and faculty members at these sessions. At the Institute for Visualization and Perception Research, University of Massachusetts–Lowell, Georges Grinstein, William Mass, and Jim Giddings provided assistance by creating maps of electoral districts in St. Paul and Fresno on the Weave platform. Chai Lee, Mai See Yang, Mai Neng Yang, Mai Na Lee, Alice Wong Tucker, and Pao Her read drafts of the manuscript in part or in its entirety, contributing helpful suggestions. Brian Wong, Susan Stone Wong, Emily Wong, Julia Wong, Daniel Wong, the late Steven Stone, and Som Stone contributed fresh perspectives on the research when we discussed it at family gatherings. Two reviewers provided detailed comments on the manuscript, enabling me to improve it. I thank Kate Wahl, Eric Brandt, and Margo Irvin at Stanford University Press for their assistance in publishing this work. Gor-

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don Chang, editor of the Asian America series, gave ongoing support and thoughtful advice. I am especially grateful to my mother, Rose Wong, for proofreading and editing multiple drafts. I’d also like to thank the project manager at Newgen North America, Jay Harward. Katherine Faydash performed the copyediting, Diane Il Grande proofread the text, and Jay Marchand indexed the book. The dean of Carleton College provided support for research assistance and travel. All errors are of course solely my responsibility.

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Preface

One of the legacies of the Vietnam War is the story of the Hmong refugees from Laos who resettled in the United States at the end of the military conflict in Southeast Asia. It is estimated that, when the communist forces prevailed in Laos in 1975, 13 percent of the country’s population fled as refugees. Most of the refugees were ethnically Hmong and resettled in the United States in the decades following the war. The story of the Hmong refugees’ harrowing exodus from Laos has been told in riveting autobiographical accounts, historical narratives, poetry, and spoken-word performances since the war. Their escape to Thailand has been reenacted on the stage in community theaters and performed by children in public parks. The wartime experience of the Hmong was the subject of congressional hearings during the 1990s, when Hmong veterans of the Secret War in Laos, an arena of the Vietnam War, demanded recognition for their service in aiding the US military. Forty years after the end of the war, however, few Americans know much about the history of this ethnic minority group from a small and distant country in Southeast Asia. In the scholarly literature, little attention is given to what bearing this ethnic history has on the process of immigrant inclusion or the meaning of citizenship to new Americans. Living in small ethnic communities or scattered across urban and suburban neighborhoods, many Hmong Americans are culturally isolated. The Hmong of Laos practiced a subsistence agriculture, and most were preliterate when they came as refugees to the United States. They might easily be ignored and neglected as xv

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an “invisible” minority group. Yet in the first decade of this century, the residents of several US cities have taken note of the political energy and acumen of Hmong Americans, particularly the American-educated offspring of the adults who came as heads of refugee families. Running successful campaigns for local and state elected office—primarily in California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin—a growing number of younger Hmong Americans have called attention not only to their people’s long and compelling ethnic story but also to the community’s more pressing contemporary needs. The spokespersons of a younger generation of Hmong Americans are forging new paths in projects aiming for the Hmong Americans to be fully included and recognized as contributors to the American community. The lessons from their efforts are not yet widely discussed in the national discourse on immigration, but they are becoming part of the political history of local cities and metropolitan areas. In part, what can be learned from the Hmong American experience is the meaning of citizenship to immigrants of refugee origin. Internationally, the number of persons displaced by other wars and thrust into refugee status has grown to unprecedented levels. In 2015, the United Nations’ refugee agency, UNHCR, reported that 59.5 million persons were displaced, forced to leave their homes because of violent conflict and persecution. Among those persons, nearly 14 million had been displaced in 2014 alone, and about half were children.1 Providing safe haven and shelter for refugees is a daunting challenge for the international community. Beyond the immediate crisis, national policy makers and leaders in local communities of resettlement have been called upon to help forge opportunities and assistance for the refugees so that they can rebuild a stable livelihood. The interviews conducted in the field reveal that leaders and ordinary members of Hmong American communities share and frequently express a yearning for a freedom infused with meaning derived from a collective history of marginalization and oppression as a minority ethnic group in Asia. The identity narratives of the Hmong recount repeated experiences of territorial displacement as refugees. From ancient times, in each new place of settlement in China and Southeast Asia, the Hmong were never recognized as full members of political society or majority social institutions. Some modern-day ethnic leaders have hoped to eventually win a Hmong national homeland, but most members of the ethnic group fight simply for the right to live with some minimum degree of economic security and to practice

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an ancient culture that defines their identity. Without the protection of a nation-state, the Hmong of Asia had no ground on which to contest the most elemental human rights for themselves. The Hmong in America continue to think of their quest for liberties in this historical context, and like members of other American ethnic groups with refugee origins, they hope to use their settled position as citizens of the United States as leverage in ­international efforts to gain human rights protections not only for themselves but also for relatives and coethnics abroad. The notions of full membership in the body politic are also influenced by the egalitarian tradition of the American civil rights movement. Hmong American social activists have expressed support for, and some identify with, the politics of redressing racial inequality, recognizing the contributions of Hmong culture in American society, and attaining parity of opportunity in education and the workforce. In this book these goals are considered within the framework of a theory of social justice defined by Nancy Fraser in terms of participatory parity—or the ability to participate as equal members of society without systematic hindrances.2 A close examination of the struggles of Hmong Americans to attain participatory freedom and parity can shed light on the process by which new citizens become fully included in national and local communities. In the American system, some elementary knowledge of the nation’s history and laws is required of naturalized citizens. For a new American to discover the deeper meaning of being a US citizen, however, requires sustained interaction with members of the political body. The encounters and associations established between immigrants and longer-term US residents and citizens have a reflexive character. The new citizen not only assimilates a political culture but also introduces new energy and perspectives to the political body by engaging in public life. Because of this two-way exchange, the immigrant’s process of citizenship inclusion has the potential for productive synergy: as immigrants learn about and affirm core ideals of democracy, their inclusion in the citizenry holds the possibility of invigorating and expanding its solidarities. Immigrants, however, frequently face formidable barriers to such a positive mutuality of exchange and interaction. Having come to America with few material resources and low levels of formal education, Hmong Americans have experienced high rates of poverty and linguistic isolation. ­Poverty increases their vulnerability to fear and prejudice toward ­foreigners,

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an obstacle in its own right. In communities where Hmong Americans have settled, the perception of cultural and racial differences among native-born residents too often can extend to distrust, fear, and even open hostility toward newcomers. To advance intercultural understanding and social inclusion, a growing number of young community activists educated in the United States have joined with elders to create projects to claim respect for Hmong American culture and history. In politics, members of a relatively young and US-educated segment of the community have focused on building community-level capacity to participate in elections and field candidates. These young Hmong American activists have spread awareness about the value of political participation as a path toward social inclusion and advancement of the Hmong American communities. I first became interested in political life in communities of ethnic Hmong in the United States when two Hmong Americans were elected to the state legislature in Minnesota. These events followed the winning of elected office by Hmong Americans on city councils and school boards in other Midwestern states. My colleagues and students in Asian American studies began to ask why the Hmong Americans, who came as refugees of the Vietnam War to the United States in the late 1970s and 1980s, seemingly jumped over hurdles to political participation. They seemed to steer their way through the local electoral system quite handily. Why were the Hmong Americans able to elect their own coethnic representatives in state and local governments less than three full decades after the first arrivals? In 2007, I helped organize some academic conversations to engage Hmong American students and faculty from around the United States to discuss these questions. The experience of Hmong Americans remained a new subject among political scientists studying Asian Americans. Important progress has recently been made. Although most national surveys do not include sampling strategies or language interpretation in interviews of Hmong-speaking individuals, the 2012 National Asian American Survey included the first sizable subsample of Hmong Americans. In results discussed in Chapter 1 of this book, the researchers found that Hmong Americans have a high rate of voting for Democrats and a high rate of voting among eligible citizens, as compared to other Asian American groups.3 The in-depth interviews reported in this book shed light on some of the underlying dynamics influencing this finding. This research also gives a more detailed portrait of a group that is often neglected in studies, such as that of

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the 2012 report of the Pew Research Center, “The Rise of Asian Americans,” which examines sociodemographic trends and values among eight Asian American ethnic groups but does not reveal the particularities of experience and political thinking of many smaller ethnic groups, including Hmong Americans, who present a very distinctive picture.4 The research assistants for this project were young Hmong American college students from the Twin Cities in Minnesota; Fresno, California; and Hickory, North Carolina. They were conversant in the traditional cultural practices of their families. As in other traditional Asian cultures, ­ancient beliefs dictate that the Hmong funeral is the most important ritual and event in the lives of Hmong families. Its importance stems from the veneration of ancestors. I had learned on a summer trip to study Hmong village life in southwestern China that at weddings sometimes parents and elders would toast the newly wedded couple by singing songs expressing the high esteem afforded to a career as a government official. My research assistant set out to listen carefully for similar themes in ceremonial songs. At a funeral ceremony held by a Lee clan in St. Paul during the summer of 2007, an officiating leader sang a qhuab kom, or a song of blessing. This is one type of funeral song that typically has the intent of bringing closure to a funeral. The lyrics included these lines: You the remaining sons stay focused And those of you who do well in education May you become government officials . . . May you live on to become kings and sovereigns.

Throughout an intercontinental diaspora, Hmong people continue the tradition of using such ceremonial songs to pass on wisdom from the deceased ancestor to the living.5 The intent of the qhuab kom is to inspire the children of the deceased person to look forward and imagine new possibilities for their future. It helps shift the focus of the family away from the hardship and pain felt during the funeral.6 It is common for the officiant at a funeral to perform songs instructing the living sons of the deceased about how to lead their future lives. In the funeral of the Lee clan, for example, the song lyrics including naming careers to which they should aspire. This instruction emphasized building affinity among members of the clan and service to the community. In particular, sons should not hunger for power or fight for government positions; if a younger brother wins a kingship, his

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older brother must support him. Young men should pursue education, and should they excel, they should go into government service. There are similar teachings in Hmong proverbs: “If you heed your parents’ advice when young, you will become the village chief when grown.”7 However, the respect for officials is sometimes coupled with a warning about the price government officials have exacted on Hmong families in collecting taxes. In another proverb, children are cautioned, “See a tiger and you will die; see a government official and you will be poor.” These themes reflect the memory of conflicts of economic interests between Hmong villagers and government authorities who represented the ethnic majority. Although the proverbs and songs have roots in ancient history, a “government official” in premodern China is a figure far removed from the democratically elected official or administrator in the contemporary United States. In antiquity, and even in recent history, the residents of Hmong agrarian communities often interacted with administrators of central or provincial governments who came to the village to collect taxes, typically placing an onerous burden on subsistence farmers. In my conversations with several Hmong American scholars, a few have commented on the historical line of Hmong leadership in Laos throughout the twentieth century to the present day. In the ethnic diaspora, there is a high regard for the talent of individual leaders and the historical precedent of political representation in Laos. The precedent set by these early Hmong leaders in Laos is likely one important factor helping motivate the desire of Hmong Americans to participate in politics and governance in the United States.8 In Hmong at the Turning Point, Yang Dao recounts a celebrated line of Hmong leaders in Laos. Under French colonial rule during the late 1910s to early 1930s, Lo Bliayao emerged as a political leader of the Hmong. He was followed by Hmong who were chiefs of subdistricts in the French protectorate before the Second World War. Three brothers of the Lyfoung family held higher office after 1947: Touby Lyfoung was deputy to the province chief of Xieng Khoung and vice governor of the same province; Toulia Lyfoung was elected to the Constitutional and National Assemblies; and Tougeu Lyfoung was a member of the National Assembly, a King’s ­Council.9 After Laos’s independence in 1954, a number of Hmong served in the National Assembly, including Tougeu Lyfoung, Touby Lyfoung, Ly Yia, Lao Chue Cha, Moua Sue, and others. In the mid-1970s during the Provisional Government of Laos, Yang Dao was appointed by the king of Laos to

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the National Consultative Council, the equivalent of the Laotian Congress. A Hmong woman has served on the eleven-member Politburo and as president of the National Assembly of Laos. The country’s current minister of justice, Chaleun Yiapaoher, is of Hmong ethnic background.10 My research team’s interviews of Hmong Americans revealed some of the complexities in the process of adapting traditional thinking about Hmong leaders as it evolved in Laos to the contemporary circumstances of politics in the United States. When Hmong American parents place a high valuation on careers in government, for example, this has helped encourage some young persons among the growing pool of political activists to consider running for elected office or to dedicate themselves to service in government in another way. There are many other influences on the career choices of young Hmong Americans, which vary as they do in any ethnic group, and individuals will decide to enter public service for other reasons, including personal proclivities, talents, and opportunity. To the extent that political careers are well regarded in families, this cultural view is a positive influence on expanded political participation. It also stands in contrast to the attitudes of many American and Asian American parents. More often these parents encourage children to enter careers considered more financially lucrative and freer from the turbulence of politics, such as law, medicine, engineering, the sciences, or business. Traditional notions of Hmong leadership are problematic. The idea that Hmong leaders serving in government should act principally as brokers for Hmong interests persists in the contemporary American context. Two elected officials, Blong Xiong and Mee Moua, discussed problems with this commonplace viewpoint in our interviews. As legislators, each served a whole district. Their responsibilities were wider than those perceived as appropriate for a “Hmong leader,” as often expressed by some older members of the ethnic community. American legislatures typically consist of members representing different districts and a diverse range of constituency interests. As a result, there is a need for individual members to build political alliances with colleagues across district lines. Educating older Hmong Americans who came from Laos as adults in these realities of governance in the United States and the limits of ethnic parochialism remains a challenge for the community. In conducting the empirical investigation for this book, the research team conducted in-person interviews of individuals in four principal l­ocalities

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and from a broad cross section of Hmong American communities, including leaders and ordinary citizens and residents. Invited to participate in the study, the research participants were asked to describe their understanding of politics and identity, how they regard citizenship and political participation, their criteria for choosing among political candidates, and concerns about their communities. Our aim was to evaluate responses in light of an analytical framework formed by integrating insights from various strands of an interdisciplinary scholarship on citizenship acquisition and inclusion. Informed by this theoretical scholarship, the history of the Hmong as a refugee group, and the narratives told by Hmong Americans, we sought to learn about the motivation of individuals to engage in politics and how they thought about the experience in politics. Observing the election campaigns of several Hmong American candidates in St. Paul from 2007 to 2010, the research team took note of the young volunteers’ energy in bringing elders into conversations about elections and to the polls. These activities have continued in subsequent elections, but it is still important to consider that political engagement can deepen and grow. The patriarchal thinking in clans persists. Clans are tightly knit and lines of decision-making authority are hierarchical. Participatory democratic deliberation is not customary. The cultural gaps in thinking between young people raised in the United States and their immigrant parents pose obstacles to community-wide collaborations. The following chapters examine the evolution of Hmong American politics, which is still in its early phases of development. Already active participants in recent elections in several US cities, Hmong Americans are exploring new avenues for expanding civic and political participation. Some projects are experimenting with the integration of traditional storytelling arts and contemporary spoken word to describe identity narratives. Alongside the community’s political leaders, Hmong American writers, musicians, craft artisans, and visual artists are forming a complementary body of work reinterpreting and constructing narratives of identity. Drawing on recollections of struggles for dignity and recognition in the homeland of their parents, this emerging generation of intellectual and grassroots spokespersons is constructing a living story. Among the most compelling themes is an ethnic people’s move from the status of a minority people living on the margins of states in their homeland to undertake a quest for equality and participation as American citizens.

Voting Together

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One

Citizenship and Participation

At the end of the Vietnam War, tens of thousands of Hmong adults and children fled from their homes in Laos to seek temporary refuge and protection in Thailand. One of many ethnic minority groups in Laos, the Hmong had been divided on both sides of a civil war fought between the reigning Royal Lao Government and the Pathet Lao communist insurgency. Those Hmong who had sided with the Royal Lao Government against the communists had a legitimate fear of retribution when the Pathet Lao declared military victory and prepared to establish the Lao People’s Democratic Republic in December 1975. The civil war in Laos was part of a series of wars that took place in Southeast Asia after the end of the Second World War. Beginning in 1946, the First Indochina War was fought principally in Vietnam by independence forces against French colonial rule; later, the war in Vietnam extended into the French protectorates of Laos and Cambodia. This regional conflict ended with the signing of the 1954 Geneva Accords, which included an agreement by France to withdraw its troops from Vietnam, as well as separate cease-fire agreements in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. It was not long before fighting broke out again in Vietnam, which had been temporarily divided under the 1954 Geneva Accords between a northern zone under the administration of the Viet Minh, an independence coalition led by the Communist Party, and a southern zone governed by the rival Republic of Vietnam. Again, the conflict in Vietnam grew to encompass interconnected civil wars in Cambodia and in Laos. Known popularly in 1

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the United States as the “Vietnam War,” the Second Indochina War began in the late 1950s and came to an end in 1975.1 Its intensity and regional scope were fueled by direct military intervention and various types of military assistance given by the United States and the Soviet Union to their allies. One hidden part of the Vietnam War is known as the Secret War in Laos. The United States, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam were technically obligated under an international agreement not to militarily intervene in the internal affairs of Laos because of that country’s neutrality. Instead of sending troops to assist the Royal Government of Laos in opposing the communists, the United States provided massive military assistance to the royalist government. Castle writes that the United States ran a “multibillion dollar U.S. aid program,” staged largely from Thailand and headed by the US ambassador to Laos, which “came to include a complex military logistics network, a civilian-operated airborne resupply and troop movement system, a multinational ground and air force, and the introduction into Laos of a limited number of U.S. military personnel.”2 The geography of Southeast Asia made Laos strategically important in the war. The small country is sandwiched between Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and Myanmar (formerly Burma). With shared borders with each of these countries, Laos stood at a geographic crossroads strategically vital to the war. Military supply lines from North to South Vietnam along the Ho Chi Minh trail ran through Laos. The status of Laos as a neutral state complicated matters for the foreign powers seeking control in the region. Laos had declared independence from France in 1953. At the 1954 Geneva Conference, representatives of the nine participating states agreed on “undertaking to respect the sovereignty, the independence, the unity and territorial integrity of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.”3 Subsequently, under the agreements of the 1962 Geneva Accord, the United States, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and eleven other states agreed with Laos to respect its neutrality under the International Agreement on the Neutrality of Laos, and the 1962 Protocol to the Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos prohibited the introduction of foreign regular or irregular troops, foreign paramilitary formations, and foreign military personnel into Laos. In addition, the protocol included a prohibition against the introduction of armaments, munitions, and war material generally, except for conventional armaments in quantities the Royal Government of Laos considered necessary for its national defense.

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The 1962 Geneva agreements did not prohibit the release of ordnance by US forces into the territory of Laos. It is estimated that the US forces dropped two billion tons of ordnance in Laos, with the principal aim of cutting off North Vietnamese supply lines that ran through a part of Laos.4 From 1964 to 1973, the American military ran B-52 bombing operations about every eight minutes, twenty-four hours a day. The Hmong played a critical role in missions to rescue downed American pilots. They also guarded the radars guiding the combat aircraft. On the rescue missions, thousands of Hmong lost their lives. On the ground, the guerrilla units under Vang Pao’s command were sometimes called “the Hmong Army,” but his units included soldiers of other ethnicities. Vang Pao’s units carried the main burden of the offensive ground operations in northeastern Laos after 1968, according to Castle. The Royal Lao Army was divided into five regions. Four of the five regions had Special Guerrilla Units (SGUs) funded by US military assistance to Laos. Major General Vang Pao was the commander of Military Region II. In the conflict, it is believed that, all told, there were more than thirty-five thousand Hmong war casualties and many more who incurred disabling injuries.5 As the American public became aware of covert US involvement in Laos, opposition to it grew. More widely, the tide of public opinion in the United States turned against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. The United States began reducing its troops in South Vietnam. By 1972, it was clear that the United States would withdraw. In April 1975, the communist forces in Vietnam and Cambodia prevailed. In Laos by that time, Vang Pao’s army had collapsed, and the Pathet Lao had taken increased control of a provisional coalition government. As the communist forces were mounting final attacks on military positions of the Royal Lao Army, Vang Pao requested and received air support from the United States for the departure of Hmong and Lao Theung (each a distinct ethnic minority group) military officers, civil servants, and their families from the air base in Long Tieng to Thailand. In May 1975, the CIA flew Vang Pao, his family, and some senior military officers to Thailand.6 The Hmong who did not receive this help from the United States left for Thailand in a mass exodus on foot. Families took flight with their small children under the cover of night with the hope of avoiding enemy fire. For those who reached the Laos side of the Mekong River, it was very hard to find a small boat to ferry them across the treacherous waters to Thailand.

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Typically, all that was available to assist them in crossing was a primitive flotation device. Eventually about fifty thousand Hmong adults and children survived and would find shelter in the Thai camps. Most resettled in the United States, beginning with a first wave in 1975. Other countries of resettlement included Australia, Argentina, Canada, France, French Guiana, and Germany.7 Between 1980 and 1996, about 130,000 Hmong refugees resettled in the United States.8 The number of persons of Hmong origin living in the United States grew by about 97 percent from 1990 to 2000, and by 40 percent in the next decade, reaching a count of 260,073 persons, according to the US Census.9 The Hmong who reached the Thai camps would be officially classified as refugees according to United Nations conventions.10 But as Minnesota state senator Mee Moua remarked in an interview with the New York Times in 2002: “We’ve always been viewed as refugees. As a people, we’ve never really had a country.”11 Moua had just been elected to the Minnesota State Senate, representing a district in St. Paul. The value of citizenship to people long regarded and treated as social outsiders, or “the other,” lies in its equalizing of status on moral grounds, as Mee Moua describes: There is this belief, there is this desire to believe without judgment that citizenship is the equalizer. . . . We know that that’s not the reality of the political, social, and economic world that we live in. People get treated differently because of skin color politics or ethnic and gender politics . . . but at the end of the day, the moral position that we come to is that it is because we fundamentally believe that our citizenship makes us all equal that then we are so offended when we are treated differently. . . . The difference here is that fundamentally, we have rights. . . . [T]he best symbolism of that is that when you go to vote, you get one vote, and it’s secret ballot and it all weighs the same.12

The dream of the Hmong “to have their own country” is a familiar theme in the oral literature preserved and recounted by Hmong Americans in the United States. Lee discusses how being “without a country” has meant different things in the past. One meaning refers to how the Hmong have been treated as social outsiders in the country where they live, whether or not they have formal citizenship status. Lee examines a second meaning represented by the aspiration of the Hmong for political autonomy, which may represent a desire to have their own sovereign country. This was the

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aim of Hmong messianic movements, which Lee shows had articulated the desire for a Hmong kingdom, influenced by ancient Confucian thinking about the “kingdom” as a mandate from heaven. The messianic leader in Laos represented a type of Hmong leader different from those prominent Hmong who held government positions under French colonial rule or in the independent constitutional monarchy of twentieth-century Laos.13 A third way in which the phrase “without a country” is sometimes used is in the discourse about the Hmong people’s own ethnic history to describe a status they have held in the international system as refugees. When the Hmong who left Laos were compelled to seek and receive protection as refugees after the Vietnam War, their status fit the criteria for refugee status as defined by the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees; that is, they were considered refugees owing to the “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, [being] outside the country of his nationality and . . . unable or, owing to such fear, . . . unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.”14 The Hmong who left Laos because of threats of reprisal—as the new regime regarded them as traitors or as collaborators with enemy forces— would not be formally classified as “stateless” or “without a country” under conventions of international law. Modern-day conventions classify a person as stateless if no country recognizes the individual’s citizenship status. The Hmong who fled Laos as refugees were still Laotian citizens, according to the national government of Laos, although UN authorities recognized that they had a legitimate fear of political persecution in their homeland. For the Hmong who longed for a homeland where they would be accepted and protected as citizens under the law, the fear of persecution fueled the feeling of being cast into the international system “without a country.” The refugee experience also forcefully underscored the value of citizenship to the Hmong as a matter of survival and human dignity. The work of Somers on citizenship helps clarify the significance and moral force of the Hmong Americans’ demand for citizenship rights in the United States. Somers builds on an argument advanced by Arendt that social inclusion and political membership are prerequisites for a person to have “any rights at all,” including the right to human life.15 Arendt pointed

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out how easily Western nations could remain silent when the Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust because their expulsion from German citizenship severed attachments to a political body. As stateless persons, without the “right to have rights,” they become “unrecognizable as fellow humans.”16 Hmong Americans have actively sought citizenship status because it affords equality of standing on moral grounds, as Moua suggests. When Hmong Americans are able to claim US citizenship rights, this increases the expectation of equal treatment. In turn, being a citizen helps motivate self-initiated action to claim rights or demand equal protection under the law when people are confronted with injustices rooted in systematic social and economic inequality. By 2013, not quite forty years after the end of the Vietnam War, about 88 percent of the Hmong American population held US citizenship status.

Identity and Participation One source of motivation to take part in politics is found in expressions of ethnic identity stories, which interpret a Hmong migratory history in Asia. A recurring set of themes focuses on the resistance to persecution, the defense of cultural ways of life, and a quest to be treated with dignity. The story line of a Hmong identity originates in ancient China. It is sustained to the present day with memories of an ethnic history extending through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and in places scattered across China and Southeast Asia. One of the difficulties anthropologists and historians have long encountered when carrying out research on the Hmong of China and Southeast Asia stems from complexity in ethnic terminology. Much like the term Asian American is a conglomerate category, which includes many ethnic subgroups, the term Miao has long been used to refer to many ethnic groups different from the Han, who ethnically comprise the majority of people in China. The term is used presently in China to refer to “a set of ethnic groups, all belonging to the same linguistic subfamily (the MiaoYao), from which the Hmong of Southeast Asia are descended and to which they are intimately related.”17 These ethnic groups include at least four subgroups—the Hmong, Hmu, Kho Xiong, and Hmao. In historical studies

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of the Hmong in China, scholars have noted that ancient texts refer to the Miao, and the category includes the Hmong as well as other ethnic groups. Researchers are unable to provide a definitive account of where and when the Hmong ethnic group originated. It is believed by many that the origins are in the Yellow and Yangtze River regions of China. Hmong identity narratives and Hmong legends name an ancient mythical ancestor, Chi You, who was the powerful rival of Hwang Di during the warring states period in pre-Imperial China, before its unification under Emperor Hwang Di, “the Yellow Emperor.” After Chi You’s final defeat at the hands of Hwang Di, the ancestors of the Hmong dispersed as the San (three) Miao tribes, according to the legends. The Hmong of China were targets of a long history of campaigns waged by the Han and Qing to subjugate ethnic minority groups. Tapp describes features of colonization campaigns directed against the Miao/Hmong in southwestern China. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, for example, central authorities sent Han officials to replace local chieftains. These moves sparked a series of revolts. In the early eighteenth century, Han Chinese moved in to occupy agricultural land of the Miao, establish military posts, and expropriate property, such as livestock. A succession of revolts of the Miao/Hmong included the Miao Rebellion of 1854–1873 against excessive taxation. There were revolts of the Miao throughout the nineteenth century. The Hmong began to migrate from southwestern China during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There are some indications that the first migrants came much earlier. Most experts agree, however, that the first large-scale migration of Hmong from Guizhou and Sichuan by way of Yunnan occurred in the mid-nineteenth century.18 Lee provides a commentary on the reasons for the migration to Southeast Asia, noting that some scholars identify economic reasons. The economic factors would be associated with the swidden agricultural production practiced by the Hmong. In growing opium poppy, for example, it is necessary to open up new agricultural plots in the forest as the soil of existing plots is depleted. Thus, a type of economic pull factor may have drawn the Hmong to Southeast Asia from China in search of untilled agricultural land.19 However, as Lee argues, there are reasons given in their own oral literature and the explanation is political; that is, the Hmong point directly to Chinese attempts to conquer, expropriate their lands, subdue, and force assimilation into the outsider’s

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culture. The Hmong “say they sought new land in order to survive physically and culturally.”20 The themes of a migration induced by persecution and wars of conquest flow through an oral literature that informs and memorializes the identity of the Hmong people of Southeast Asia. Symonds provides an example in the translation of the song “Many Mountains,” found in her anthropological study of cultural beliefs and practice of the White Hmong in a northern Thailand village. The song lyrics, excerpted here, include a reference to Xieng Khoung in Laos: We birthed our sons and daughters, Buried our fathers and mothers. We fed the spirits and our ancestors were happy. And so we lived Until our fathers died when Ming slashed his wrists And Manchu marched onto the throne. Into the earth Our brothers and fathers decayed, Our ancestors mourn In the cry of the lightning and the moan of thunder. Centuries passed And spirits haunted in the search of shallow brooks To quench our thirst. Through Red Rivers and Yellow streams, Refuge became ours In the realm of the three-headed, ivory-tusked Matriarch Men of the sunset became our brothers, And opium perfumed our huts, We populated the hills of Xieng Koung. We fed the spirits and the ancestors were happy.21

The patrilineal clan is the basis of Hmong social organization. In traditional Hmong society and still today, there are from eighteen to twenty-one clans whose members have the same surname, such as Lee, Xiong, Moua, or Xiong.22 According to the patrilineal system, male and female children belong to the father’s clan and assume the surname of the father. A woman who marries keeps her own clan name but is taken into the ritual practice of

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her husband’s clan. Property is passed along to male descendants. There are also, however, some matrilineal practices in traditional Hmong society. Lee has shown that matrilineal lineages are evident in practicing rituals of some clans.23 In addition, within each clan are sublineages called “ceremonial households,” or ib tug dab qhuas.24 Each clan has handed down its own set of rituals and ceremonies based on ancient systems of animist belief. The rituals express reverence for ancestors and are practiced in the home and at family funerals, weddings, and other significant events in Hmong cultural life. The clan and the subclan, which binds more immediate family affiliations than the larger encompassing clan, are a source of identity and of social support. For example, clan leaders still mediate disputes among members in various US cities as they did in Laos. The clan sometimes organizes the sharing of financial resources in informal rotating credit systems, although these may extend beyond the clan to the wider Hmong ethnic community.25 Many younger Hmong Americans no longer adhere to all or many of the core animist beliefs or cultural practices of their parents’ generation. Among the older members as well, leaders of associations and clans have also found ways to adapt traditional thinking and practices to American life and the geographic mobility of families; for example, when some family members move to a new city and others remain, geographic distance may lead to adaptation of norms to encourage direct assistance to relatives who may be isolated by not having clan members living in close proximity.26 The clan system still plays an important role in Hmong American social life in the United States, but other types of social affiliations are important, just as they are in other immigrant communities. For different individuals, these may include informal relationships to neighbors, membership in community associations, ethnic organizations, professional networks, and churches or temples. These social connections are formed through networks of many types, which may be based on shared cultural, political, or recreational interests or tied to work or school, for example. For the Hmong in Laos, Lee has shown that political unity of the Hmong is prone to fracturing of political unity along lines of clan affiliation, for the clan is the primary source of social affiliation. The segmented feature of the Hmong identity along clan lines is of interest in examining their participation in American electoral politics. The Hmong clan system has sometimes

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played an important role in helping organize support for political candidates. Potentially, segmentation of Hmong unity along clan lines could be problematic for Hmong unity. One of the first instances was in Mee Moua’s campaign for a seat in the Minnesota Senate. The clan served as a vehicle for communication in the ethnic community about the campaign and for raising donations. How the clan system may emerge as a factor in any particular election is not straightforward, however. There was only one Hmong American vying for the seat Moua won, and as a result, a problem did not arise in which a candidate of one clan was running against another. In an election to replace Moua when she retired from the Minnesota Senate, in contrast, several Hmong Americans declared themselves candidates. Some mobilized very effectively through their own clan, and the vote of the Hmong American community was split. In not every instance of a Hmong American candidate’s successful bid for elected office, however, has the candidate’s own clan played an important role. Blong Yang reflected on how he was relatively more detached from the clan system than some other Hmong American candidates, for example.27 It is therefore useful to consider, as I will in the next section, the applicability of models of campaign outreach that focus on social networks more generally.

Voter Mobilization and Social Networks Hmong American communities have learned to carry out multipronged campaigns using specialized outreach methods for specific racial-ethnic groups. Mee Moua’s campaign set an early precedent by recruiting younger volunteers to participate in intensive, on-the-ground get-out-the-vote efforts, using personal connections and community-based networks to create a stable core of campaign workers. In subsequent campaigns, Hmong American candidates have developed newer outreach techniques, including the creation of multimedia messages for dissemination through computermediated tools, such as Facebook. Increasingly, these rely on direct, intensive, carefully targeted, and culturally attuned voter contact through existing social networks. These techniques are now taught and honed by professional political consultants and candidate organizations throughout

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the United States and adapted to the social and cultural characteristics of voters in local neighborhoods. In the scholarly literature on electoral politics, there are contrasting theories on why some people vote and others do not. One approach most pertinent to the experience of Hmong Americans conceptualizes the act of people “voting together” or voting socially in the context of social networks, which may be formed in the neighborhood, through a social organization, or through an ethnic community, for example. Theories of social voting draw from a strand of voting models that emphasizes the role of voter mobilization in explaining turnout; in other words, many people decide to vote in response to actions of interest groups, parties, and candidates in contacting prospective voters and in providing information and sometimes direct assistance. The social theory of voting departs from well-known approaches to explaining voter turnout known as the resource-based model. The logic of why an individual would vote or not is based on a cost-benefit calculation. Brady, Verba, and Schlozman developed a theory using this form of logic. The predictors of an individual’s decision to vote are in three categories. The first category consists of resources, including civic skills, which are measured by years of education, verbal ability and communication skills, and time to spend after work at a job or in the home or after school. Second, being asked to vote is also important, and an individual’s contact with a social or political network increases the likelihood of being asked. Finally, being interested in voting is a predictive factor.28 Rosenstone and Hansen emphasize the importance of politicians’ mobilization of voters, arguing that less mobilization explains historical declines in voter turnout.29 The standard resource-based models do not reliably predict the propensity of Hmong Americans to turn out to vote. The educational attainment and per capita income of Hmong Americans are some of the lowest recorded among Asian American ethnic groups in the 2010 decennial census and five-year estimates of the 2006–2010 American Community Survey. Furthermore, the 2012 National Asian American and Pacific Islander PostElection Survey (2012 AAPI PES) found that Hmong Americans had a turnout rate of 89 percent in the 2012 presidential election, which was among highest among Asian American ethnic groups (details on the Asian American survey and census data are described later).30

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Of particular relevance to electoral experiences of Hmong Americans is a theory of social voting developed by Rolfe.31 From this viewpoint, the mobilizing activity performed by elite political actors, such as candidates and organizations, increases the probability of voters turning out on Election Day in three ways. First, this activity serves to inform voters about choices in the election when information is not readily available. Second, mobilizing through face-to-face campaigning increases the likelihood of turnout, although this is only a temporary effect. The most important effect is to increase the salience of politics and the election under way among members of a social network, such as friends, relatives, associates at work, and residents of the neighborhood. The third outcome is more permanent than the relatively short-term impetus stirred by direct face-to-face contact with a canvasser or get-out-the-vote volunteer, particularly if that person is a stranger, because of the ongoing social interaction of people who are interdependent. As Rolfe notes, the role of social networks is illustrated by a study by Sinclair and colleagues, who showed that contact was more effective in increasing turnout when performed by neighbors rather than professionals from outside the neighborhood.32 When campaign strategies have been successful in the Hmong American community, candidates and campaign teams have understood in a practical sense the mechanisms of social voting. They strive to make the campaign salient to prospective voters by developing tailored messages and direct contact, tapping into the social connections present in associational, neighborhood, ethnic community, family, and clan networks. In this book, I suggest that intergenerational communication on everyday concerns about the meaning of citizenship, not only in its formal sense but also equal treatment of citizens and the exercise of political rights, are at the crux of a developing process of political identity construction. Sinclair notes that conversations about politics often take place “in the context of constructing social and political identities.”33 In communities of Hmong Americans talking about elections and the act of “voting together” are activities that have activated the themes of an ancient identity story, giving it new meaning in a contemporary American context. By 2010, 57 percent of the foreign-born Hmong population had naturalized. By the end of that same decade Hmong American voters in several cities in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California were already voting regularly in elections. They gave their support not only to Hmong American candi-

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dates but also to politicians supportive of their policy interests, regardless of racial-ethnic background. In a few Midwestern cities, Hmong American candidates began to win seats on local governmental bodies and took office during the 1990s. The first was Choua Lee, who competed successfully for her seat on the St. Paul school board in 1991. A few years later in 1994, Lormong Lo was appointed to city council seat in Omaha, Nebraska, where the Hmong Americans lived in far fewer numbers than in St. Paul or in Fresno. From 1996 to 2000, Joe Bee Xiong held an elected city council seat in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Xiong was first Hmong American to win a seat on a city council by election. The next year Lormong Lo was reelected in Omaha to the city council position he had earlier assumed by appointment. These early successes were rapidly followed by several others, including pathbreaking victories in 2002. In January 2002, Mee Moua was elected to the Minnesota State Senate in a special election in District 67, which covers a large portion of St. Paul. That same year there were two other electoral milestones. Cy Thao was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives from District 65A, a district with a concentration of Hmong Americans. Tony Vang was the first Hmong American to join the Fresno Unified School Board, serving from 2002 to 2012. Kazoua Kong-Thao became the third Hmong American to win a seat on the board and served on it from 2004 to 2011. After Mee Moua retired in 2011, Foung Hawj was elected in 2013 to represent District 67, the district from which Mee Moua retired. Several other Hmong Americans have won seats on city councils in various cities. In 2006, Blong Xiong became the first Hmong American city council representative in California, winning election in Fresno. Xiong stepped down after serving two terms and had lost a bid to represent the Twenty-First Congressional District in 2012, as well as a race for the Fresno County Board of Supervisors. Noah Lor next won a city council seat in Merced in 2007. Although Lor lost his mayoral campaign in 2013, he continues to serve on Merced’s city council. In Wisconsin, Hmong Americans continued to win elections. In 2016, Michael Xiong won a seat on the city council of Eau Claire. In St. Paul, Dai Thao was the first Hmong American elected to the city council in 2013. In Minneapolis that same year, Blong Yang won a seat on the city council representing Ward 5, the first Hmong American to serve on that local body. In Maplewood, a suburb of the Twin Cities, Tou Xiong was elected to the city council in 2015. Xiong Yang, of the

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city council in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, has served from 2007 to the time of this writing. In 2014, Steve Ly was elected to the Elk Grove city council, south of Sacramento, after serving on the local school board since 2012. In addition, school board representatives include Pang Xiong, who holds a seat on the Thermalito Union School District in Oroville, a city in the Sacramento Valley of California. Kaying Thao was the first Hmong American elected to the Roseville School Board in a suburb of the Twin Cities of Minnesota. Meanwhile, Chue Vue was elected to the St. Paul school board in 2013, and Chue Xiong to the school board in Eau Claire in 2014. Yee Leng Xiong, serves on the D.C. Everest Area School District in Wisconsin. In 2016, Mary Thao was elected to Wausau’s school board. Ethnic Association and Evolving Leadership Styles

Hmong American leaders have also formed ethnic associations to help make Hmong American voices heard by policy makers. In the early resettlement years, the Hmong Council was founded in Fresno by Vang Pao, former major general in the Royal Lao Army, to enable leaders of the eighteen Hmong clans to come together to provide leadership to the Hmong community.34 Established in several cities, the Lao Family Community was formed in 1977 to provide a structure of leadership and an intraethnic communication network, and to be a provider of social assistance for families. Some organizations developed leadership styles less hierarchical than the Hmong Council’s model, as Yang notes in describing the origins of two organizations. Hmong National Development Inc. (HND) was formed by middle-aged and “middle of the road” leaders in 1993 to promote selfsufficiency and provide leadership in the Hmong American communities. The leaders were democratically elected, a method departing from traditional practices in which leaders are selected by elites in inner circles of organizations. In Minnesota, the Hmong American Partnership was cofounded by Hmong Americans and American professionals. This enabled combining the skills and social connections from within and outside the ethnic ­community.35 Other associations work to groom new community leaders. The Association for Advancing Hmong Women in Minnesota, for example, has worked to help girls and adult women become leaders in the community. In discussing problems such as marital stress, resource scarcity, and the “tokeniz-

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ing of elders,” educational programs bring to light the social and economic forces exacerbating family problems, such as home foreclosures, job loss, gang violence, and youth crime.36 If expanded and made accessible to many more residents, these types of programs would help equip residents to comprehend and participate in local politics and policy discourse. The political activists of generations 1.5 and 2 entered public life remembering and disseminating stories heard from childhood. The narratives shaped their understanding of the Hmong historical experience as they began to press for equal treatment of Hmong Americans in the United States. Inspired by the American civil rights tradition of the mid- and late twentieth century, a new generation of Hmong American leaders envisioned a democratic egalitarian ideal of social justice. The spokespersons conveyed a respect for traditional Hmong values, which stress the importance of family and community. Presenting a counterpoint to hyperindividualistic cultural norms, family elders had encouraged a sense of responsibility to public service, which was conducive to civic and political participation.37 The collectivist orientation of traditional Hmong culture, however, is not always conducive to democratic political engagement, particularly when patriarchal and hierarchical forms of decision making prevail. If members of the community believe group cohesion requires overly deferential attitudes to authority figures, these attitudes may suppress free expression of views in policy deliberation and the taking of leadership roles by women and young people. When egalitarian ideals are infused into a political culture rooted in collectivist norms, it is possible for the mix of ideas to motivate democratic engagement by community members prevented or discouraged from participation in traditional contexts. The idea that it is honorable to serve the collective welfare can be preserved while new actors formerly pushed to the margins or subordinated in the past by hierarchies entrenched in communities can come forward with a sense of their own agency and power.

Social-Economic Status: Racial-Ethnic Comparisons The policy of the US government in the 1970s was to distribute refugee resettlement sites across the United States to speed integration and not concentrate large numbers of newcomers in one host community. Except for a few former military and political elites and others who would enroll in

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colleges, who came directly to the United States without a stay-over in one of the Thai refugee camps, the first groups of refugees were from agrarian backgrounds. Many were sponsored by Catholic and Lutheran refugee agencies, with individual host families assisting the Hmong families to start life in America, helping them to acquire basic provisions, establish a home, learn how to navigate neighborhoods, and gain access to social services. After spending some time in the first settlement site, many families moved to another city or town, or perhaps several others in succession. The most common reasons to move from the original place of arrival included the pursuit of job opportunities, access to improved educational opportunities for children, and closeness to family and clan members. It was common for whole clans to move together to a new city for one or more of the previous reasons. By the year 2010, several waves of refugees had arrived and established stable families. There were 260,073 persons of Hmong origin living in the United States, according to the 2010 census count, which tends to undercount racial and language-minority groups.38 Patterns of Residence and Internal Migration

Geographic patterns of residential concentration and migration of Hmong Americans within the United States are shown in several maps. Residence across the United States at the county level in the year 2010 is shown in an online map on the author’s website (www.carolynwong.site).39 The four states with the largest number of Hmong American residents are California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, in that order. In these states, the counties with the largest Hmong populations include Ramsey and Hennepin (Minnesota), Fresno and Sacramento (California), Milwaukee (Wisconsin), and Catawba (North Carolina). Another online map on the author’s website displays the Hmong Americans as a percentage of the Asian population in counties. Where Hmong Americans make up a large proportion of the Asian population, their policy concerns are likely to stand out more prominently than in counties where they make up a small proportion of Asians. The map shows that outside of the California counties of Fresno and Merced, the Hmong Americans are not a majority of Asians, but in several counties in Minnesota and Wisconsin, they do comprise greater than 50 percent of the Asian American

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population, or between 30 percent and 50 percent of the Asian population, as well as in a few counties in North Carolina and Arkansas. The Office of Refugee Settlement, in conjunction with private voluntary agencies, scattered the refugees from the Vietnam War to cities and towns across the United States, with the rationale that this practice would avoid overburdening any single locality with the costs of integrating the newcomers. The pattern of initial settlement reflected this dispersal policy as well as the receptivity of private voluntary organizations, which often assumed responsibility for assisting refugees after their application for resettlement was approved.40 In the federal government, the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Department of Health and Human Services coordinates the initial resettlement through partnerships with federal agencies working in social services, state coordinators of refugee services, and private voluntary agencies. In the 1980s, a significant secondary migration occurred. Many Hmong were drawn to the agricultural economic life in the Central Valley of ­California, which had become the home of several influential ethnic leaders in the late 1970s. In the 1990s, a third internal migration found families moving out of Fresno to cities and towns in other regions, including the Midwest and the South. The most important destination point was St. Paul, Minnesota, which drew Hmong families because more job opportunities were available than in California. Illustrating the internal migration of Hmong Americans across US regions from 1990 to 2000, Map 1.1 shows origin and destination points in the West, Midwest, South, and East. The interstate migration that took place in this period is regarded as tertiary, or a “third migration.” Map 1.2 indicates the number of Hmong migrating from source areas into four states—­ Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Carolina, and California—in the late 1990s. The 1990s internal migrations are shown because they significantly shaped the present-day geographic distribution of the Hmong American population. In part the migration was a response to elimination or drastic reduction of welfare benefits legislated by 1996 federal welfare reform (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996), which hit the Hmong American communities hard. As a result of the out-­migration from California, the center of Hmong American political and cultural life shifted to Minnesota. California is still home to the largest Hmong population, but it is dispersed across several regions and localities

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# of Hmong migration from: Northeast: 27 Midwest: 586 South: 213 Within the region: 1,932

# of Hmong migration from: Northeast: 219 South: 504 West: 7,434 Within the region: 2,705

# of Hmong migration from: Midwest: 141 South: 10 West: 341 Within the region: 57

# of Hmong migration from: Northeast: 156 Midwest: 326 West: 3,261 Within the region: 119

M a p 1 . 1   Migration of Hmong Americans across regions of the United States, 1995–2000 Source: 2010 Census. Note: The map shows patterns of an internal Hmong American migration in the late 1990s.

in the state, which tends to reduce its political influence in local elections, compared to the more concentrated numbers that can be mobilized in St. Paul, which emerged as the place of residence of the largest concentrated Hmong population. The concentrated population of Hmong Americans in the state capital, with its highly developed industrial and service economy, created favorable conditions for the development of an urban-centered ethnic political and cultural life. Its vitality persists even as increasing numbers of families have moved to nearby suburbs. In a 2008 survey of Hmong voters, Hang found a rise in residence in the suburban areas surrounding the Twin Cities. The percentage of Hmong living in either of the Twin Cities, Minneapolis or St. Paul, was 52 percent of the total sample, and 41 percent resided in surrounding suburbs. In rural Minnesota, the percentage was 7 percent.41 When the first electoral victories of Hmong Americans in St. Paul and Eau Claire were reported in national news outlets during the 1990s, the Hmong Americans were largely unknown and received hardly any attention in scholarship on Asian Americans. The historical origins of Asian

Wisconsin

Minnesota

Marathon

Ramsey Sheboygan Dane

Hennepin Hennepin

Milwaukee

California

North Carolina Catawba Burke

Sacramento

Fresno

Number of Hmong immigrants 3,000

M a p 1 . 2   In-migration of Hmong Americans to WI, MN, NC, and CA from other states, 1995–2000 Source: 2000 Census. Note: The map shows migration patterns of the late 1990s. Counties with more than two hundred Hmong American immigrants from other states are labeled. Counties with more than two thousand Hmong American immigrants from other states are labeled in bold.

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American studies, an interdisciplinary program of teaching and research in the academy, partly explains the undeveloped research and teaching about this ethnic group. Asian American Studies programs in several US universities had originated during the civil rights and Vietnam War era before the 1980s waves of Southeast Asian American immigrants arrived. By the 1990s, it was clear that the newer Asian American groups, including the Hmong Americans, Vietnamese Americans, and Cambodian Americans were transforming the landscape of Asian America. Scholarly research and college-level teaching on the Hmong in America is now found across many disciplines, including history, sociology, political science, cultural studies, education, and public health. Course offerings and research expertise on the Hmong are also an important component of Asian American studies programs at the University of Minnesota; the University of Wisconsin; the University of California, Los Angeles; California State University at Fresno; and other institutions of higher learning. The 2010 US Census brought attention to the fast growth of the Asian American population. The Hmong Americans are counted as an ethnic group of Asian ancestry. The growth rate for persons identifying as Hmong alone or in combination with other ethnicities was 40 percent from 2000 to 2010, and 97 percent since 1990. In comparison, the growth rate for persons identifying as Asian alone was 43 percent, and for persons identifying as Asian alone or in combination with other racial-ethnic groups, the growth rate was 46 percent. In terms of numerical growth, the population identifying as Asian alone had the second-largest increase among racial-ethnic groups. Their numbers grew from 10.2 million in 2000 to 14.7 million in 2010, when they comprised about 5 percent of the total US population. The Hispanic population grew by 43 percent over the same decade and had the largest numerical growth, increasing by 15.2 million between 2000 and 2010. For Asian Americans and Hispanics, these growth rates were each four times larger than for the US population as a whole, which grew by 9.7 percent. Census data on the socioeconomic characteristics of minority racialethnic populations are instructive for understanding the underlying social context of their political participation and the social policies that affect them. Several features of the Hmong American population become clearer when census indicators are viewed alongside those for other racial-ethnic groups. In particular, two features stand out: disparities of economic status

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and the large size of the school-age population of Hmong American children. Two perspectives are presented here. First, Table 1.1 compares various social and economic indicators on population characteristics for the Hmong Americans alongside major racialethnic groups in the United States, including the white, black, Asian, and Latino or Hispanic populations. The comparisons use estimates from the five-year estimates of the 2006–2010 American Community Survey (ACS). The average poverty rate for Hmong Americans is about 27 percent, higher than the rate for all other racial-ethnic groups, but only slightly higher than the rates for blacks. In comparing income statistics, it is important to consider average household size, as this differs between racial-ethnic groups. In the 2010 census, the average household size for Hmong Americans was 6.28, much larger than the average for the general US population, which was 2.59; the average size of families (not households) in the Hmong population was 6.51, compared to 3.14 for the US population.42 If comparisons focus on household income, both the mean and the median estimates for Hmong Americans are greater than the estimates for blacks and Hispanics, but less than the estimate for whites. If, however, per capita income is compared (the mean over the previous twelve months), Hmong Americans have the lowest estimate, which is $10,971 in the five-year 2006-2010 ACS survey, as shown in Table 1.1. It should also be noted that the percentages of Hmong Americans receiving Supplementary Security Income (15.8 percent), which the federal government pays as assistance to elderly people with disabilities, and cash assistance (13.7 percent) is higher than the percentages for any other racial-ethnic group. At the same time, retirement income is the lowest (3.1 percent). An ethnic subgroup of the encompassing category of Asians, the Hmong comprise a relatively small group. There remain significant segments of Hmong Americans who are elderly, and among those are disabled war veterans; still others rely on the cash assistance because of the economic, social, and cultural disadvantages persisting from the early refugee years. Figures 1.1–1.3 compare selected socioeconomic characteristics of sixteen ethnic groups of Asian ancestry, replicating a methodology used in the Community of Contrasts series published by the Asian American Center for Advancing Justice.43 The figures shown here use a newer data source, the three-year estimates from the 2011–2013 ACS.44 The newer data update the

Ta b l e 1 . 1   Poverty and incomes of selected racial-ethnic groups in the United States Total Population

303,965,272

White *****

231,170,208

Black ±69,170

40,633,114

percentage of families and people whose income in past 12 months is below poverty level All families 10.1% ±0.1 7.70% ±0.1 21.5% Married couple families 4.9% ±0.1 4.1% ±0.1 7.2% Families with female householder, no husband present 28.9% ±0.1 24.8% ±0.1 35.6% All people 13.8% ±0.1 11.3% ±0.1 25.2% income and benefits Median household income (dollars) Mean household income (dollars) Per capita income, mean (dollars) With earnings With Social Security With retirement income With Supplemental Security Income With cash public assistance income With food stamp/SNAP benefits in the past 12 months

Asian

Hmong

Hispanic or Latino

±18,397

16,198,607

±14,484

238,312

±6,543

47,727,533 ±2,665

±0.1 ±0.1

8.5% 6.4%

±0.1 ±0.1

25.2% 21.3%

±1.7 ±1.8

20.0% 13.3%

±0.1 ±0.1

±0.2 ±0.1

20.1% 11.2%

±0.4 ±0.1

42.0% 27.0%

±4.6 ±1.8

38.4% 22.4%

±0.2 ±0.2

51,914 70,883 27,334 79.7% 27.5% 17.5% 4.0% 2.5%

±89 ±123 ±78 ±0.1 ±0.1 ±0.1 ±0.1 ±0.1

54,857 74,570 29,728 78.8% 29.5% 19.0% 3.5% 1.9%

±98 ±129 ±79 ±0.1 ±0.1 ±0.1 ±0.1 ±0.1

35,341 48,170 17,766 78.9% 23.4% 14.6% 7.4% 5.1%

±100 ±139 ±55 ±0.1 ±0.1 ±0.1 ±0.1 ±0.1

68,098 88,774 28,383 88.8% 15.7% 8.4% 4.3% 2.3%

±324 ± 314 ±138 ±0.1 ±0.1 ±0.1 ±0.1 ±0.1

46,634 55,728 10,971 91.0% 11.9% 3.1% 15.8% 13.7%

±1,588 ±1,565 ±272 ±1.0 ±1.2 ±0.6 ±1.3 ±1.2

35,341 48,170 15,638 88.4% 15.8% 7.5% 4.7% 3.8%

±100 ±139 ±65 ±0.1 ±0.1 ±0.1 ±0.1 ±0.1

9.3%

±0.1

7.1%

±0.1

21.6%

±0.1

5.4%

±0.1

29.6%

±1.7

15.7%

±0.1

±0.1 ±0.1

32.1% 11.7%

±0.1 ±0.1

16.5% 29.6%

±0.2 ±0.1

22.9% 11.7%

±1.1 ±0.8

26.8% 8.9%

±0.1 ±0.1

highest level of education attained (population 25 years and over) High school graduate (includes equivalency) 29.0% ±0.1 29.3% Bachelor’s degree 17.6% ±0.1 18.4%

Source: 2006–2010 Five-Year American Community Survey, table D03. Notes: Dollar amounts are in 2010 inflation-adjusted dollars. The entry of five asterisks in the margin-of-error column indicates that the estimate is controlled. A statistical test for sampling variability is not appropriate. White = white alone or in combination with one or more other races; Black = black or African American alone or in combination with one or more other races; Asian = Asian alone or in combination with one or more other races (400–499) and (100–299) or (300, A01–Z99) or (400–999); Hmong = Hmong alone or in any combination (422) and (100–299) or (300, A01–Z99) or (400–999); Hispanic or Latino = Hispanic or Latino (of any race) (200–299).

Citizenship and Participation $40,221

Indian

$38,246

Taiwanese

$35,876

Sri Lankan

$32,923

Japanese

$31,382

Chinese

$30,419

Malaysian

$27,884

Total population

$27,088

Korean

$26,514

Filipino

$25,135

Pakistani

$23,768

Indonesian Thai

$22,572

Vietnamese

$22,234 $19,224

Bangladeshi

$17,183

Laotian Cambodian Hmong

23

$16,472 $11,938

F i g u r e 1 . 1   Mean per capita income of Asian American ethnic groups Source: American Community Survey (ACS) 2011–2013, three-year estimates.

three-year estimates from the 2007–2009 ACS survey, which is the source for the Community of Contrasts report. Also reported are margins of error of the estimates at the 90 percent confidence level.45 Figure 1.1 shows comparative per capita income levels, which are the lowest for Laotian, Cambodian, and Hmong individuals. For the Hmong, the estimate of per capita income ($11,938) is quite a bit lower than it is for the next highest group, the Cambodians ($16,472). The estimate for the Hmong is less than half that for the total population including the sixteen Asian American groups ($27,884). It should be noted that the estimate of mean per capita income is somewhat lower in the ACS 2010 five-year survey (the source of the data reported in Table 1.1) than the estimate in the ACS 2013

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Citizenship and Participation

three-year survey, (the source of the data shown in Figure 1.1); in the former, the estimate is $10,971, and in the latter the estimate is $11,938 for the Hmong, plus or minus $410. In general, the precision of such estimates should be viewed with caution; it is difficult for survey researchers to obtain representative samples of small ethnic groups with many members who are linguistically or socially isolated. One of the major problems is bias in estimates due to nonresponse bias. Both estimates are given here, in part to illustrate the imprecision of estimates, which should be considered not only for estimates of income but also for other variables. Another distinctive feature of the Hmong American population is its large share of school-age children. Their education, job prospects, and role as future providers for families and participants in society will shape the future of the ethnic group. In 2010, the percentage of Hmong American children under eighteen years of age was about 43.1 percent, a larger percentage than among any other Asian American ethnic group, and considerably larger than the average percentage for all Asian Americans, which is 24 percent.46 Levels of educational attainment point to improvement of individual and family well-being in the near future. As Figure 1.2 shows, among Asian Americans, Laotians, Cambodians, and Hmong have the lowest percentage of persons twenty-five years and older with a bachelor’s degree (12.8 percent, 15.5 percent, and 15.6 percent, respectively), compared to the 29.1 percent among the total Asian American population.47 The percentage of Hmong Americans twenty-five years and older with a bachelor’s degree increased from 4.9 percent to 7.4 percent between 1990 and 2000.48 The growth rate was large, increasing by 13.4 percent from 2006 to 2010 alone. Compared to other racial-ethnic groups, however, disparities are ­significant. Xiong identifies the systemic obstacles impeding educational parity for young Hmong Americans. In general, schools that place students with disadvantaged backgrounds in low school tracks limit the quality of their education and their chances for college acceptance.49 Many Hmong American children face considerable challenges related not only to economic disadvantage but also to language difference, as indicated by one study reporting that in California, 58 percent of Hmong students in kindergarten to twelfth grade were recently classified as English-language learners.50 The importance of adequate educational provision for children to improve their future opportunities for job and career advancement is under-

Citizenship and Participation Taiwanese

87.1%

54.2%

Korean

92.6%

52.6%

Chinese

82.4%

52.0%

Malaysian

83.7%

50.6%

Bangladeshi

82.9%

47.9%

Japanese

95.3%

47.2%

Indonesian

93.8%

46.0%

Filipino

92.6%

45.9%

Thai

85.0%

42.8%

Total population

86.3%

29.1%

Vietnamese

Laotian

91.7%

58.1%

Pakistani

Cambodian

91.1%

70.5%

Sri Lankan

Hmong

95.4%

74.7%

Indian

26.9% 15.6% 15.5% 12.8% High school diploma or higher

25

71.4% 67.2% 64.7% 68.9% Bachelor’s degree or higher

F i g u r e 1 . 2   Educational attainment of Asian American ethnic groups Source: American Community Survey (ACS) 2011–2013, three-year estimates.

scored by the large number of adults working in manufacturing and production occupations and small numbers in better-paying positions. Figure 1.3 displays the share of the US and Hmong population, respectively, that are employed in major occupational categories. From the largest to the smallest percentages in terms of Hmong employment, the share of the US population as a whole and the Hmong subpopulation employed in the major categories is as follows: production, transportation, and material moving (US, 12 percent; Hmong, 31 percent); sales and office work (US, 26 percent; Hmong, 26 percent); service (US, 18 percent; Hmong, 19 percent); management, business, science, and arts (US, 36 percent; Hmong, 20 percent); and natural resources, construction, and maintenance (US, 10 percent; Hmong, 5 percent).

26 Citizenship and Participation Management, business, science, arts Service

Sales and office work Natural resources, construction, maintenance Production, transportation, material moving 0

5

10

15

20

US population

25

30

35

40

Hmong in US

F i g u r e 1 . 3   Occupational distributions: US and Hmong population Source: Data are from “Hmong Socioeconomic Trends in the U.S.,” State of the Hmong American Community 2013 (Washington, DC: Hmong National Development), 21. Reprinted with permission of Chia Youyee Vang (with minor modifications to original).

In Figure 1.3, the large occupational categories combine several detailed occupations. Figure 1.4 breaks down several of the ACS’s OCC occupational classification codes at a more detailed level. The detailed categories shown are those filled by 2 percent or more of the Hmong population, according to the ACS estimates. There are six such categories, with estimated percentages of the Hmong population as follows: miscellaneous assemblers and fabricators (6.68); cashiers (5.56); other production workers, including semiconductor processors and cooling and freezing equipment operators (3.15); retail salespersons (2.57); laborers and freight, stock and materials, hand (i.e., manual workers) (2.55); and cooks (2.34). The estimates should be viewed with caution, because margins of error are large at the 90 percent confidence level, compared to the percentage estimates. The size of the margins of error significantly reduces the statistical reliability of the actual estimate. The occupations and estimates with standard errors are shown, nonetheless, to provide a general sense of what types of jobs Hmong Americans occupy most frequently. Several influential Hmong American community leaders regard the reform of social policies that would help narrow economic disparities as

Citizenship and Participation Miscellaneous assemblers and fabricators

6.68%

Cashiers Other production workers including semiconductor processors and cooling and freezing equipment operators

5.56% 3.15%

Retail salespersons

2.57%

Laborers and freight, stock, and material movers

2.55%

Cooks

27

2.34%

F i g u r e 1 . 4   Common occupations of Hmong Americans: Detailed categories Source: American Community Survey (ACS) 2011–2013, three-year estimates.

an important consideration in their choice of political candidates, as the interviews excerpted throughout this book will document. The cause for their social policy concerns is evident in their own remarks and in the recent retrenchment of social assistance for the immigrants and poor. Hmong Americans were hit hard in the mid-1990s by federal welfare reform, as reported in a 1997 New York Times article. One or more forms of federal assistance were given to 1.8 million legal immigrants. Food stamps were cut for an estimated sixteen thousand Hmong veterans of the Vietnam War and many more members of their families. In California, nearly twenty thousand Hmong from Laos lost their food stamps. As social service workers told of a rise in suicide threats, news outlets reported the suicides of two Hmong women in California who had left messages that they were taking their own lives because of the welfare cuts; another suicide in Wisconsin received prominent news coverage.51 Because a large percentage of Hmong American adults fill manufacturing and production jobs, many were especially vulnerable to employment loss during the 2008 recession. The 2006–2010 ACS revealed that, among Asian American ethnic groups, Hmong persons sixteen years of age and older had the highest rate of unemployment, at 11 percent. The rate for Laotians and Cambodians was next highest, at 10 percent, compared to the rate for the total Asian American population, which was 8 percent.52 Another disparity is in rate of home ownership. For Hmong Americans, the

28

Citizenship and Participation

rate was second lowest among Asian American ethnic groups, at 48 percent, after Bangladeshis, which was 44 percent, and close to the rate for Koreans, at 49 percent, and Cambodians, at 51 percent. Taiwanese and Vietnamese had the highest rates, at 66 and 64 percent, respectively; for the total Asian American population, the rate was 66 percent.53 Another factor limiting social mobility is linguistic isolation. Among all Hmong American households, 21 percent are isolated by language, given that all household members fourteen years and older speak English less than well.54 Further, among Hmong Americans five years and older, 92 percent speak a language other than English at home and 98 percent of these persons speak the Hmong language at home.55 A consequence of this language isolation is that parents have great difficulty in making their concerns known about the educational services and social environment in the schools, as they affect their children. The serious nature of many parents’ concerns about race and peer violence in school environments is evident from the 2012 National Asian American Survey. This pre-election survey reported that 71 percent of Hmong Americans expressed concern about school bullying as “a very serious problem,” far higher than the percentage reported by members of other Asian American ethnic groups in this survey. The percentages reporting the same level of concern about school bullying among the other Asian American groups were as follows: Indian (52), Filipino (46), Cambodian (45), Vietnamese (44), Native Hawaiian (42), Korean (28), Japanese (25), and Chinese (19).56 This finding is likely explained by the high rates of peer violence in schools that Southeast Asian immigrant teenagers experience. Immigrant adolescents between the ages of ten and nineteen experience higher rates of bullying and peer aggression than do others their age, according to a systematic review of the relevant literature. Of eighteen studies reviewed, fourteen were conducted in the United States and the others in Europe (three) and Israel (one).57

Voting and Policy Concerns The 2012 Asian American and Pacific Islander Post-Election Survey (AAPI PES) reported information on voters of several Asian American ethnic backgrounds based on a nationally representative sample. The survey was

Citizenship and Participation

29

c­ onducted in nine Asian languages, including Hmong, as well as English and Spanish, during November and December 2012. A total of 6,609 interviews were completed. The sampling design was based on a method using lists of Asian names. The sample included 290 Hmong American ­respondents.58 Regarding voter turnout, the 2012 AAPI PES reported that Hmong Americans and Japanese Americans both turned out to vote at an estimated 89 percent rate in the 2012 presidential election, higher than the other Asian American ethnicities and comparable to the 88 percent rate for Indian Americans. The next highest rate was for Vietnamese Americans, estimated at 81 percent; the average for all the Asian Americans surveyed was 79 percent. Only 31 percent of Asian Americans and 26 percent of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders received contact by political campaigns, or other groups conducting election outreach, according to the 2012 AAPI PES. Significantly, 49 percent of Hmong Americans reported receiving electionrelated contact. This percentage was higher than that for respondents from the seven other ethnic groups for which data were reported; using the ethnic terms reported by the PES, these percentages were as follows: Chinese (39), Japanese (36), Korean (33), Laotian (33), Vietnamese (28), Filipino (28), Cambodian (27), and Indian (25).59 In addition to collecting data on turnout, 2012 Asian American and Pacific Islander Post-Election Survey included questions about voters’ choice for president and concerns about social policy issues. Among ten Asian American ethnic groups, Hmong Americans reported one of the largest percentages who voted for Barack Obama, rather than John McCain, in the 2008 presidential race. The percentages reporting voting for Obama versus Mitt Romney in 2012 were as follows: Indian (84 vs. 16), Cambodian (77 vs. 23), Hmong (78 vs. 24), Laotian (71 vs. 29), Japanese (70 vs. 29), Chinese (69 vs. 29), Korean (66 vs. 33), Filipino (62 vs. 37), Vietnamese (61 vs. 39), and Asian Americans as a whole (68 vs. 31).60 Two veteran leaders of community-based mutual assistance organizations suggest why older Hmong Americans immigrants choose to vote for one candidate or another. The choice of presidential candidates is rooted in economic and social concerns, in these leaders’ estimation, whereas local candidate choice is also affected by personal contact and associations. In one interview, a leader of the Lao Family Community of Fresno noted:

30

Citizenship and Participation We started from scratch. The very first generation, our parents, couldn’t speak English, maybe a little background and a few years of education in Laos. There were no professionals with skills or knowledge. Arriving as strangers, we did not know what opportunities were available. When we established the Lao Family association in the 1980s, we started social services with no funding for interpreters. We started with an agricultural project in 1983 . . . teaching people to irrigate and prepare the soil. Almost every family was interested in small gardening . . . from tomatoes to green beans to strawberries. Later on we started placing people into companies, factory production. Then we started helping some young people working at McDonald’s. We started some job training for sewing, health services, and education jobs. Now we start seeing children graduate from school and work in public- and private-sector jobs. Some are doing quite well, going to college and taking part in the community.61

Before the 2008 elections, established leaders of mutual-aid associations in both Fresno and St. Paul noted that many in their circles had voted for Republicans in the past, but some of these, and many other Hmong Americans, would vote for Obama. Concern about poverty was a major factor in choosing between candidates. In Minneapolis, one leader of the Hmong American Mutual Assistance Association, a Republican, commented that many in the Hmong American community “don’t know much about parties”: “They will respond first to the candidate who pays attention to Hmong American voters. . . . The Democrats have a better idea [about] how to reach out to the community . . . for voters.”62 On choosing between candidates in the 2010 primaries, when this interview took place, this association leader remarked: I think the Hmong will go to Obama and Clinton more than Sarah Palin. After the September 11 tragedy, Bush put too much money into national security and defense. The economy was collapsing. Many of the Hmong believe it is Bush’s fault—making people poor—when in fact it was not. So the Hmong wanted to change to vote Democratic and the Democrats did better outreach.

He also added a comment on his own party preferences: “I was a Democrat earlier and helped the Democrats, but when Norm Coleman changed political parties I changed to the Republican Party. It was because I was following my personal friend who asked for my help.”63

Citizenship and Participation

31

Social and Cultural Resources for Political Engagement After Mee Moua’s election to Minnesota’s state senate, Hmong American candidates for other offices have adapted and refined intergenerational approaches to political education and mobilization, which her campaign pioneered. Young Hmong Americans typically volunteer to carry out intensive door-to-door voter outreach, to assist their elders in understanding election ballots, and to organize publicity and campaign events for candidates. Because many elders are not proficient in English, this voter assistance is needed to turn out Hmong American voters and to fill gaps in their understanding of the politics of the campaign and the electoral system. Some younger candidates have used social media and music videos, which are posted on public websites, to broadly communicate candidate messages. Campaign workers have also become adept at using computer technology to aid voter outreach. To illustrate, Figure 1.5 shows two photographs of young Hmong Americans using computer technology to locate likely voters in neighborhood precincts and share timely information on conversations between voters and campaign volunteers. At volunteer sessions that last through the day and night, it has become common for younger campaign workers to share voter information, plan voter outreach, and take part in traditional-style communal meals with neighbors, friends, and relatives. The Hmong American experience holds out its own lessons about the possibility of synergetic blending of traditional styles of communication through

F i g u r e 1 . 5   Two photographs of young volunteers using online voter lists and reading maps during an election to fill a vacant Minnesota state senate seat, July 2010, St. Paul Source: Courtesy of Via Yang.

32 Citizenship and Participation

family and clan social structures with information sharing through the Internet and mobile devices. Clan structures can serve as a resource for ethnic-based mobilization during campaigns, although competing Hmong candidates tend to break down this solidarity. For other reasons as well, it is important to examine the relationship between clan-based solidaristic thinking and structure and moves to increase participatory forms of democratic politics. While bringing potential benefits of shared interest in supporting Hmong American candidates, traditional thinking about leadership roles in clans has drawbacks for a participatory democratic citizenship. The old style of social organization tends to suppress individual initiative and expression of innovative ideas when they emphasize deference to a small set of male elder leaders. It has been possible to build and sustain the energy of grassroots campaigns in Hmong American communities only by infusing participatory and egalitarian norms and styles of leadership into social organizations, which retain the collective bonds of family and community. As the wartime generation of military leaders has passed on, the commonality of thinking about which leadership qualities are required for group advancement among elders is undergoing change. The qualities honed to lead in twentieth-century warfare in Asia do not translate to American democratic politics, and yet the parents of college-educated leaders owe allegiance to a generation of former military officers led by Vang Pao during the war. As the older generation leaders see both men and women rise to positions of high standing and political power in American government, tensions over who constitutes the legitimate leadership of the Hmong community are bound to arise. Among the adults of refugee origin who participated in our interviews, there was much agreement about which characteristics distinguish a leader. The overwhelming majority expressed the view that a leader demonstrates personal commitment to the Hmong as a group that has suffered injustice and remains largely impoverished in economic terms. The notion of what constitutes a Hmong leader, moreover, is a man who rises from within into the traditional system of clan-based authority and gendered hierarchy, receiving consensual support from clan leaders. Political leadership in American politics, however, requires the ability to communicate with constituencies of diverse ethnic backgrounds in the English language, knowledge of US laws and the ability to navigate

Citizenship and Participation

33

the ­interlocking institutions of a government organized along federal lines, and the ability to build alliances and gain electoral support from constituencies outside the Hmong community. The more an elected official shows political agility and responsiveness to constituents who are not Hmong, the greater are the pressures from traditionalists for the leader to return to the community and demonstrate loyalty to it. The political thinking of the first generation of adult Hmong refugees was shaped by the wartime experience in Laos. Some remained motivated by the desire to replace the communist system in Laos with a Westernstyle liberal democratic government. Others defined themselves as ethnic nationalists, supporting nationalist opposition movements in Laos. While foreign policy concerns led many first-generation leaders to support Republicans, an “in-between” generation of community leaders now heads many traditional mutual assistance groups in various cities. This group still cares deeply about homeland politics but also feels responsible for creating a bridge to the domestic concerns of US-born Hmong. One community leader described himself as representing this “in-between” generation and their thinking: “a lot of Hmong support the Republicans on international issues, but on domestic issues they care about the interests of public employees and about working with government, and on these issues they feel closer to the Democrats.”64 It is not surprising that Hmong American women have emerged as leaders of social change and advocates of expanded political participation of community members in the United States. Women’s participation as equals in politics had been limited by patriarchal traditions and social structures in Laos. When the Hmong came to the United States, women began to gain experience in exercising the right to vote and running for office. American laws protect women against gender discrimination in federal services, situations of employment, credit applications, housing, access to businesses and buildings, and certain educational programs receiving federal funds. The notion that woman can participate as peers in the world of politics inspired a growing number of young women to follow career paths in public service, determined to break gender barriers and set precedents of success for themselves individually and for the community as a whole. Once Mee Moua attained national visibility as the first Hmong American state senator, moreover, her position would serve as an example for other women to run for political office or pursue careers in other forms of public service.

34 Citizenship and Participation

In ethnic community institutions that retain the clan as the basis of social organization, there is growing recognition of the capacity of women to provide leadership. Progress has taken place more slowly in these institutions, which are steeped in traditional Hmong cultural norms, than in mainstream electoral politics. One breakthrough event took place in 2014, when Mao Khang, a forty-two-year-old woman from Wausau, Wisconsin, was elected to the leadership team of Wisconsin’s eighteen-clan council for the first time in that organization’s history. Earlier in 2010, the first general election for president of the state’s eighteen-clan council had been held. Both elections signaled a widening acceptance of democratic practices and drew participation from about a thousand Hmong Americans across the state of Wisconsin. This decision-making process departed from a previous practice of choosing a president through deliberations among members of an inner circle of leaders.65 In realms of life apart from politics and the ethnic associations, Hmong Americans have found other ways to adapt traditional ways of thinking to contemporary life in the United States. Gary Yia Lee points out that the Hmong value entrepreneurial skills, drawn from “the outstanding Hmong traits in life: desire to compete (sib twv), to excel and improve one’s living conditions (sib twv ua neej).”66 The Hmong enterprising spirit is reflected in the demonstrated expertise of Hmong Americans in small-scale farming or home gardening suited to the sale of fresh produce in modern-day farmers’ markets. Some community leaders have helped form a farmers’ association in St. Paul, with the explicit goal of adapting traditions that value holistic approaches to farming. The association describes its work as empowering experienced Hmong farmers through community organizing around a “Whole Food Model.” This approach is “grounded in strong communitarian values . . . which acknowledge that all aspects of the farm-to-fork system must be addressed simultaneously to truly build intergenerational and community wealth. There are five distinct but interrelated components in the model: land access, new markets, trainings and capacity building, financing, and research and data collection.”67 Among the US college-educated Hmong Americans who are establishing themselves in careers in state and local government, private business, and teaching and public service professions, policy concerns about human rights in Laos persist. One explanation for the power of human rights politics, as Margalit argues, is that a “negative politics” aimed at eradicating

Citizenship and Participation

35

cruelty and humiliation may take temporal priority, if not preference, over a “positive politics” that would create positive well-being, such as through the realization of democracy or liberty.68 In this view, the securing of human dignity is most urgent, and I have found from interviews that this sense of urgency about attaining dignity and recognition moves Hmong Americans of all ages. Young Hmong American writers have created new avenues for selfexpression as well as for informing an American audience about the history of the Hmong in America. The first widely read account of Hmong American culture was Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction and other awards. Written by an outside observer of Hmong social relations and culture, the full accuracy of Fadiman’s description of Hmong cultural views has been questioned. Despite gaps in understanding and misrepresentation of some cultural notions, the book has been used in American medical schools to teach physicians and other health providers about the importance of understanding non-Western cultural perspectives on health and medicine. Since the publication of Fadiman’s book, Hmong American authors have produced deeper and more nuanced insight into the Hmong peoples’ lives and history. One of the most accomplished young writers is Kao Kalia Yang, who published Latecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir in 2008. Creative-writing projects have helped educate and promote the work of emerging Hmong American writers, such as the seven Hmong coming-of-age writers featured in How Do I Begin?: A Hmong American Literary Anthology, from the Fresno-based Hmong American Writers’ Circle, which was founded by Burlee Yang.69

Citizenship Politics The Hmong veterans of the Vietnam War were granted an expedited path to US citizenship for their military service. In 2000, with the help of congressional allies and community advocates, Hmong American military veterans staged a legislative contest that opened the pathway to citizenship status for Hmong veterans and their spouses. Congressman Bruce Vento, who represented Minnesota’s Fourth District, encompassing St. Paul, led a legislative battle in Congress to facilitate Hmong veterans’ access to citizen-

36 Citizenship and Participation

ship by allowing bilingual interpreters to assist during citizenship tests. As a result, the Hmong Veterans Naturalization Act was enacted, allowing Hmong individuals to take citizenship examinations with a bilingual interpreter if they had assisted the United States during the Vietnam War as field soldiers or fighter pilots, or in other roles qualifying them as military veterans. Soon afterward the wives of male heads of household received the same benefit. It was difficult for lawmakers to deny the Hmong veterans’ demand for US citizenship rights in light of their military sacrifices. At the same time, it can be argued that the practice of making citizenship dependent on an exchange of rights for past military service potentially weakens the theoretical foundations of citizenship. Somers has argued that citizenship is “imperiled” by market fundamentalism, or “the drive to subject all of social life and the sphere to market mechanisms”; as a result, the “rights-bearing citizen” is transformed into an individual without rights or membership in a state.70 In a contractual view of citizenship, citizenship is considered an earned privilege. A person’s citizenship rights hinge on an ability to exchange something of comparable market value with the state. Inability to do so potentially justifies the exclusion of persons unable to work or earn a living from social assistance programs. In contrast to a contractual view of citizenship, Somers suggests that citizenship is an “instituted process” located in civil society, a third sphere between market and state, and the locus of community associational life. As Alexander has described the nature of this sphere, it encompasses a “world of values and institutions that generates the capacity for social criticism and democratic integration at the same time; further, the structure of civil society may rest upon a cultural structure, but it is hardly merely discursive in its shape and form. It is filled with institutions, organizations of communication and regulation (and we need to recognize the world of public opinion).”71 The move to make citizenship subordinate to markets is illustrated by the treatment of African Americans during the 2005 crisis after Hurricane Katrina, Somers suggests. Broadcast around the globe were televised images of tens of thousands of African Americans who had lost their homes and means of livelihood in New Orleans as a result of the hurricane. In the news stories, people were shown sleeping in shelters and subsisting with no money or home. Newscasters and politicians loosely began to call the displaced persons “refugees,” stirring strong protests.72

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Because market principles have penetrated into public life and thereby loosened the bonds between members of civil society, as Somers claims, no one is more vulnerable than individuals who live outside the mainstream culture and with few material resources. People who lack access to regular employment and material wealth to rely on in times of financial hardship lack resources to offer in the quid pro quo trading between citizens and the state. With little or no formal education, and lacking the skills to obtain minimum wage jobs upon arriving in the United States, most Hmong refugees relied on public assistance in the initial years after settlement. In the logic of market exchange, receiving benefits would accrue as a debt to the government; Hmong communities received funds from state governments for job training and placement through mutual-aid associations in various cities and townships, but those funds were held back as government agencies concluded that sufficient time had passed for the Hmong refugees to gain skill and find jobs, even as job loss in the community at large increased as a result of the Great Recession of 2008. Regardless of formal citizenship status, their acceptance of public assistance casts Hmong families as deficient, according to an incentivized view of citizenship. Taking public assistance opens them to criticism as a “drain” on the coffers of the state, and they appear especially undeserving because of a foreignness that is inescapable for them. Honig has provided helpful insight into this lowered standing of foreigners in democratic citizenship regimes, describing how their foreignness induces a cycle of undecidability in which it cannot be determined whether foreignness is “good” or “bad,” or, in other words, a gift or threat to a nation-state regime’s identity and stability. Portrayals of foreigners cycle from one valuation to the other. Honig’s argument about the cycle of undecidability helps explain instability of public narratives and policy toward the Hmong Americans’ support of the American military during the Vietnam War. Although through the Hmong Veterans Act, veterans were valorized for this service, the act later became grounds for attaching the label “terrorist” to the Hmong. In 2001, the USA Patriot Act expanded the definition of a terrorist organization. The legislation stipulated that a terrorist group consists of two or more individuals, organized or not, which uses any dangerous device with the intent to endanger someone’s safety or damage property. As a result of this definition, any resistance group engaged in armed conflict with its own government could be considered a terrorist organization, including the

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Hmong in America who had fought as allies of the US military in resisting the current regime in Laos. In the first several years after 2001, Hmong refugees continued to enter the United States and receive permanent residency status. However, in 2005, this situation changed, and a growing number of Hmong began to have their applications for permanent residence denied because of this definition of “terrorist.” Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold pointed out the striking and sad irony: “The Hmong have effectively been labeled terrorists as the result of the support they gave the U.S. during the Vietnam War.”73 As a result of political pressure directed at Congress and the Bush administration by Hmong Americans, legislators passed a bill with language stipulating that the Hmong would not be considered terrorists.

Toward a Participatory Citizenship The literature on participatory citizenship identifies conditions necessary for providing and sustaining inclusive democratic rights. The theorists are concerned about overcoming barriers to constitutionally stipulated rights when discrimination impedes their exercise. One branch of this literature has proposed experiments in institutional reform to enable meaningful participation by ordinary citizens in local policy-making bodies. In this view, mechanisms enabling citizens’ deliberation on policy are valued because they enable ordinary people to affect the content and range of policies under consideration and decided on by governance. Deliberative mechanisms at the local level allow community members to share in the proactive creation of policy rather than simply voting between a limited set of predetermined choices of candidates or policies. Fung has examined experiments in an empowered form of citizenship in some US cities, with institutionalized mechanisms for citizenship governance on policing and school councils with the power to make policy. The experiments were informed by international experience, including institutions of participatory budgeting in Porte Alegre, Brazil.74 The benefits of deliberative democracy are pertinent to Hmong Americans, but only if the present-day limits of deliberative capacity are recognized and addressed. As noted earlier, Hmong American communities have, on average, low educational attainment and a low level of English

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proficiency as compared to other Asian American communities. Standing in the way of an effective functioning of deliberative democracy, as Fung points out, are imbalances of power that impede participation on equal terms—or at all—in deliberative bodies. These imbalances arise from various sources, including low levels of literacy and economic disadvantage. For Hmong Americans, overcoming these inequalities requires the reform of school systems, so that they will teach children and adults needed skills in civic engagement and politics while also educating them in English and computer literacy, numeracy, knowledge of science and humanistic subjects, and job-oriented skills. At the level of local schools, involving teachers and parents in community movements to make these programs available to low-income families may be the most pressing priority. Informed by theories of participatory citizenship, this study thus highlights the importance of developing well-rounded capacity in Hmong American communities for participation along multiple dimensions of social life where equal opportunity is blocked. The analysis builds on Fraser’s theory of participatory parity. Fraser’s conceptualization of participatory parity identifies two principal paradigms of social justice, which folk paradigms distinguish as realms of “redistribution” and “recognition.” The redistributive realm concerns the distribution of material resources, which are primarily economic; the recognition realm is concerned with status equality and reciprocal recognition, which concern institutionalized patterns of cultural value that “ensure participants independence and ‘voice’” and “constitute actors as peers capable of participating on a par with one another in social life.”75 The interviews conducted for this study reveal the interconnectedness of obstacles to participatory parity in the realms of both economic distribution and recognition. Many Hmong refugee adults commented that economic poverty was a source of felt discrimination. In addition, a number of them noted their experiences of discrimination based on their identity as an ethnic or racial group, although they did not typically refer to race or ethnicity as conceptual categories. Fraser’s theory of social justice helps identify the interdependence of a politics of recognition, which is often related to race and racial discrimination (but also other forms) and of economic distribution. In turn, the Hmong American experience is helpful for deepening our understanding of these interrelationships as a counterpoint to research approaches that single out one or the other dimension of disparity.

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Fraser identifies a third realm of participatory parity: the political process through which reforms in the direction of parity of recognition and distribution are achieved.76 An important step is reforming existing institutional venues so they will enable self-organized politics in the community. In these places there are openings for parity claims to be voiced and heard, and for political leverage to be exercised first with a small or moderate influence, depending on the numbers and political resources of the group. Some local experiments that show promise for training in participatory civic skills played an important role in the campaign for the Veterans Act. One is a group of Hmong refugees who were involved in citizenship education at the Jane Addams School for Democracy in St. Paul, which adapts a model introduced in the early twentieth century by Jane Addams’s HullHouse in Chicago to modern-day needs. Recent immigrants who reside in low-income communities work together with college students to prepare for citizenship examinations, with an intentional model of colearning; no person is set up as solely a teacher, but all participants are teachers and learners. Small-group deliberation on challenges faced in everyday social life and in civil society takes place in “circles” with bilingual language interpretation. In the veterans’ case, the “Hmong Circle” on their own initiative decided to approach Congressman Bruce Vento to devise a legislative strategy and represent their demands to Congress (there is also an “East African Circle” and a “Spanish Circle”). Beginning their own political careers, a new cohort of Hmong American officials took office for the first time in the second decade of the century. In his bid to win a seat on the Minneapolis City Council, Blong Yang relied on a campaign team of young Hmong Americans, whose talents are often underestimated by older community leaders: I think a lot of times as a community our approach is very top down . . . because when you look at the talent in our community, the talent usually is there to run and win campaigns. . . . We need to be better about being outspoken, saying our piece, making sure policies that might impact us, or will impact us, mean something to us, or having a say about that. . . . Our people tend to think “voting is it” but people forget after you vote you have to keep elected accountable. You have to show up at forums. You have to show up at city council meetings. You have to be part of the political process.77

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In subsequent chapters, excerpts from interviews of political leaders and activists demonstrate common factors motivating their political engagement. In general, they share a desire to work for social equality and help overcome economic disadvantage in their communities. Yang expresses his own thinking in this way: When I was in college everything I read was about the Hmong . . . how we were the exception to this model minority myth—we were always at the bottom. We were below African Americans in terms of achievement, socioeconomics, education, almost everything. So I always thought it was important for people like myself, who are educated, to help people, young people, to do better so the cycle of dependency would stop. . . . It wasn’t that my parents wanted me to. In fact my father wanted me to be an engineer so I could go back to Laos and build houses, but that wasn’t my thing.78

As Blong Yang points out, there is still limited understanding at the grassroots level among Hmong American citizens about how to exert political influence in policy-making institutions.

Field Research Design The following chapters assess progress made thus far in building the political capacity of communities to participate in democratic politics. This participation entails voting and the politics of advocacy and claims making. To help conceptualize how the politics of combatting poverty and inequality are imagined by leaders and ordinary residents of Hmong American communities, I describe community struggles for participatory parity by describing processes that underlie parity claims making. To closely examine how these processes work, this study relies on extensive field research conducted from 2007 through 2015. I interviewed fiftytwo Hmong American leaders, including public officials, staff members of community organizations, directors of ethnic associations, performing and visual artists, educators, and church pastors. These interviews took place in California, Minnesota, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Detroit, Oregon, and Rhode Island.79 In addition, a team of bilingual, undergraduate student research assistants interviewed Hmong Americans in local neighborhood

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s­ ettings in Fresno, St. Paul, and the metropolitan area encompassing Hickory. Thirty-eight adults were recruited from the clientele of nonprofit organizations, in public marketplaces, and by door-to-door canvassing in apartment complexes. Thirteen adults were recruited from lists of professionals in ethnic business directories. Thirty-nine high school students agreed to participate after receiving invitations from their teachers in public schools or the staff of community-based youth programs. The interviews were semistructured. Members of the research team asked Hmong Americans to share their perceptions and experiences of civil and political life in the United States. The questions probed how they perceive social and political life in the United States in comparison to their own experience and current perception of their countries of origin. For example, we were interested in questions such as what their understanding of the term politics is and whether they ever get involved in politics; if they are interested in politics, whether the interest was encouraged in family life; how they think of “leaders”; how they form preferences for political candidates if they vote; and what they think are the main problems facing their community. Bilingual research assistants conducted interviews in either Hmong or English, depending on the research participants’ preference, and recorded and transcribed the sessions. When the interviews were conducted in Hmong, the transcripts were translated to English. In the text, excerpts from this latter set of interviews are the product of this transcription and translation process. One of the aims of this study was to interpret the responses by taking into account the local context of the immigrants’ daily lives, as well as the trauma of the war experience that was, for many, still fresh in their memory, and the dislocation and disorientation associated with the refugee camp experience and subsequent resettlement. In each phase of the immigrants’ lives as refugees and settled immigrants once in the United States, they had to navigate life within and between political cultures from several worlds. The most evident difference was between the political culture in the country of origin and in the United States. But cultural encounters and adaptations were varied and complex. For those whose families had interacted with Christian missionaries, for example—in Laos, in refugee camps in Thailand, or later in the United States—some converted to Christianity from a traditional animist belief system, while others did not. Within the Christian traditions, moreover, some denominations accommodated ritu-

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alistic practices to animism more than others. In the United States, immigrants found that political cultures differ among the sites of settlement on the East Coast, in the Midwest, in the West, and in the South. All of these variations affected the interplay of different aspects of an “American” and “Hmong” culture, each of which was in the process of change and shaped by distinct historical experiences. Included in the account of politics in Hmong American communities is discussion of both successful and unsuccessful candidates. Among the candidates interviewed who succeeded in winning office are Senator Mee Moua, Representative Cy Thao, and Senator Foung Hawj in Minnesota; City Council Member Blong Xiong in Fresno; Tony Vang, president of the Fresno Unified School Board, and City Council Member Blong Yang of Minneapolis. In addition, the account of campaigns addresses factors that came into play in losing an election. One example is presented by Pakou Hang’s 2008 campaign for a city council seat in St. Paul, which she lost to an incumbent. In none of the successful cases did the Hmong candidate win in a district with a majority of Hmong voters; in fact, in most cases, the Hmong voting bloc was small. Several candidates devised a two-prong campaign strategy and infrastructure. One part was directed toward voters of Latino and white racial-ethnic backgrounds, who happened to constitute the majority of voters in their districts. The second part focused on Hmong Americans, who, if not numerous as voters, were represented by recognized leaders of clans, whose support was important to win, as relations with the Hmong community would be important even if the candidate was not viewed as a Hmong leader in the traditional sense of primarily serving Hmong interests as an officeholder.

Chapter Outline Chapter 2 examines the cultural and political meaning of identity stories as articulated by Hmong Americans, including examples of how freedom and parity are expressed in these narratives. These stories have formed through an amalgam of lived experience and values. The process of construction and telling of the narratives is participatory. Chapter 3 compares local contexts of political and civic participation in several cities, principally Fresno, California; St. Paul and Minneapolis,

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Minnesota; Eau Claire, Wisconsin; and Hickory, North Carolina. The analysis uses a conceptual framework delineating the nature of parity of participation in society, including the realm of economic distribution and recognition, as articulated by Fraser. The analysis emphasizes the importance of public educational institutions and community-based organizations in promoting citizen education. Interviews of high school students in Fresno, St. Paul, Minneapolis, and the Hickory-Morganton area provide evidence of their interest in the welfare of the Hmong American community and civic engagement. Chapter 4 uses interviews of Hmong American leaders and grassroots community members to examine diverse views on a wide range of questions: the nature and extent of participants’ political and civic engagement, sources of political information, attitudes about leadership, relationships to political parties, views about the main problems in the community, concepts of ethnic identity, and views of national policy issues. Chapter 5 extends the analysis of citizenship participation to examine a case of advocacy for human rights across borders. This chapter presents a case study of the politics of recognition and dignity as expressed in the testimony of Hmong refugees about human rights violations in Thailand, where their relatives’ graves were desecrated. Chapter 6 concludes with a discussion of future prospects for wider and deeper political participation of the Hmong Americans. The desire of Hmong Americans to engage in elections is rooted in an understanding that government plays a role in helping people in poverty become self-­ sufficient and build a stable and sustainable livelihood. Experiencing racial prejudice has created a sense of commonality with other racial minorities and their American experience. From this ground there is the potential to better appreciate the power of collective action in politics and to gain the skills needed in a truly participatory citizenship.

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On the fortieth anniversary of the withdrawal of American troops from the Vietnam War, Mai Der Vang, a Fresno-based poet and writer, published an opinion piece on being an heir to the conflict in the New York Times. Vang was born in the United States, and like many other young Hmong Americans of similar background, she has no personal memory of the violence of war in Laos. As Vang writes: I carry the afflictions of this war even though I have never heard a bomb explode or feared my footsteps might trigger a mine. This war is my inheritance. . . . But I also believe that we must forge a new narrative, one that not only embraces trauma but builds upon it. We must repurpose the wreckage to serve as a reminder of who we are while acknowledging what our elders endured.1

This chapter examines how identity narratives being forged both by Hmong American elders and by those of Mai Der Vang’s generation express a desire to continue in the present day an ancient quest for human dignity and freedom. The discussion begins with an overview of several themes in contemporary identity stories and a description of historical events that ground those stories’ ongoing adaptations. Three themes are examined through the lens of theoretical frameworks in the literature on identity formation in immigrant communities: the historical continuity of freedom seeking, the challenge immigrants face in living in two worlds, and the resistance to cultural myths about immigrants that remove or deny their agency in claiming dignity and rights. The discussion illustrates varied 45

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expressions of these themes, which translate and adapt traditional identity narratives to contemporary circumstances. The creation and dissemination of the stories take place in the context of generational change in the leadership of Hmong American communities. After describing this change, the chapter provides illustrations of participatory storytelling, which brings identity themes to life with public action and infuses the stories with new meaning. The growing collection of identity stories told by Hmong Americans addresses a broad range of related subjects, including generational divides, views on assimilation and acculturation, family and gender relations, representations of Hmong culture in the media, and traditional and contemporary art. When stories connect the war legacy with present-day aspirations for equality the joining of older and younger people’s perspectives tends to strengthen a Hmong American voice in public affairs. The narratives of this type generally share two features that help motivate civic and political engagement in local communities. First, much of the storytelling is synthetic in that it connects contemporary life in America to collective memories of the parents’ experience in Laos before and during the wartime. In this respect, the stories help bridge generational difference and enhance communication within the ethnic community. Second, the process of storytelling often has a participatory character; that is, storytellers create song, poetry, and recorded performance arts as participants in grassroots organizing for community empowerment. Traditionally, the identity stories of the Hmong in Laos were conveyed orally in the form of chanted song, epic poetry, tale, and adage. As Ng has written, “sung poetry” was especially important for the Hmong because it could convey thoughts and emotions concerning “love, despair, war, separation, homesickness, and hope.” Ng illustrates this with a song verse sung by May Vue of Santa Ana, California, and translated by Kur Khang and Amy Catlin: Ni yai! Oh my boyfriend! This year our country is not peaceful, So that all our Hmong people had to leave our land. We arrived in this new country Where the others scold us, Asking why Hmong people do not have hearts that are happy, Why we do not have hearts that are good.2

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As the quarter century mark passed since the end of the war, however, a new generation had come of age after receiving an education in America, and spokespersons for these young adult members of the community began to introduce their own perspectives into private conversations about politics and debates in public spaces. Like their elders, the younger generation of community leaders highly valued US citizenship and often publicly expressed their commitment to American democratic ideals. In a manner typical of other communities of immigrants and refugees, differences emerged between those with liberal and conservative ideas, partly defined in terms of ideological debates in national politics. How diverse ideas develop and compete in ethnic communities depends on the particularity of historical experience and national and local environments. In the Hmong American communities, the content and tenor of political discourse contains a mixture of modern strands of democratic egalitarian thoughts about minority civil rights and social justice with strong expressions of ethnic consciousness, as well as traditional ways of thinking about clan, family, and ­community. The process of synthetic integration of values from the immigrant’s sending country with lessons acquired through personal lived experience in America unfolds in multistranded conversations. Identity narratives are enriched and animated when Hmong leaders and ordinary members of the community take part in local conversation and engage people from varied walks of life. In her studies of African American politics and communication, ­Harris-Lacewell provides a useful theoretical perspective on the role of oral communication in political and cultural life. In this view, “ordinary talk” in community settings helps people grapple with and create threads of interwoven identity stories.3 From the vantage point of people outside these communities, it may be easy to imagine that members of ethnic minorities have a homogeneous way of thinking about politics and other matters, but Hmong Americans hold a variety of viewpoints on matters of politics, ethics, and social problems and their solutions. Among community leaders and ordinary people, the ordinary talk adds to a wider discourse about goals in organizing communities for self-improvement and equality. And as in any human community, these will at times be discussed quietly and in private, and at other times they will break out into disputes in which ideas are ­contested in view of wider audiences and with great passion.

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It has become commonplace for writers describing the culture of the Hmong in America to romanticize some of its features. It is important from the outset to identify some widely held misperceptions. In writings about Hmong history, for example, one is the notion that the word “Hmong” means “free,” which Mai Na Lee has challenged.4 Lee points out that the meaning of “free” in the Chinese context “had more the sense of barbarity and inability to enter the fold of civilization, and in the French colonial period, the Hmong were seen as superstitiously warlike.” In these instances, the politically dominant groups portrayed the Hmong as “irrationally aggressive” when trying to force compliance with laws that unfairly taxed the Hmong or required them to perform unpaid labor in lieu of taxes.5 Tapp sheds further light onto why Westerners may have romanticized the Hmong people’s yearning for independence, turning those images into icons now associated with Hmong psychology and identity. Explorers and travelers who observed Hmong society in the nineteenth century must have found images of tribal freedom and noble savagery appealing as romantic alternatives to industrializing society in the West, Tapp argues, while suggesting that there may nonetheless have been some genuine sense of nobility in Hmong resistance to oppression. The witnesses of Hmong people who came from colonizing Western societies were attracted by and created a “romantic image of freedom from the authority of the state, and freedom from attachment to the land in their own imaginations.” Tapp also draws a parallel between the image of “primitiveness” attached to Hmong society and the invented image of the Scottish highlander.6 In fact, some Hmong Americans have themselves used the same image to describe the elder generation’s yearnings for freedom. In an interview with a local journalist in 2010, for example, Foung Hawj, who won election to the Minnesota State Senate in 2012, drew on that cultural invention: I think if I want to relate my culture to the West, we the Hmong will be more like the Scottish highlander. . . . [W]e lived in the mountains, and we enjoyed life in seclusion from civilization. We liked to enjoy the free lifestyle. . . . And we can go back further than that to the Vietnam War. . . . Our greatest weapon is a flint gun, and maybe just a tiny bow and arrow, just to shoot a tiny bird. But the Vietnam War exposed us to modern warfare, taught us how to fly, taught us how to shoot the M16. . . . We can’t go back to the highland—the free life . . . so we have to get involved in this modern society.7

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Foung Hawj is no doubt correct in pointing out that for many older Hmong Americans, freedom entails some longing for the past. But it is not clear how the concept of being free translates to the American context, either for the Hmong adults who came as refugees and have tried to integrate into the workforce and their local communities for many years now, or for a generation of Hmong Americans who have grown up in the United States. Tapp gives some sense of the contemporary diversity of thought about Hmong traditions and identity, as well as the nature of collective memories recorded in identity narratives, which often represent a notion of ethnic history that does not closely conform to actual events: Today we must say that there is at least a Protestant, a Catholic, a secular, and a messianic, Hmong tradition. Moreover, there are important and impassioned debates among the Hmong between the conservative and the liberal, the patriarchal and the feminist, the juvenile and the senior authoritarian. The Hmong community today is a multivocal one, with a form of identity inhabited by many selves and therefore fragmentary rather than unitary. Inasmuch as it remains a collective identity it reaches back, however, to a univocal recounting of history, which we may say is a largely “false” one in terms of its correspondence to objective conditions, and yet is still one which is felt to be “real” in that it speaks of historical themes of the loss of, and desire for, autonomy.8

A claim for recognition of the humanity of the Hmong people and for freedom from persecution runs through identity stories told by community spokespersons of different ideological persuasion. At the same time, there is no consensus about the meaning of freedom for the Hmong in America. People naturally hold different views about whether the authority still vested in the leaders of clan and supraclan structures to regulate community affairs and choose political leaders helps preserve social bonds and the wisdom of the elders. Some believe that giving them too much deference stifles innovative thinking or participatory freedom on the part of all community members, regardless of age and gender. Conversations about concepts of freedom take place in ordinary venues, including the private social institutions of the community, families, and clans, as well as in public spaces, typically mediated by elites. Some discussions are led in an intentional way by community elites, as when leaders construct and disseminate political narratives for the purpose of creating group solidarity. In the spaces for discourse created by works of literature

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and the performing arts, some young Hmong Americans have begun to find creative expression for their thoughts about politics and the community’s yearning for freedom. More generally, commonsense notions of freedom are discussed by people in informal and private communal spaces, such as within families, community or clan associations, informal associations of vendors and customers in small marketplaces, or social gatherings to mark important life events such as weddings and funerals. The latter category of conversation is “ordinary talk” as described by Harris-Lacewell.9 Chapter 4 reports our investigations of how people describe their own conversations about political matters in these ordinary settings. In what follows, we focus on the discourse initiated by political leaders and activists, including those using literary and art forms, in more public spaces.

Narratives of Freedom Seeking To clarify the terminology used here, the category of “transnational politics” refers to activities that aim to bring about social or political change in countries abroad. These are distinct from activities directed toward social policy change in the United States. In what follows, a fairly wide assortment of political activities is encompassed by the broad category of “Hmong American politics.” The forms of engagement that fall into this category include giving voice to concerns about public policy, advocacy, voting, and protest. In the first several years after resettlement, very few Hmong American families had the economic resources to enable them to become involved in transnational politics in a sustained or focused manner. Unable to bring with them but a bare minimum of personal belongings to the United States from the refugee camps, the adults had to concentrate their attention on immediate matters of getting along in foreign surroundings. Nonetheless, many Hmong in America were deeply concerned about their kinfolk still living in Southeast Asia, and they found ways to try to help them. As they were able, the parents of some family units in the United States began to send economic remittances to relatives abroad. As more time passed, a sense of a shared ethnicity evolved among the Hmong who had been dispersed to many countries after the war. In contrast, some prominent Hmong leaders had greater resources and were in a position to adapt the remnants of political organizations formed

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in wartime to fit their aims in the United States. The United Lao National Liberation Front, an organization formed in Laos under Vang Pao’s leadership, re-formed in the United States and continued its work, advocating a replacement for the political regime led by the Communist Party of Laos with a Western-style democracy. While directing their energies to the homeland (or transnational concerns), Vang Pao and his close associates formed a nonprofit organization to serve the social needs of the refugees, the Lao Family Community, with branches in several cities. Other leaders of the Hmong community, however, differed about the position the Hmong Americans should take toward the communist-led Laotian government. One prominent leader was Dr. Yang Dao, the first Hmong to receive a doctoral degree, which he earned from the Sorbonne in 1972. Dao had served on the forty-two-member Political Council of a coalition government between the Royal Lao and Pathet Lao forces for a short time before the Pathet Lao military victory in 1975. Yang Dao called upon the Hmong in America to focus their energies on making a new life in the United States rather than supporting a Hmong insurgency in Laos after the end of the war. One organization Yang Dao formed for that purpose was the Multi-Ethnic Alliance. In American cities, there were also informal networks of supporters of the Chao Fa resistance movement that continued its insurgency in Laos. These Hmong associations, such as the United Lao National Liberation Front and Yang Dao’s Multi-Ethnic Alliance, engaged in a form of transnational politics and organized themselves in hierarchical fashion reminiscent of traditional Hmong politics, by which members largely deferred to a leader and his core of advisers. The social organization of the Hmong continued to center on the clan systems, which elected leaders to councils made up of representatives from eighteen clans in various cities. As a result, conversations within ordinary Hmong American families about the community’s future were influenced by these political and social organizations. As the need arose for a unified response to several crises, such as instances of racial confrontations between Hmong American and white hunters in Wisconsin, or the desecration of the graves of relatives in Thailand, younger Hmong American leaders introduced some new forms of community consultations, which involved town meetings and public hearings before officials. These efforts would bring to the fore a desire shared by a growing number of younger and older members of the community to participate in more open and transparent forms of decision making.

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The sharing of stories about the Hmong historical experience has a strong participatory component. As has been common in the experience of immigrant communities, adolescents and young adults raised in America wanted to learn about their family and ethnic origins, and parents felt it was important to share this with them. Because Hmong history had been passed down through generations of Hmong in an oral tradition, not in written form (except by anthropologists, missionaries, or writers who chronicled the history as outsiders), the history could be shared only by trying to recover these oral traditions in the American context, then adapting the ancient forms of oral literature to modern cultural styles. By its nature, this process occurs intergenerationally among ordinary people; in this sense, it involves many people participating in an uncoordinated process of storytelling. Without community leaders, teachers, writers, and performing artists interested in helping advance this process, the ancient forms are at risk of being lost over time. Fortuitously, the first generation of US-educated Hmong American youth have become interested in this recovery and telling of Hmong history at a time when mass communications technology can enhance the scale and speed of the process, involving more participants than ever before. The lowering of the cost of producing and sharing music and films over the Internet enables more ordinary people to share in storytelling, including in the construction of a sense of what Hmong identity in America is, and in conversations about values and goals in which different viewpoints can be engaged.

Stories of a Divided Heart A large scholarly literature spanning several social science and humanities disciplines closely examines how people who share a common ethnicity form a sense of identity as individuals and a group when they are treated as social “outsiders” by members of dominant cultures. A departure point for this study of Hmong Americans is the concept that living in two worlds creates an inner sense of two selves, which is a common theme in studies of immigrant identity. Kao Kalia Yang came to the United States in 1987 as a small child after living in a refugee camp in Thailand for a few years. She later wrote and published her family memoirs after receiving her master’s degree from Columbia University. As a young high school student in the St. Paul public

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school system during the late 1990s, she experienced a sickness not only of body but also of heart: There was a clear division: the Hmong heart (the part that held the hands of my mom and dad and grandma proactively every time we encountered the outside world, the part that cried because Hmong people didn’t have a home, the part that listened to Hmong songs and fluttered about looking for clean air and crisp mountains in flat St. Paul, the part that quickly and effectively forgot all my school friends in the heat of summer) or the American heart (the part that was lonely for the outside world, that stood by and watched the fluency of other parents with their boys and girls— children who lingered in the clubs and sports teams after school waiting to be picked up later by parents who could—the part that wondered if forgetting my best friends to life was normal and necessary).10

Yang’s reflections are illuminated by research on a “hybrid” or dual identity, which was the subject of W. E. B. DuBois’s seminal essay on the effect of racial prejudice on the concepts of self held by black Americans. Writing in the early twentieth century about black Americans’ historical strivings, DuBois articulated the idea of double consciousness: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”11 DuBois’s concept of double consciousness lies at the foundation of many penetrating studies of racial identity.12 Expanding this idea to all blacks in the West, Gilroy describes the position as between (at least) two “great cultural assemblages.”13 The individual occupying a hybrid space navigates between two cultural groups and occupies space within both cultural groups. This space holds a challenge and a privilege, according to Blau and Brown’s interpretation of DuBois. Double consciousness can be a hindrance, in their view. Yet in creating a reflexive perspective on such double consciousness, the African American can achieve a degree of synthetic emancipation.14 The African American is described as having both a veil and a second sight.15 The veiled individual is sometimes able to perceive things about others better than those others can see themselves. The veil creates distance, but the second sight gives people a way of seeing themselves from the vantage point of others.16 How, then, does the concept of double consciousness illuminate the consciousness of members of a refugee group that has been denied political

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membership in its country of origin and come to the United States seeking protection and to establish a better life, to make a new home? Like black Americans, refugees who have experienced contempt and exclusion from societies in their original homeland tend to strongly value US citizenship because of the rights of membership. There is typically a negative social stigma attached to persons deemed outsiders, as described by Mee Moua, the first Hmong American to serve in the Minnesota Senate: I think the fundamental difference is that this is a country of others so outside of the Native American community, every individual present in this country has an other identity if you reach far back enough. So our sense of other identity is what binds us together as Americans. In fact, it’s that sense of other that, for me, defines what being an American is.17

In this comment, Mee Moua suggests that for many Hmong Americans, citizenship is an equalizer, and at the same time, it has an instrumental component that gives US citizens greater influence in global affairs than citizens of some other nations. The global power exerted by the United States affords an opportunity for economic and physical security that, in the estimation of many Hmong Americans, is greater than the security enjoyed by citizens living in other national territories. American citizenship also provides an opportunity to build leverage as citizen advocates in policy-making circles that could aid coethnics living abroad. A Hmong American might lobby US officials to place pressure on foreign governments to protect the human rights of Hmong abroad, for example; holding citizenship affords some standing to do so. But this standing is as equal members of society, at least in a formal or legal sense. It helps Hmong Americans realize a sense of self-worth as persons equal in status and rights to other citizens. This sense of self informs one part of the double consciousness DuBois described. But when Hmong Americans’ treatment as racial minorities by other Americans fails to live up to the egalitarian promise that these new Americans regard as so crucial to their rights as citizens, the experiences bring back painful memories of the Hmong being despised as outsiders in their country of origin—the other side of the two-part self. By coming to America, the Hmong by no means escaped racial prejudice, which they experience in different forms and with less intensity than they had before in Laos. Nonetheless, there were not-infrequent encounters between the Hmong newcomers and longtime residents of American neighborhoods that engendered racial misunderstanding and animosity. Bobo

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and Tuan’s theory of prejudice is especially illuminating as it clarifies the nature of racial prejudice that the Hmong have experienced in the United States.18 The theory is built on Blumer’s classic theory of prejudice, which links the psychological aspects of prejudice at the level of an individual person to its social dimension. In other words, at the center of this theoretical framework is the interconnection of the individual psychology of prejudice and its collective manifestation within and between social groups. There are four salient features of a dominant group outlook, according to Bobo and Tuan: a feeling of superiority on the part of dominant group members; a belief that the subordinate group is intrinsically different and alien; a sense of a proprietary claim over certain rights, statuses, and resources; and a perception of threat from a subordinate group that is seen as harboring a desire for a greater share of dominant-group prerogatives.19 As described later, each of these features came into play in a series of violent racial confrontations between whites and Hmong hunters in Wisconsin. The first widely publicized case occurred in 2004, and recriminations and further conflicts ensued for several years afterward. In the literature on the experience of prejudice by refugees and immigrants from Asia, Ong examined the position occupied by Asian immigrants and refugees with diverse economic means in the American racial order. Ong suggests that American racial ideology historically placed economically impoverished Asian immigrants at the “black end” of a black-white continuum of moral worthiness, where blacks are considered “unworthy” citizens and whites are deemed “worthy.” Drawing from the anthropological literature, Ong conducted an ethnographic study of the interactions between Cambodian immigrants and agents of authority in the San Francisco Bay Area, suggesting that Cambodians occupy a place very different from that of Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants, and these latter two tend to be considered “model minorities” in a racial hierarchy because they are presumed to hold on to Confucian values, which brings them closer to the neoliberal valorization of individual enterprise. Unlike the Chinese and Vietnamese, Ong argues, poor Asian immigrants, such as the Cambodians, are portrayed in cultural discourse as “primitive,” “refugees,” “welfare mothers,” or members of an “underclass,” categories branding them with a lack of dignity and moral worth.20 Ong’s observations about Southeast Asian refugees apply in some respects to the Hmong, especially since almost all Hmong refugees came to the United States in a state of economic poverty, like the Cambodians.

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However, the way Hmong have been portrayed in the mainstream media and by important opinion makers is more complex. This should not be surprising, given the vastly different relationship that Hmong American refugees established as military allies of the United States during the Indochina Wars, albeit in the “Secret War” in Laos. In addition, religious practices have engendered different responses from residents of the cities where the Hmong settled. The religions of Southeast Asian countries are diverse, and responses to traditional animist practices vary depending on the cultural receptivity of people living in those cities to the particular traditions that may be practiced by, for example, Hmong, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Cambodians, including the many indigenous cultures that may be represented in the populations that settled in the United States from Southeast Asia. Although earlier discussion identified two parts of the self-concept of the Hmong in America—one tied to the culture of the original homeland and the other to the American identity—it will become evident that analytically limiting the number of “selves” to two can lead to a too narrow or rigid concept of who the Hmong Americans are. Recognizing a duality of consciousness need not stand in the way, however, because it can be readily extended into thinking about multiple or hybrid consciousness, unlike identity concepts assuming singularity. An individual person may regard each of a number of overlapping social identities as vital, a phenomenon studied by scholars of intersectionality.21 For example, a person’s multiple social identities may include ethnic, cosmopolitan, gendered, religious, and secular selves; and at the same time the individual may hold on to the idea of membership in a nation as well as subnational political community, such as a city or town. If multiple and overlapping identities interact to shape a person’s concept of self, then one or the other can assume greater salience in a single moment or social context. This fluidity is one factor in theories of cultural translation. In his study of the Hmong diasporic identity, for example, Tapp reviews the discussion among anthropologists who have suggested that members of cultural minorities do not face a simple choice between “going back to their roots,” which is a conservative move toward tradition, and the single alternative of “assimilating” to the culture of the mainstream or dominant majority. Rather, there is another alternative: the minority group members can choose to perform cultural translation, a term Homi Bhabha introduced as a metaphor of linguistic translation to describe one choice

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facing people who migrate across frontiers, which can be geographical or not. The idea of translation, according to Bhabha, refers to the process of changing and adapting oneself to new circumstances.22

Taking Liberties: Breaking Cycles of “Good” and “Bad” Immigrant Myths Honig’s analysis of the dominant myths associating foreigners with nation building is directly applicable to America’s history of admitting refugees and illuminates the nature of social relationships formed after refugees settle. In Honig’s view, immigrants (or foreigners) are depicted in these myths alternatively as givers to or takers from the nation. When the dominant narratives concerning foreigners living in democratic countries are defined only in terms of those countries’ processes of nation building, rather than in relationship to their democratic development, what is at one moment valorization of the foreigner as a giver to the nation too easily turns into the opposite: denigration of the foreigner as taking from the nation.23 In popular portrayals and public policies affecting the Hmong, story lines often follow this vicious cycle of depicting the “good” and “bad” immigrant. An important cycle of positive and negative portrayals pivots around interpretations of the Hmong’s relationship to national security interests. In Paul Hillmer’s account of how the Central Intelligence Agency recruited Hmong to fight for the United States, for example, agency officials described the Hmong “as perfect” warriors because of their perceived physical prowess: they could run long hours by day and night, quickly climb steep mountains, and suffer through hunger and deprivation of all sorts, the story went.24 But as I described in Chapter 1, decades later the Hmong veterans of the Secret War were classified as “terrorists” by a provision of the 2001 USA Patriot Act precisely because of their earlier role as US military allies during the Vietnam War to defeat the communist forces that prevailed in Laos. The circularity of representing the Hmong as both givers and takers paves the way for racial resentment to mount against them in cycles of cultural backlash. When populist anger rises in time of economic austerity, immigrants can be blamed for “taking” from the economic well-being of others. The cycle of praise and blame is illustrated by a conversation at a televised Minneapolis town hall meeting in 1981, where a panel discussed

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the status of Hmong refugees in the Twin Cities. John Tanton, a prominent proponent of immigration restrictions in the 1980s, remarked that the Hmong “are a highly successful group that is motivated and has taken the trouble to learn the language and has fit in quite well.” But, he added, “the larger question we’re going to look back on is will we have enough food to export or will we have consumed it all ourselves? So it’s not a question of any particular group.”25 In popular culture, Hmong American families have been similarly portrayed as possessing supposedly worthy and unworthy cultural traits. In the 2008 Hollywood film Gran Torino, starring Clint Eastwood, two Hmong American teenagers costar. In a romanticized fashion, the film depicts close relationships in their immediate and extended family. Although the family’s mutual support system is shown in a somewhat positive light, Hmong gender roles are stereotyped and portrayed more negatively when a Korean War veteran, played by Eastwood, has to teach the teenage boy, his neighbor, “what it means to be a man.” The implication is that a virile masculinity is absent in Hmong culture, which the film suggests overemphasizes communal family ties at the expense of allowing teenagers’ masculinity to develop. Although the film has been defended as pure entertainment, the representation of a Clint Eastwood–style masculinity as desirable, compared to presumed Hmong concepts of masculinity, which are stereotypically depicted as either weak or missing altogether, leaves a lasting impression because Hmong culture is rarely portrayed in the popular mass media. Most Americans are wholly unfamiliar with Hmong history, cultural practices, or views of the masculine and feminine.26 The story line, moreover, supports popular perceptions that immigrants, like the Hmong, coming from societies where social organization is based on kinship are in one moment praiseworthy for their adherence to “family values,” but in the next instance blamed for practicing a culture that purportedly undermines American individualism as the source of heroic acts, as when the Korean War veteran saves the Hmong teenager. For various Asian American ethnic groups, Honig’s cycle of undecidability takes a somewhat different form, but for all groups, the circularity impedes their efforts to achieve full and lasting inclusion. What may seem a boon to the public image of a group at one moment can become its opposite in the next. The cycle can be broken by changing the relationship between foreigners and democratic societies, no longer insisting that the

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foreigners be “givers” to or “takers” from the nation-building project, but instead situating the foreigners in relation to the building of democracy, as Honig argues: The practice of taking rights and privileges rather than waiting for them to be granted by a sovereign power is, I would argue, a quintessentially democratic practice. Indeed, it is one of the practices whereby the American experiment in democracy began. As Alexis de Tocqueville points out in Democracy in America, American “settlers” began “exercising rights of sovereignty” without the prior knowledge or authorization of the “motherland.”27

In Honig’s view, it is important to break the cycle of undecidability—the depiction of “good” and “bad” immigrants—by recasting popular thinking about immigrants’ relationship to democracy as “taking liberties”; they must make room for themselves in civil and political society by staging contests to win nonexistent rights, and “by way of such stagings, sometimes, new rights, powers, and visions” come into being.28 In Hmong American communities, political leaders face the challenge of facilitating translation and reconstruction of an identity story while also mobilizing their constituents’ participation in the telling. Part of the challenge is to recount the history and sense of identity of an ethnic minority group without depicting the group’s culture as homogeneous, and without portraying cultural traits as somehow intrinsic to a group by virtue of its historical origins. When notions of ethnic characteristics become fixed, in contrast, there is scarce room for individuals who identify with an ethnic political movement to express or otherwise manifest their individuality, which is elemental to their humanness.

Translating Identity Stories In the 1990s, at national gatherings prominent Hmong leaders began to articulate their views on the set of translated values that should be the foundation of a Hmong identity. In a 1995 keynote presentation at a conference on the Hmong, for example, Gary Yia Lee described his view of what it means to be Hmong. In his speech, Lee described the Hmong people as a multiethnic and multilingual community living in many countries. The

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meaning of “being Hmong” includes the sharing of a collective consciousness, relating positively with others, and becoming effective parents; moreover, a set of moral values lie at the core of what “being Hmong” means, such as “equality, honesty, ability to compromise, fairness, flexibility and sensitivity to other people.” In Lee’s view, a Hmong identity is developing in fast-changing environments, where people can draw from old traditions and ideas. They can borrow from other sources to shape a new group image to fit the demands of the postmodern world.29 Among older leaders who are veterans of the Secret War, many of whom hold more firmly to a traditional (as distinct from a translational identity) sense of the Hmong identity, we can identify two distinct political strands of thinking. These diverge somewhat in which values are given priority, but they can overlap or coexist to some extent in a single person’s thinking. The first is undergirded by a sense of ethnic pride formed from an understanding of Hmong history as a resistance struggle against persecution, led by leaders endowed with supernatural or messianic qualities who can deliver the Hmong people to freedom. These beliefs trace the origins of Hmong resistance to the first Hmong kings who fought against Chinese warlords, but resistance fighters have also attributed messianic qualities to twentiethcentury Hmong leaders. At the time of the 1975 defeat of the US and Royal Lao forces by the Pathet Lao, which established its government in the capital at the end of the war, some Hmong forces refused to surrender even after most of the resistance forces were destroyed. Some in the Hmong resistance movement continued to carry out low-scale military warfare in the highland jungles of Laos. These Hmong fighters were motivated by a messianic set of beliefs. Although perhaps only several thousand have survived to this day in the jungles, some who remain work to recruit members and propagate their views through private channels in the Hmong communities in Southeast Asia and in the West. A second orientation was taken by Laotian Hmong allies of the United States who committed themselves to trying to defeat communism and install Western-style democracy in Laos, rather than to achieving more limited goals of ethnic autonomy or nation building in some territory of the Laotian state. The political views of this group were shaped by the conflicts between American imperialist power and communist and nationalist insurgencies in Southeast Asia, and a definition of liberal democracy as the opponent of Marxism and authoritarian forms of government. Even though

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the political and social system in Laos thirty years after the end of the war does not come close to the socialist ideal espoused by leaders of the revolutionary movements during the mid- and late twentieth century, Vang Pao and other leaders of the United Lao National Liberation Front and related groups favored an overthrow of the Pathet Lao regime and the installation of a democracy, which they hoped to have a large part in leading. Both of these lines of thinking influenced the children of the Secret War veterans, many of whom felt sympathy with the Hmong groups in Southeast Asia who resisted communist rule and had a special concern for human rights violations against noncombatants, including women and children living in the jungles of Laos. But with the passage of time, the concerns of a younger generation of political activists began to move in other directions. In the early phases of political activism among a college-educated generation, the aim of gaining recognition for the service of their parents as US veterans with full benefits was important; later, young Hmong American activists expanded their agenda to try and gain full recognition of their parents’ and their own rights to citizenship, including the freedom to participate and voice their concerns as full-fledged members of the political ­community. Hmong American youth are certainly not alone in expressing high regard for participatory engagement in civic life. Their thinking more generally reflects that of American youth, whose view of what constitutes good citizenship has changed since their parents’ generation formed views of citizenship.30 Compared to many parents, who considered loyalty and deference to authority as the hallmarks of being a good citizen, younger people value engagement and do not see themselves as “subjects” of government; rather, they directly approach government to influence its actions, and they have greater tolerance, as well as concern for others, both in the United States and internationally, than does the previous generation. While young and elder Hmong Americans shared their strong valuation of citizenship, political leaders of the two generations held different views on the type of political participation that was desirable and meaningful. The younger leaders tended to value individual independence more than their elders, and so began to move toward detaching themselves from the system of internal community decision making, which placed authority over political matters with a handful of elders: former military leaders who had established their authority in the Vietnam War among their parents’ generation.

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Moreover, the younger generation brings an outlook formed from the content and style of American education to the conflicts between tradition and modernity that the Hmong communities have grappled with. They are more inclined than many in their parents’ or grandparents’ generation to believe that people should decide without coercive pressure from authorities which traditions to follow or not. The younger generation’s perspective is illuminated by Sen, who writes that participation “requires knowledge and basic educational skills[;] denying the opportunity of schooling to any group—say, female children—is immediately contrary to the basic conditions of participatory freedom.”31 Members of the younger generation of Hmong American activists who themselves are the beneficiaries of an education that prepares them for civic engagement as well as for the job market are likely to appreciate its value for their own younger siblings and future generations. It is not only the younger Hmong Americans who value some forms of participatory freedom, however. Many elder Hmong Americans have brought their own perspective to bear on what it means to “take liberties” in America, using forms of political participation they find suitable. Hmong veteran organizations have been especially active in advocacy in Washington, DC, to gain citizenship rights and benefits available to other US veterans of the military. In several respects, in fact, these acts by the elders of the community inspired the next generation to initiate advocacy alongside the traditional leaders. Although traditional social structures of decision making in the Hmong community are hierarchical, there are important ideas that can be adapted to encourage more Hmong Americans of all ages to become engaged in community affairs. For example, my interviews show that younger Hmong Americans often speak about community values learned from their parents—the ethic of leaders caring for people, the importance of communal solidarity, and a responsibility to assist the poor. Moreover, an ethic that emphasizes the responsibility of individuals to help others in the community who are in need is an important factor motivating children to contribute to their community in political or social service. These values can be of significant impact as one of many motivations for community members to become politically engaged. If young people dismiss these values as oldfashioned, the community is likely to lose resources.

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As the younger generations’ modern-day perspective on participation expands in influence in community politics, its potential for enlivening democratic politics will be fully realized only if cross-generational understanding and cooperation can be achieved. To achieve a fully participatory democracy, however, people representing different age, gender, and income backgrounds need to be engaged. Because of their English-language skills and understanding of the political system, the younger generation of leaders is in a position to help speed up the process of giving voice to the Hmong story and concerns from the older generations’ perspectives. This includes a process of cultural translation of the elders’ concerns about communal well-being for the ethnic group, especially as they age and as many remain more socially isolated than their offspring because of language skills. Intergenerational participation will perhaps allow for more varied forms of cultural translation in politics. Pakou Hang described formative spiritual influences on her values before deciding to run for local office in St. Paul in 2007. She was deeply influenced both by Hmong traditional beliefs in ancestor worship and by the religious and social values conveyed to her by teachers at her Catholic primary school. In Hmong traditions, Hang pointed out, “the funeral is the quintessential part of the Hmong community. . . . In the ceremony they go back to each place where the person lived. . . . As the offspring of this family member’s spirit . . . you view their life. . . . [I]t is rooted in the culture.” In her campaign for city council, Hang did bring up religious issues prone to divide the electorate, such as matters of abortion and gay marriage. She emphasized the concerns Hmong Americans felt about the economic recession, which partly was shaped by a sense of their Hmong identity. At the same time, spirituality and social values were closely connected in her own thinking: Even though I feel I am deeply spiritual and my Catholic upbringing and Catholic teachings inform the way I see the world, my family is also very traditional. I am deeply rooted in that. . . . When I was running we had a ceremony where we asked our ancestors to help guide me, and we said if you help for a successful outcome we will give back . . . and give you an offering as well. . . . My father tied strings on me right before the election to give me good wishes. . . . And that definitely informs how I see the world . . . That I am part of this larger story, this longer story of Hmong

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Reconstructing Identity Narratives people, and I’m connected to my ancestors—my maternal grandfather and my paternal grandfather who I never met, but it is such a big part of how I think about what kind of leader I should be.32

In this interview, Hang described how her spirituality formed as an amalgam of different traditions. This perspective illustrates a synthetic approach to the construction of a Hmong American identity. In the experience of other Hmong Americans, however, adherence to different belief systems and practices has given rise to intracommunity disputes and sharp contradictions. In other interviews, pastors of Protestant evangelical churches affiliated with the Hmong American Alliance in Hickory, North Carolina, and in the Twin Cities expressed the view that the basic tenets of Christianity and animism are incompatible.33 The leaders of community mutualaid associations in both cities voiced a different perspective, acknowledging the tensions but remarking on the possibility of one tradition coexisting peacefully with the other. The relationships between diverse strands in the Christian tradition and in Hmong culture are continually evolving. Vang has written that the conversion of Hmong to Christianity, both in Laos and in the United States, has affected cultural practices and kinship ties, while further dividing the community, where there is already dissension based on clan affiliation, gender, and different views on politics in Laos.34 Tensions such as these are common in immigrant communities, Vang observes, and are one part of a complex process by which Hmong American identity is being negotiated and reconstructed.35 In ethnic minority communities with such diverse opinions and beliefs, having the space and freedom to express cultural views is a vital part of what Renato Rosaldo has called “cultural citizenship.” The term refers to the right of people considered social outsiders to speak in their own voices in public spaces.36 It is not enough for groups to be granted a formal right to participate in politics; they must have the ability to exercise it by giving voice to their concerns and claims on a stage from which they can be heard and understood. This concept of citizenship is clearly more expansive than the legal concepts derived from liberal theories of citizenship. In this view, cultural citizenship is a human right to be claimed and exercised; when outsider groups lay claim to their human and civil rights to seek equality in society, they exercise their cultural citizenship. As people carve out a space for public participation in storytelling, they are exercising cultural citizen-

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ship, in Rosaldo’s terminology. These acts give voice to ordinary people, in turn giving notice to leaders of the people’s concerns or demands. Increasingly, a prerequisite for exercising the type of cultural citizenship envisioned by Rosaldo is having access to the Internet and skills to use a computer. Yet effective use of this communication medium remains limited to those with prior education and access to computers with Internet in their homes, places of work, or other accessible sites in their local communities. The Internet is a source of news and information on community concerns and public policy in the adopted country of immigrants. In addition, Brinkerhoff argues that Internet technology facilitates the expression of identities by members of diasporas. Communication on the Internet can aid the integration of migrants by creating avenues for them to negotiate their identity and promote solidarity; to learn, explore, and enact democratic values; and to mobilize to peacefully pursue policy influence, service objectives, and economic participation in the homeland.37 Prasit Leepreecha contends that Internet communications are an especially important vehicle for people of Hmong ethnicity to exchange ideas about identity, information about events of concern to the Hmong worldwide, and as a tool of advocacy for Hmong interests in certain cases. From locations in urban areas, younger people have used the Hmong romanized popular alphabet (Hmong RPA) to converse over the Internet. In 2004, for example, Lee observed a young Hmong man at his family’s home in Wenshan in southern China engaged in a live discussion group with a Hmong man in the United States. At the conclusion of the conversation, the young man said to Lee: “You see, now we can easily connect and discuss. Even if we live in different parts of the world, we share the same feelings and can disseminate messages very fast via modern technologies of communication. We, the Hmong people, do not need to struggle to have our own country.”38 In addition, changes in the consumer marketplace for films of various genres have increased access to media narrative making. Louisa Schein’s studies of Hmong media making show how film in particular has “peripatetic character,” which is not limited in its location to particular national or “generically cosmopolitan” spaces. Emphasizing how media making became a “major force in Hmong social life” with the camcorder revolution, Schein suggests that the Hmong made spaces for their own particularized narratives of their experiences, consisting of “cultural memories, war genealogies, sentiments of loss, and struggles of resettlement.”39

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Many in Hmong American communities across the United States viewed films documenting the precarious existence of Hmong who remained in the jungles of Laos, refusing to surrender, after the communists took over the Laotian government. A few moving documentaries were produced by European filmmakers who felt they could safely enter the conflict areas in Laos, which would have been extremely dangerous for reporters of Hmong descent. The BBC regularly publicized news stories of Hmong war refugees in Thailand, which recognizes them not as refugees but as illegal migrants. Hmong rights advocates have used these and other documentaries in advocacy campaigns directed at government officials in Washington and international organizations, hoping to win support for their human rights claims on behalf of Hmong from Laos.40 It is true that many identity narratives told by Hmong media makers are best found in communicative spaces between those conventionally considered either national (e.g., BBC) or cosmopolitan. At the same time, Hmong filmmakers have examined political subjects in an American context. Foung Hawj (also spelled Foung Hue) and Noel Lee’s The Time Is Right for Mee, for example, documented Mee Moua’s run for the Minnesota State Senate, and the story is of interest to students of American elections, as well as to researchers who focus on ethnic politics.41 In light of the potential of Hmong American stories to illuminate the life of immigrant America more broadly, it will become important to consider the ways that Hmong American cultural artists are constructing a concept of the Hmong American experience with a dimension that expresses their sense of a universalized humanity, a process that can be elusive, as it is mixed with other concepts of self.42

Leadership and Generational Change Once Hmong refugees resettled in the United States after the war, leaders of the community worked to reconstruct and to disseminate their story, highlighting their military sacrifice in the Indochina War. From the settlement of the first wave of refugees in 1975 to the early 1990s, leadership in the community laid with the Hmong veterans of the war, including those who established their reputation and influence through service as officers in the military or in government. Many veterans wished they could return to Laos under a different regime and had sympathy for the remaining resis-

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tance fighters in Laos. But slowly the dream of the Hmong veterans’ return to Laos faded.43 In the 1990s, a younger generation of activists began to direct their energies toward the goal of full integration with equal rights in the United States. A new generation of Hmong American leaders wanted their communities to become fully included and engaged as US citizens while still remembering and contributing the lessons from their war experience and the “highlands” culture. For some, their emerging identity had much in common with other racial minority groups in the United States, including the shared striving for full equality as citizens. In this context, the focus of the new generation’s desire to help Hmong kin in Laos turned to rights advocacy and providing economic and social assistance. These avenues of transnational politics took precedence over efforts to provide political support to anticommunist resistance forces, although sympathy for these forces was still widespread. In June 2007, Hmong American communities were shocked by the arrest of former major general Vang Pao in Sacramento, California. Vang Pao was arrested with ten other individuals on charges of plotting to overthrow the government of Laos, as well as on weapons charges related to the alleged conspiracy. The plot would have been in violation of the US Neutrality Acts, as it involved inspections of weapons that were to be illegally shipped to Thailand for use by armed resistance forces in Laos. According to the criminal complaint issued by a US grand jury, the accused were engaged in a conspiracy to “kill, kidnap and maim” by sending funds to a mercenary force armed with AK-47s, Stinger and antitank missiles, grenades, mines, and other explosives.44 In the end, all charges were dropped in September 2009, as a result of insufficient evidence. The arrest of Vang Pao shocked Hmong Americans across the United States. Several protest rallies brought thousands of Vang Pao’s supporters to Sacramento, the site of his court hearings, and support rallies were held in St. Paul and other cities. In his own words, Vang Pao said after the arrest: “For the past 35 years in this country the Hmong communities have been calling me constantly about education, health, social services, employment and just about every aspect of life here.”45 A New York Times report pointed out that responses to the arrest were divided, with differences generally along generational lines. Yuepheng Xiong of St. Paul was a young adult when he came to the United States, received

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a college education, and opened the first Hmong bookstore in the world. Xiong expressed his indignation about the arrest: “He was arrested by the very people that he trusted and who he had been so loyal to—the Americans.”46 In contrast, a younger Hmong American, Paul Herr, who worked in information technology in Washington, described a rather apathetic response of a younger generation to the arrest: “The majority of young people didn’t really care what he was doing about going back to Laos. They just ignored him. America is their homeland.”47 For Hmong who had come to America as adults, the arrest represented a betrayal by the US government. One middle-aged leader of a well-­established mutual-aid association told me in unequivocal terms that ­after the arrest, he would never trust the US government again.48 Among younger Hmong Americans, despite the apathy Paul Herr described, political activists of their own generation recognized the historical importance of Vang Pao. Although many were more progressive than Vang Pao when it came to their views on politics and policy, the young activists regarded the arrest as an injustice and felt proud that they had galvanized so many Hmong Americans to protest in public. The US authorities failed to produce any compelling evidence for the allegations against Vang Pao’s part in the alleged conspiracy, and a sense that the aging Vang Pao had been manipulated by members of his inner circle and betrayed by the American government spread in the Hmong communities. More important, however, was the powerful political and cultural symbolism of the event for the construction of a Hmong American identity. In the view of young Hmong American activists who had been working to construct an identity narrative that translated concepts of Hmong identity into modern American contexts, the arrest vilified a history of Hmong American service in Laos to their American allies. To their ears, the justification for the arrest and the US government’s response cast as “terrorism” the military service of a people who regarded their sacrifice for US allies as heroic. Many already felt betrayed at the end of the war, when the Americans did not help tens of thousands of Hmong refugees escape from Laos. Louansee Moua’s words capture the sentiment of a progressive young woman who had become a political activist after college. Speaking to a reporter about the protests, she said: “It’s not just about a human being that brought us over to America; it’s a whole social justice movement.” She added, “People are going to rallies because they want the Hmong to be

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recognized for what they’ve done for the country.”49 Louansee Moua had coordinated the public relations and media work of Senator Mee Moua’s first campaign for a seat in the Minnesota Senate, and she later helped launch a protest among young Hmong Americans of negative portrayals of the Hmong by a local radio station. After moving to California, she became chief of staff to San Jose city council member Madison Nguyen. At the same time, however, community leaders of Louansee Moua’s age were not uncritical supporters of the role Vang Pao had played in his decades of leadership of the Hmong in America. For example, Moua recalled in the same interview that thousands of Hmong Americans of her parents’ generation bought promissory notes from the United Lao National Liberation Front, an organization led by Vang Pao and his associates, in exchange for the so-called commitment that they would hold a position on a commission or some other appointment in the government of “the new, free Laos” in the future.50 Earlier in the 1990s, the Minneapolis Star Tribune uncovered details on this. According to the widely read report, Vang Pao had initially settled in a four-hundred-acre Montana ranch, but he moved to California in 1986, more than $170,000 in debt. Gathering a close group of allies around him in the 1980s, Vang Pao and his associates employed the United Lao National Liberation Front to give aid to the resistance forces still fighting against the communists in Laos. As a fund-raising arm, a stated aim of the organization in 1981 was to resist “foreign oppression on behalf of the Lao people who are pursuing the fight for peace and independence.” But when short of funds in 1991, Vang Pao used another group, the National Liberation Front of Laos, to raise $500,000 for work “in the front line.”51 Cy Thao, a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives, described how Vang Pao’s arrest brought about a sense of betrayal and changed the political loyalties of many in his father’s generation: The Vang Pao arrest signaled the beginning of closure. It ended the talk of going back to Laos for my father’s generation. For my generation, we already knew we’re not going back, that’s why we’re so involved here. We don’t want to go back. . . . My father was a Republican, and many of his friends were. It was because they saw the Republicans as “tough,” and they had this fantasy that they would take them back to Laos and help us overthrow the Laotian government. The arrest of the General changed the loyalty of the older generation. Some of my father’s generation had worked with Norm Coleman, but when Norman Coleman was running against Al

70 Reconstructing Identity Narratives Franken for senator, they felt Coleman didn’t do anything to try to help the General.52

In contrast to the stance taken by Vang Pao and his close associates, many of the older leaders were never solely, or even mainly, concerned with returning to Laos. The Lao Family Community, an ethnic association, took responsibility for helping the refugee communities establish themselves in America—helping them to get acclimated to neighborhoods and everyday survival skills, to learn English, to get their children started in public schools, and to find employment. As early as 1981, the comments of one local leader of the Lao Family Community at a town meeting in the Twin Cities had emphasized the importance of looking forward and making a new life in places of settlement. This leader responded to a question about whether the Hmong refugees would leave America and go back if the situation in Laos ever “got back to normal”: I think most refugees would want to return to their home if they could, but the option isn’t available. . . . Since we have no way to choose, we decided to come over here [America]. . . . But for us, myself, and I have been talking with my friends that wherever we live, we have to work hard and to help the local community to protect the land as our own home. So, this is what we are trying to tell our own community and the people.53

This statement expressed a perspective shared by leaders of the Lao Family Community and other community groups in various cities. Their aim was to advocate for greater opportunities to learn English and necessary job skills so that families could establish a stable livelihood, all while living securely in local communities and receiving a public education for their children. Contrary to the depiction of refugees that ran in some of the popular press, Hmong leaders were not looking for handouts, nor did they encourage the community to rely on them. Sustainable progress would entail learning more than day-to-day survival skills. The experience of political powerlessness, by which the Hmong had been subject to being taken advantage of and betrayed, had imparted a valuable political lesson: namely, having the power to determine one’s own future depends on gaining citizenship and using the rights that came with it in order to get a seat at the table where laws are made that affect their own opportunities. Only with citizenship would the Hmong be in a position to be heard and respected, not used and abandoned as soldiers

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in wartime, or used as a bargaining chip between nation-states in times of peace. Thus, a new generation of community leaders emerged in the 1990s. Increasingly, thinking among younger leaders encompassed change in beliefs about the nature of freedom and how democratic ideals should be reflected in politics. Differences arose over the norms and political ethics of running of community organizations, as well as of selecting leaders, and the perspective and practices of Hmong Americans in elected office and as political candidates. For younger Hmong Americans, Vang Pao’s concept of leadership and its practices made sense in the context of patriarchal society in authoritarian political systems in their parents’ original homeland, but they ran counter to the American democratic ideals they had come to accept. The principles of democratic freedom that were important to the younger generation included freedom of expression and choice, as well as transparency in the activities of political groups and leaders. Their parents’ generation had not grown up or learned about these concepts and practices, and elected leaders and heads of nonprofits had to face the challenges of representing Hmong Americans. In interviews for a news article reporting on interclan rivalry over control of community agency funding in Wisconsin, two Hmong American scholars commented on this subject. One of the scholars, Vincent Her of the University of Wisconsin, described how clans’ ability to designate certain persons as leaders or persons with political power is declining: “Now people support whoever they think is the best. The clan is not essential to putting people in power.” The second scholar, Shoua Yang of St. Cloud State University, added a pointed criticism of the clan structures: “I see clans’ structure as political suicide,” because the traditional systems privilege personal connections over leadership ability. This system underestimates the importance of developing or recognizing leaders with capability to help advance the economic and social well-being of Hmong American communities, in Yang’s view.54 In the democratic political realm, where equality in the voting booth and participation in democratic deliberation is valued according to American ideals of democracy, it has been increasingly difficult to place constraints on young people’s interest in choosing leaders. In an old philosophy of leadership when the Hmong were outsiders and marginalized in Laos, a “Hmong leader” formed a base in the traditional clan structure to which he was accountable. Trying to adapt this thinking to American politics, the clan leaders have sometimes regarded Hmong elected officials as advocates

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for ethnic interests rather than leaders accountable to all their constituents in a district. When the elders wanted to remain as the power brokers, their efforts came up against resistance. The power-broker style of choosing Hmong candidates for political office does not accord with concepts of freedom of expression and choice in the American political style, where elections tend to be candidate based and young Americans value their individual decision-making prerogative in the voting process. Where the ethic of grassroots participation in politics is strong, there will be a desire for young Hmong Americans to run and serve in their own right, maintaining ties to Hmong American voters and constituents as a special obligation, but also seeing themselves as serving constituents of all races and backgrounds, as the principle of democratic representation demands. What types of links younger leaders will construct between younger people like themselves and their parents’ generation of voters remains to be seen. A deeper desire for intergenerational bridge building would entail giving their parents some degree of direct voice in deliberations and choice, not limited to the mediation of clan leaders, who can censor voices that they consider undesirable. With an older, aging population that remains largely preliterate, giving them a direct voice in American politics is difficult because they need someone to help them communicate. If the younger generation finds it part of their desired goal to find ways for the elders to express their views apart from or alongside the mechanisms of the clan structure, of course the younger people’s mediatory role will not be neutral either. It is likely to emphasize a move away from power-broker models of leadership.

Illustrations: Participatory Storytelling Participatory storytelling is performed in distinctly different styles in contemporary Hmong American communities. In a few US cities, Hmong elders constructed memorials in public squares to disseminate the story of the Hmong veterans and encourage conversation about their military sacrifice in the Indochina War. In 1997, the US government finally acknowledged that it had supported a prolonged air and ground campaign against the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong, operations known as the Secret War. At that time, the

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federal government dedicated the Laos Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery in honor of the Hmong and other Lao combat veterans from the Secret War. Five years earlier, a Vietnam War memorial had been dedicated at the Minnesota State Capitol. Evoking the style of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, the granite memorial displays more than a thousand engraved names, including Hmong Americans who were killed or missing in action as a result of the war. As the war experience became more distant, and Hmong American leaders acquired greater cultural and material resources to tell their stories on their own terms, community leaders in other cities worked to create memorials that could more specifically honor Hmong veterans of the Secret War. In 2005 in downtown Fresno, California, with the support of the city’s mayor, Hmong leaders unveiled a twenty-two-ton granite and bronze monument depicting two Hmong soldiers supporting an injured American pilot. The idea of building grand public monuments spread to smaller towns in the Midwest. In 2006, Hmong leaders in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, dedicated a large monument in a public park, with interlocking walls engraved with the names of deceased Hmong veterans. Challenging Racist Portrayals in the Media

One event that marked the beginning of civil rights activism among Hmong Americans was a community protest against a racist portrayal of Hmong culture on a local radio station in the Twin Cities. In June 1998, a broadcaster on the KQRS radio station read a news story about a Hmong young woman who had been accused of killing her newborn son, then remarked that the Hmong people should “assimilate or hit the goddamn road.” He also derided the Hmong in his comment on the $10,000 fine that could be levied against the woman: “That’s a lot of eggrolls.” The radio station’s insulting broadcast prompted young Hmong American activists to form Community Action Against Racism, which led a series of protest actions. Only a week after the broadcast, several large corporations pulled ads from the radio program, including Perkins Restaurant & Bakery, US West, Kinko’s, Prudential, and Mall of America. Grassroots organizers staged a march of more than five hundred protesters from the Lao Family Community center to the nearby state capitol, chanting, “Who are we? Hmong! Who’s a racist? KQRS!” Several months later, the radio

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station read an apology to the Hmong community on air and agreed to further measures, including ending a morning show Tak, which caricatured Asian men. According to Cy Thao, more than ten years after that incident, this grassroots movement also launched a broader effort by younger Hmong American activists to become involved in the US political process. Thao offered this reflection: “All of us who are almost middle aged now, a whole bunch of us came out of that got involved in that and got involved in the political process right after that so in a way that was the beginning of our political movement for equality.”55 The Hmong American activists drew from a repertoire of civil rights protest tactics and styles that communities of color had used for decades. Commenting on the reasons for their energetic engagement in American politics so soon after their parents had come to the United States as refugees, Cy Thao continued: We never had the chance before. This is the first time it’s open. We said to ourselves, is it true? Don’t take it for granted, work harder, and work smarter. Me and my friends realized that politics really drives policy. You have to be at the table. . . . We had that hunger. . . . Some try to go back to Laos for that hunger, only because that’s something they could understand. . . . They don’t understand the system here so can’t participate.56

Young Hmong American activists also felt moved to advocate for the rights of Hmong refugees who remained in Thailand. Cy Thao also noted the perspective of young Hmong Americans like himself: Maybe it’s because of the history that we all came with. Our community, we’ve been oppressed almost everywhere we’ve been. So this is probably the first time we feel we are part of the community—and we have the ability to finally speak up about the injustice that has happened to us throughout our history. So there is that sense of obligation: here I have the opportunity to speak up and help those that can’t help themselves.57

For the Hmong in America, the identity-related themes that unify community members across generational divides emphasize recognition of their basic humanity and rights—and for the younger members, the concept of human rights implies a sense of “we-ness” that extends outward with an ethic of universalism, expressed in the idea that the Hmong are part of a global human community.

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A Long Walk for Freedom

In the several years following the protest against the Twin Cities radio station, small collectivities of young Hmong Americans in a few localities began to stage other types of action aimed at “taking liberties” denied to the Hmong in the United States or abroad. Many activists were college students living in or near urban settings with a concentration of Hmong residents. These younger activists adapted a variety of styles of protest to carve out room for their message in public spaces, and there were efforts to forge and project an intergenerational unity. One such effort took place in the summer of 2004, when college students and older adults staged the Long Walk for Freedom from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Washington, DC. The name for this event recalled the title of Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, documenting his life of struggle against apartheid and minority rule in South Africa. The aim of the Long Walk was to bring international and national attention to the human rights of children whose families were among those few thousand Hmong who had resisted the establishment of the communist government of Laos in 1975 and refused to surrender. These resistance fighters remained in the mountainous jungles in the central-northern part of the country. The Laotian government had continued to wage a low-­ intensity counterinsurgency war against the Hmong resistance for more than twenty-five years, although quite a few families had in fact surrendered, and more continued to do so over time as they faced death from starvation. Many of the remaining survivors were not combatants, but women and children. The theme of the Long Walk to the US Capitol also brought to light the more general plight of the Hmong who had resisted the communists in Laos at the end of the Vietnam War. Tens of thousands had tried to escape by foot through mountainous terrain at night, facing enemy gunfire as they headed toward the Mekong River, which marked a geographical boundary between Laos and Thailand, which accepted the Hmong as refugees. For those who reached the river, only some families could hire the operator of a small boat or barge to ferry them across. Many more plunged their bodies into the treacherous waters, holding onto ropes and floating devices. Parents had for decades recounted the sad and harrowing tale of Hmong relatives and friends who perished during this attempted escape. Such stories were told mostly in the intimate setting of family homes, in community-based media venues, and in the ethnic associations of Hmong

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in the United States. In contrast, the Long Walk turned these privately told memories into a public narrative of rights claiming for those Hmong considered coethnic patriots, who were still surviving as resistance fighters in the mountainous jungles of central-northern Laos. The act of recounting this story increased the profile of the Hmong community, giving it wider recognition in the international community of human rights defenders, and as US citizens bringing their grievances to the members of Congress. Zong Khang Yang, the adult son of a middle-aged Hmong veteran, was the leader of the Long Walk. Yang first met and later formed a cooperative relationship with college student activists at a rally at the Minnesota State Capitol to ask that the US government and international organizations investigate and try to put a stop to the killing of Hmong children in Laos. What triggered the protest was the killing of four girls and one boy, from age thirteen to sixteen, by troops of the Lao government in the jungles where Hmong resistance fighters and their surviving family members lived. As reported by the BBC and Amnesty International, the youth were mutilated before being killed. A witness quoted by Amnesty said that one girl was shot in each breast and another girl was disemboweled. A number of witnesses reported hearing communist troops yelling, “Hmong, your mouth allows you to speak, your vagina allows you to breed.” A soldier then opened fire, according to this account.58 Four hundred Hmong from around America joined the walkers for a rally in Washington, DC, that culminated in meetings with congressional staff members and political leaders in the Rayburn Building on Capitol Hill. Dai Thao, one of the coordinators, gave an account of the meetings: “Our message to senior staff members from the offices of Senators Norm Coleman and Russ Feingold was that action is needed now. While sympathetic, they told us many congressional leaders were aware of the aggression against the hapless U.S. secret war veterans in Laos, but that there wasn’t enough ‘political will’ to act.”59 One of the student leaders, a college sophomore at the time, reflected on her experience: I went through an identity stage, learning about the history of race in America and realized there are still Hmong in the jungles of Laos. A majority are women and children because the husbands were persecuted and killed. So I talked to my community members, and there was no

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leadership on that issue. I started organizing a petition to stop the persecution in the jungles of Laos. . . . People became aware, and we got about 8000 signatures in the end. We sent them to Mark Dayton. . . . It became a huge movement. . . . There was a rally at the Capitol, and we had over 500 Hmong fly in or drive to the rally. We had meetings with the State Department and some European friends had some videotapes of Hmong in the jungles.60

It was the engagement of ordinary people in conversation about the human rights of the Hmong who remained in the jungles of Laos that made the most difference in the end, in the student leader’s view: We got to engage in conversation. After we came back, there was a big community meeting, a dinner. Community members expressed concern. Afterwards, the core group of us decided on a name for our group: Humanity Helping Humanity, a grassroots group. . . . We continued to go to colleges to present the history and talk about the Long Walk, did presentations, and more petitions.61 Hip-Hop and Storytellling

The Long Walk helped inspire younger and older activists to collaborate in the creation of new forms of public storytelling. One by-product of this was innovation in cultural projects. A form of storytelling that became popular among youth is intrinsically participatory in its style: the spoken-word art form of rapping or hip-hop, which performing artists taught in small community workshops of young people, then performed in the community settings where conversation unfolds about ethnic culture and public life. This informal and conversational style of communication affords opportunities for audiences to exchange ideas with performers. Spoken word and the integration of hip-hop with songwriting evoking Hmong musical styles are leading a flowering of contemporary popular culture among Hmong American youth. These forms of performing art are influential in the creation of new strands of the Hmong American story. Because the fables, songs, and family histories of their parents’ generation are passed from one generation to another in an oral tradition, the genre of spoken word has special potential to resonate with audiences, both younger and older.

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Some of the most creative performances of intergenerational story telling may be found in Tou SaiKo Lee’s recordings. In 2009, Tou SaiKo Lee recorded a collaboration with his grandmother, Zhoua Cha. He performed modern spoken art and his grandmother chanted traditional Hmong songs, creating a conversational exchange. Figure 2.1 shows their joint performance at the Fifth International Conference on Hmong Studies in St. Paul. In one of his recorded hip-hop songs on the history of the Hmong, Tou SaiKo Lee’s group Delicious Venom calls on elders and younger Hmong Americans to listen and learn from one another, joining across generations to boldly claim the rights to simply “live and let live”: Flea market weekends sleeping sixty minutes to two hours Been working overtime ain’t had no time to take a shower Family business slow still on the go Blow for blow we slug it out against the winter and snow Ever since existence we have been survivors Neglected never claimed a country Just wanted to live and let live Now it’s been thirty years Since imprisonment in the jungle for the Hmong Remind your elders and educate the young.62

F i g u r e 2 . 1   A photograph of Tou SaiKo Lee and his grandmother Zhoua Cha, March 2014, St. Paul Source: Courtesy of Lee Pao Xiong.

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Communicating that the Hmong have always been survivors and freedom seekers helps bridge the divides that started to form within families as children attended American schools. The children saw not only the stark difference between American and Hmong culture but also the disparity in material resources available to them compared to many of their classmates, as well as how important material possessions are in a consumer economy dependent on mass advertising. Despite the growing gulf between parents and children, family ties are still revered and necessary for social stability. As a result, if some spokespersons for the younger generation use their creative talents to perform Hmong storytelling in a contemporary key, linking the immigrant and homeland experience in a way that is understandable to their own peers and to their parents’ generation, this could be the starting point for a synergy of the Hmong and American selves. Moreover, it could help forge unity within families and community to enable sustained community engagement in acts of self-liberation from the degradation felt from prejudice and poverty. For the young, taking care of aging parents and grandparents is a core value in Hmong tradition, and the mutuality of responsibility for the well-being of parents, siblings, and offspring will likely continue to be a core element of an identity story, one that could build and sustain solidarity among the Hmong American people. Challenging Racial Violence

A racial confrontation between Hmong and white men on recreational hunting expeditions in Wisconsin lead to the death of six white men in 2003. The tragic incident shook members of the Twin Cities and Wisconsin Hmong communities and reverberated in Hmong communities across the United States. Chai Soua Vang, a husband and father of six children, was a Hmong resident of St. Paul. In his late thirties, he worked as a truck driver and had previously served in the California National Guard. Vang was on a hunting trip in the woods of Wisconsin near the Minnesota-Wisconsin border when he fatally shot six white men. Hunting is a popular recreational activity among residents of diverse backgrounds in several states where Hmong live, including Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, and North Carolina. Many Hmong men are avid sportsmen, enjoying hunting as they did in Laos. In the sparsely populated land where the shootings occurred, privately owned land stands alongside public land, many times without clearly

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marked boundaries. The white hunters claimed that Vang had trespassed on private land. A confrontation led to the shootings. There was no doubt that Vang had killed the six hunters, but after the trial ended, questions remained unanswered about who was the first to call out threats and to what extent the racial epithets shouted at Vang led him to believe that his life was in danger when he fired at the party of white hunters. The shootings sparked a spate of sensationalized coverage in the national print and broadcast media. Few Americans knew about the Hmong community or its culture, largely “invisible” in most urban and rural settings, and for many, their first exposure to it was through these news reports. Leaders of the Hmong communities in Minnesota and Wisconsin called for racial peace and reconciliation, issuing apologies to the families of the deceased hunters. At the same time, many Hmong Americans tried to make clear that the incident was an outburst of violence by an individual, not the responsibility of all Hmong Americans—nor was it reflective of racial animosity toward whites. How race had played into the conflict became a subject of debate. Disagreements emerged about the role of the mass media in sensationalizing cultural difference and possibly stirring up fear and animosity toward the Hmong culture. Tou Ger Xiong, a community activist and leader of the community group Coalition for Community Relations (CCR), observed Vang’s trial and described the confrontation in the woods and of the trial: When they saw Mr. Vang, they didn’t yell, “Get out of here, you Minnesota Viking fan.” They said[,] “Get out of here you chink, you gook, you f-ing Asian.” When the lawyer in the defense said this case has a lot to do with racial prejudice, I can feel the intensity in the room. I felt a sense like, “Wow! No way, don’t say that bad word. No, that can’t be us.” It is a racial trial. Race has everything to do with it. It’s like this huge elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.63

A spokesperson for the Wisconsin attorney general offered a very different interpretation of the events: I think the race issue is overplayed in this case. . . . It’s really not about race or ethnicity. It was really, from our perspective, about one man, he had anger issues, who had shown a propensity in his life not to be able to deal with certain issues or events where he feels disrespected.64

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Reports of racial conflicts as broadcast by media outlets exacerbated racial stereotypes and the misunderstanding of Vang’s motives. Steven Kohn, a lawyer representing Vang, was convinced that racial animosity drove the confrontation between hunters that led to the killings. Although Kohn did not think the jury’s decision was motivated by race, he criticized the media’s role: “Probably the most glaring error the media made was focusing on this as ‘Hmong hunter,’” Kohn said. “You wouldn’t have seen that if Mr. Vang had been black, had been Hispanic, had he been any other race than Hmong. . . . You would not, for example, see a headline that said ‘Black hunter killed white individuals.’”65 Supporting the criticism of racial backlash against the Hmong, Tou Ger Xiong has recounted important details of a local courtroom television show that negatively portrayed the Hmong relatives and friends who traveled to observe the trial of Chai Soua Vang and offer their support. Many of the Hmong relatives and friends brought their own food for the lunchtime meal, carrying it in portable containers. They had anticipated a long drive and a full day away from home, and so it was customary to eat together with food brought from home, together with families and friends. The courtroom TV show, however, suggested that the Hmong did not “want” to intermingle with residents of the town by frequenting local restaurants or other eateries. This reinforced a stereotypical image that the Hmong are clannish and unfriendly to whites—and whether intentional or not, this sort of image making tends to stoke racial tensions.66 As told by the Hmong and documented in police records, racial conflicts between Hmong and white hunters had occurred not infrequently in the past. Three years earlier, the Hmong filmmaker Va-Megn Thoj had produced a film depicting the fear that many Hmong hunters feel about racial danger when entering the woods of the Midwest to engage in recreational hunting. In an article Thoj later coauthored with Louisa Schein, the authors exposed important features of the racial dynamic and racialized media representation of the Hmong in the United States, arguing that these forms of racism tend to be overlooked when the dominant discourse about race in America pivots on black-white relations alone.67 There had never been a full-blown movement to keep Hmong hunters out of the hunting areas of Wisconsin; rather, incidents of confrontation between individual or small groups of Hmong and white hunters erupted

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sporadically. But after the shootings of the six white hunters, signs were displayed in some stores and on cars: “Save a deer, kill a Mung [sic].” For self-protection, Hmong leaders recommended that members of the Hmong community temporarily cease hunting activities.68 The political science literature sheds important light on the dynamic of racial prejudice that unfolded in this case. Though not addressing the relations between whites and the Hmong, or this particular incident, Bobo and Tuan examined conflicts in rural parts of Wisconsin over Native American land and fishing rights in Wisconsin. In a long legal battle, local white residents challenged the sovereign rights of Native American tribe members to control access to parts of rivers that are popular for fishing for sport and for other purposes. Bobo and Tuan show how feelings of racial superiority among whites became a dynamic social and historical force in the conflicts.69 Their argument is built on Blumer’s theory of race and group position, which the authors quote: The dynamic factors in prejudice begin with the feeling of propriety claim or first rights to scarce and socially valued goods and resources. A wide range of claims might be recognized in the sense of group position. This includes such relatively tangible claims as access to or control of land, property, jobs, and businesses, political decision making, educational institutions, and recreational resources. But it also includes claims on such relatively intangible things as positions of prestige and access to “areas of intimacy and privacy.”70

In turn, when those who are members of a dominant group feel the “rights, resources, and statuses” they deserve are encroached upon by members of a subordinate group, the fears and anger “become fused” into a feeling of prejudice against the subordinate people or groups.”71 And in turn, this fusion makes prejudice a force in politics, underlying the dynamic at the heart of Bobo and Tuan’s theory. Not more than three years after the Chai Soua Vang case ended, racial tensions erupted over turf and property rights in rural Wisconsin once again. This time, there was little doubt in anybody’s mind that racial animosity motivated a murder in the woods near Green Bay. In this instance, a Hmong hunter named Cha Vang was shot by a white hunter, James Nichols. At a meeting called by the Coalition for Community Relations, which had earlier advocated for justice in the Chai Soua Vang case, the coalition

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presented its updated list of concerns. The CCR demanded that the same resources go into the investigation of Cha Vang’s murder as in previous cases involving white hunters. Tou Ger Xiong said: “I’m afraid that we will have missed the boat in not addressing this as a hate crime because there have been numerous incidents before the Chai Vang incident two years ago; and between then and now there’ve been many incidents, particularly in the Wisconsin northern woods.”72 In responding to racial backlash against the Hmong in America, one could imagine some elders directing their gaze back in time, linking this current case to the centuries of racial persecution that forced the Hmong to continually move to find safer places to live in Asia. Some of the elders sometimes speak about a “curse” on the Hmong. But leaders in the Hmong American community set their sights on how to move forward and drew lessons from the battles people of color have fought to be recognized as full and equal citizens in the United States. Identifying with the American civil rights movement from this perspective, activists staged a series of rallies calling on state officials to designate the murder of Cha Vang as a racial hate crime. Several years later in a personal interview, Cy Thao described the response of some community leaders who were working to improve race relations by increasing avenues of communication and social interaction between Hmong and white hunters. More work was required to increase the understanding of hunting rules and norms in the United States among hunters of Hmong descent, and to show other white hunters that the Hmong, like them, are not objects posing a threat but are simply seeking recreational opportunities—all while trying to be respectful of local community residents, property rights, and the natural environments. According to Thao: It’s not like before, this was a new problem. . . . We raised questions in the community: are we safe in the woods; are we accepted in the woods? They created a Metro hunter association, possibly the only metro hunting club in the country—it was part of the Minnesota Deer Association, the Metro chapter, and it had all Hmong members. They built a relationship with other hunters out there, it was to say, we’re not different from you, so something good came out of it.73

Beyond work to improve race relations in everyday social interactions and recreational spaces as Cy Thao describes, there is a growing understanding

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among young Hmong American leaders about what work lies ahead if they are to break the cycle of undecidability, as described by Honig. It will be important to build political efficacy and to continue the work of cultural translation so as to create an emancipatory concept of self out of the sense of a divided self that members of racial minorities acquire in the United States. Claiming equality as full citizens is a starting point, and this was at the core of young leaders’ responses to the murder of Cha Vang. The Hmong culture of political resistance to incursions on land occupied by Hmong villagers in China and Southeast Asia had relied on oral communication since ancient times. Once in America, the Hmong adapted familiar communicative practices to the lifestyles of modern cities and towns. Widening access to modern communications technology, such as the Internet, radio, and television increased the chance for “ordinary talk” to travel on public channels. Community radio shows feature news, cultural programs, and call-in shows where listeners give their opinions on matters of private and public concern. Across the ethnic diaspora, Hmong recording artists in the United States, France, Australia, Laos, and Thailand have published a growing body of work, including music and spoken-word CDs and videos, sold in the mass marketplace by distributors over the Internet and by small ethnic vendors in Hmong communities. Some communities and school systems foster a culture of grassroots participation of ordinary people in storytelling, such as in the mutual engagement of elders and young in collecting oral histories, participatory theater, spoken word, songwriting, and the adapting of fables to modern-day story styles. For marginalized groups whose members are actively trying to construct and share a story from their history because it has been suppressed, the process itself will tend to create bonds of solidarity and feelings of efficacy when leaders encourage and tap into a participatory process of story construction.

Conclusion The identity stories of the Hmong American experience are composite narratives with distinctive strands. Many elder leaders have interpreted Hmong history through the ideological lens of late twentieth-century battles against communism in Southeast Asia. Others have been moved by a sense of ethnic

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nationalism to support resistance fighters in Laos. Many younger Hmong Americans view the history of the Hmong in Asia from the perspective of human rights as conceived in international law and norms. For a large proportion of the Hmong population, traditional animist beliefs anchor family and spiritual life, while others have turned to evangelical Protestantism, mainline Protestantism, Catholicism, Mormonism, and other Western religions. Yet this diversity of ways of thinking about Hmong history, spiritual matters, and the problems of present-day life in America does not undermine the strength of the recurring theme of citizen inclusion that resonates through multiple strands of the Hmong identity story. Without membership in a polity, there is no foundation for members of a marginalized group to advance their collective striving for participatory freedom, which is necessary to afford members of a subjugated people a voice for working with allies to improve the group’s economic and social well-being. These identity stories have been enlivened by the actions of ordinary people who seek to freely participate in social and political life. Political leaders, literary writers, and performing artists tell narratives of Hmong individuals coming to terms with a self-concept divided between consciousness shaped in traditional Hmong society and modern America. This requires a synthetic integration of multiple identities, and as more young Hmong Americans emerge in public life, they will learn how to adapt and leverage the cultural resources present in Hmong family and clan life in democratic politics.

Three

Participation in Local Contexts

Why in some places more than others have Hmong Americans been active in local or state politics? This chapter examines local contextual factors conducive to participation in four cities: Fresno, California; St. Paul, Minnesota; Eau Claire, Wisconsin; and Hickory, North Carolina. The discussion focuses on the role of local institutions as enablers of civic and political engagement. In this place-based analysis, institutions in some cities facilitate participation by educating newcomers in the citizenship skills needed to make claims for equal treatment and opportunity. The chapter begins by describing an analytic framework that identifies institutional factors that aid political participation in local environments. Local profiles are then presented for the four cities. These profiles are supplemented by a comparison of social and economic features of the local population using recent census indicators. The discussion then turns to compare salient features of local institutions across the city contexts. A report of interviews of Hmong American high school students in three cities illustrates attitudes of Hmong American youth about civic engagement and problems facing their communities. Finally, the institutional environments for political activism are compared across three cities where Hmong Americans have been active in elections: Fresno, St. Paul, and Eau Claire. The comparisons are facilitated by the similarity of life experience and cultural traditions across city contexts. In whichever American city they settled, Hmong Americans generally shared experiences of village life disrupted by the civil war in Laos and had taken refuge in Thailand. After 86

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resettlement, they continued to retain and share memories of their homeland experiences. While Hmong Americans adapted their traditional social structures, based on clan associations, to contemporary life in the United States, their core beliefs and practices remain similar across the local contexts compared in this chapter. Similarly, the US-educated offspring of early refugee families share an ethnic identity as Hmong Americans. They typically faced similar challenges when adapting cultural perspectives learned from their family upbringing to school and community life as children and young adults.1

A Framework for Comparing Local Contexts of Participation This section describes a framework for comparing local contexts of participation, with a focus on the role of local institutions in promoting political participation. Where local institutions effectively educate residents in citizenship skills to individually and collectively make claims for equal treatment, political participation is likely to be more extensive and sustainable. A critical component of this educational process is the promotion of crossgenerational communication and cooperation, which involves community and school projects that teach how to adapt identity narratives to modernday circumstances, as well as techniques for their dissemination. Parity-Assisting Institutions

In what follows, some local institutions are described as “parity assisting,” a term I have adopted using ideas borrowed from Fraser’s theory of participatory parity. The theory proposes a normative standard of social justice, which “requires social arrangements that permit all (adult) members of society to interact with one another as peers.”2 In Fraser’s conceptualization, participatory parity is a standard that should be evaluated in two distinct societal realms—or in other words, along two dimensions. The first dimension refers to matters of recognition, which address institutionalized cultural patterns of status inequality or subordination; the second concerns economic redistribution. Drawing an analytical distinction between parity in the realms of distribution and recognition helps clarify the characteristics of politics in

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each sphere. This bidimensional approach challenges thinking that reduces struggles for social justice to one or the other dimension. By the late 1960s, the American civil rights movement had propelled struggles for equality of status for a variety of identity groups, including groups defined by raceethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, and physical disability. The emphasis on multiculturalism tended to eclipse an older politics of “class” that had occupied the more prominent place in popular notions of justice since the Progressive Era and Great Depression. In academic studies as well, research on cultural identity attracted greater interest than studies of class inequality, most notably labor studies or research on poverty (although work on these subjects always maintained a place in the scholarship on social justice, it has been somewhat revived since the 2008 recession). Students of cultural identity were likely to neglect “class” struggles. In studies of economic equality, researchers proposing remedies often fell into a pitfall of economic reductionism, attributing all inequality to class difference or exploitation while regarding the cultural narratives that establish and sustain unequal social status as epiphenomenal. In this view, economic forces determine social outcomes. Fraser points out the need to examine how inequalities rooted in race and identity status are interconnected in society. It is also important to more firmly establish the study of fair redistribution as a significant arena of social justice. This two-dimensional approach encourages thinking about struggles for redistribution and recognition in a unified framework of analysis. It is possible to consider both the particularity and the interaction of strategies that would attain greater parity on each dimension. Some examples of what claims for parity for Hmong Americans might look like will help illustrate this point. For members of racial minority groups, gaining access to jobs often requires overcoming patterns of racial discrimination in hiring. Receiving respect from employers and coworkers at places of employment is another basic requirement for an individual to adequately perform a job and to receive equity in pay and rights. In this respect, demanding recognition of equal status is intertwined with matters of employment and income distribution. Our interviews of ordinary citizens and residents in Chapter 4 illustrate the forms of prejudice and discrimination that impede citizens’ inclusion in their workplaces and neighborhoods. It is not uncommon for Hmong families to experience unfriendly reactions and even backlash from neighbors and members of the larger

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c­ ommunity in response to the practices of Hmong culture. Gatherings of extended Hmong American families to practice ritualistic ceremonies and to socialize are no more noticeable than backyard parties at which people gather to enjoy American-style sports events or play popular music that reverberates down the street. But there is often a yearning for stability and fear of cultural change among longtime community residents. On occasion the presence of people with unfamiliar cultural practices arouses not just curiosity but also a reflexive fear of foreigners. In times of economic hardship and in communities with concentrated poverty or job loss, these markers of cultural difference become flash points for hostile resentment of the newcomers, especially if they are perceived as taking scarce jobs, social assistance, and seats in schools from longer-term or US-born residents. Concern about sustaining a livable income weighs on Hmong Americans living in economic poverty. For this reason, redistributive social policy that provides an economic safety net, including income support for people unable to work or earn a living wage, is a pressing issue in Hmong American communities. Refugees typically enter the United States via sponsors, who provide some help with shelter, food and provisions, and clothing, and refugees are also eligible for income assistance, but for a limited time. Refugees largely seek the independence, dignity, and economic security afforded by regular employment, with wages or salaries adequate to sustain their family. Thus, a basic requirement for their full social inclusion is the availability of jobs with fair work conditions that provide a livable income. But recognition of people as full peers in social life is also essential. Fraser describes the concept of misrecognition, which is different from popular theories of identity politics, which focus principally on attaining recognition of group-specific identities; rather, Fraser proposes an approach that regards recognition as a matter of social status. What matters in this view is “the status of individual group members as full partners in social interaction. Misrecognition, accordingly, does not mean the depreciation and deformation of group identity, but social subordination—in the sense of being prevented from participating as a peer in social life.”3 Apart from the struggles of the Hmong Americans and other immigrants for fair treatment, there are other important instances when claims for parity in the cultural and economic realms interact. The struggle for women’s equality illustrates the interplay of claims for social justice in both realms. Feminist scholarship has shown that equity in job opportunity and

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pay entails—but is not reducible to—gender discrimination in the workplace. For the Hmong Americans, culturally defined gender roles traditionally restrict income-generating roles for women outside the home and give decision-making authority to husbands and other male family members. When Hmong American women have found jobs outside the home in the United States, the change of family roles has brought needed income and some new freedoms, but it also has sometimes led to tension associated with insecurity about newly evolving gender roles inside traditional families. Because of the interconnectedness of social factors underlying the struggle for recognition and redistribution, community activists working to attain parity in one arena need to recognize obstacles that could manifest in the other. Unraveling the relationship is often difficult because disparities may be latent. For Hmong women, as for women of all racial-ethnic backgrounds, access to jobs is necessary for them to gain independence—a first step toward recognition by society as rights bearers both as individuals and as women. In addition, this independence increases the status of women in the community. In communities where progressives champion women’s equality in the professions, new leadership programs for Hmong American women have been formed to help prospective and emerging leaders acquire necessary skills, and to deal with misunderstandings or resentment, which often emerge within these women’s own families and among their coethnic associates as a result of their self-assertiveness. In recent years some women’s leadership programs found that it was important to help address the obstacles to leadership emergence among young Hmong men. Their experiences of racial stereotyping, which are forms of misrecognition, and workplace discrimination are often gendered because popular notions of which leadership traits are admired in males differ between traditional Hmong and American societies. Without developing leadership training attuned to the particularities of Hmong culture, including its traditions and concepts of male roles, as well as the nature of racialized thinking about Asian American males in US society and how job discrimination is manifest, it is not possible to move beyond first steps to redress gendered inequalities. Electoral strategies recently employed by some successful Hmong American candidates demonstrate their developing understanding of the interactions occurring between a politics of parity of distribution and recognition. Bidimensionality is evident both in the issues candidates press into the campaign discourse and in the political identities they craft for themselves.

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In recent years Hmong candidates have typically run for offices representing districts that include constituents who are of Hmong ethnicity as well as many who are not Hmong. Often many prospective constituents who are not Hmong are low-wage immigrants or racial minorities living in the same neighborhoods as Hmong refugees. If political leaders restrict their view of poverty to the experiences of the Hmong refugee communities alone, they fail to see shared interests with people of color and working people of all backgrounds, forgoing opportunities to create alliances. A few successful candidates have understood the need to represent all constituents in their district and to increase mutual understanding and cooperation among the immigrant and the native born. Their campaign platforms and legislative agendas speak to issues that cut across racial and ethnic difference in their districts. A well-informed understanding of how issues of recognition and fair distribution of economic resources are intertwined also helps temper some narrow forms of ethnic politics that reify group identities. The reification of a Hmong ethnic identity can subordinate concerns about fair economic distribution of wealth not only in view of the government’s role in the latter but also in intraethnic politics. Claims for parity may take the form of petitions to the government via protest actions or letter-writing campaigns, lobbying policy makers in the legislature or executive branch, and organizing community actions to register opinions on court decisions. Electoral campaigning on the part of political candidates who are known, or who promise, to advocate for participatory parity for Hmong Americans is in a different category of actions; that is, campaigning is not claim making in the same sense. But a community with a recent history of successful claim making generally builds this activity from a social infrastructure that is conducive to campaigns to elect candidates with these agendas. Arguments for Hmong Americans’ participatory parity based on the claim of a right to take part in society with a standing equal to their peers can be considered acts of “taking” rights.4 In general parity-assisting social institutions cannot on their own act to attain participatory parity. The acts need to be initiated by self-directed individuals who lack power and so decide to assert themselves by “taking” the rights due to them on moral or legal grounds. Motivation arises from the recognition of a common interest and a sense of efficacy from political action. Thus, institutions can provide

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space for community members to articulate identity narratives expressing aspiration for freedom and equality; in turn, people themselves gain a sense of efficacy and increased motivation to take political action. There is a synergetic interaction between the enabling work of institutions and the growing agency by individuals to act in movement toward participatory parity. One helpful sociological approach examines neighborhood contextual factors as they influence urban community residents’ collective efficacy or ability to take part in collective action on behalf of their own interests. Sampson has argued that when individuals engage in civic collective action in the form of public claims making, they do so more often in an environment with a dense network of nonprofit organizations. The networks of nonprofits have a greater effect than individual memberships in organizations or neighborly exchanges.5 The public claims making often blend familiar types of civic behaviors, such as festivals or meetings of neighborhood associations, with organized events focused on an explicit claim; in general, Sampson suggests that forms of such “blended social action” have become more common than 1960s-style protest actions. Moreover, residents of cities “react to neighborhood difference”—or inequality—“and these reactions constitute social mechanisms and practices that in turn shape perceptions, personal relationships, that reverberate both within and beyond traditional neighborhood borders, and as a whole define the social structure of the city.”6 Building on this theoretical approach, Hein found that “the spatial distribution of Hmong collective action is shaped more by the location of ethnic and public institutions than by residential concentration” of Hmong ethnic populations in particular census tracts in the Minneapolis– St. Paul metropolitan area.7 Which activities of nonprofit groups clustered together in a spatial context aid collective action? The Hmong refugees enter communities and cities without experience or organization in American democratic life. In some places they have benefited from the humanitarian aid of persons in the community, such as refugee family hosts and refugee rights advocates. However, a long-term relationship of dependence on benefactors hinders the self-reliant sense of efficacy and knowledge required to organize claims for participatory parity. Where political leverage is lacking or weak, institutional environments can help emerging political activists gain a public hearing or access to policy makers.

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Educational Institutions

In local settings, social institutions play a particularly important role in helping community members acquire civic skills and in building the capacity of communities to engage in collective action. For immigrants and refugees, educational institutions play a particularly important role in preparing newcomers to participate in governance and civic life. Educational institutions of two types are particularly important in building knowledge and skills for civic and political participation.8 First, the public school systems bear the responsibility of educating children for citizenship participation as adults and are in that respect part of the nation’s democratic institutional framework. However, when federal and state policies devalue this role of public schools by providing inadequate resources and curricula, it leads to poor results in many states and localities. Funded by taxpayers and run by governments, public schools do not operate in the civil sphere, which lies between the societal spheres of the government and markets. But schools prepare young people to participate in the civil sphere and in politics as adults. This preparation should include culturally relevant education for youngsters from diverse backgrounds so that they make meaningful contributions as adults in both the economic and the cultural realms of social life. For this reason, poorly prepared minority and low-income students will be vulnerable to problems of cultural isolation and disparities of economic opportunity. With an understanding that both types of inequalities hold back many Hmong American students, community and educational leaders have called on public schools to develop new types of curriculum and teaching expertise. For example, these leaders are concerned with educational policy reform that would make curricula accessible to minority students who speak languages other than English at home and who are accustomed to cultural environments, styles of communication, and social interaction that are different from those of the ethnic majority. Economic inequality would be partly addressed by providing social support to parents who would like to help their children succeed in school but do not have the requisite resources. Second, grassroots community organizations can significantly aid civic and political engagement. Some of these community organizations give priority to educating ordinary community residents in skills for active citizenship engagement, including leadership and policy deliberation. This work

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creates a direct, face-to-face relationship between residents and helps them voice their concerns to policy makers. Again, the effectiveness of community-based education and organizing requires the understanding of the interconnectedness of issues of parity of recognition and distribution. Some groups focus only on one or the other set of issues. The policy remedies they advocate may be ineffective as a result. Some focus on mobilizing community members to join in petitioning policy makers or to vote without conducting ongoing education on the principles and skills of participatory and deliberative democracy. While mobilizing drives without corresponding educational work of this type may succeed in turning out numbers of people for a specific campaign, building long-term or sustainable citizenship engagement requires an integrated approach to turnout and education so that the pool of knowledgeable voters and activists continually grows and new leaders emerge. This is especially important in minority communities of low-income residents and when levels of formal education and English proficiency are low among large segments of those communities. Some of the most important work of schools and grassroots groups is in aiding the development of identity narratives of participatory freedom and parity. In both institutional environments, new forms of teaching identity narrative construction promote storytelling and performance in varied literary and artistic genres. The skills required for teachers and facilitators are varied, because engaging and compelling storytelling needs not only to be aware of ethnic culture but also to be focused on specific age groups and intergenerational ones. The stories of agrarian life in Asia, Hmong social structures and cultural traditions, war experience, refugee flight from their homelands, and settlement and adaptation to American life are psychologically and historically complex. Teaching community members to express their ideas and emotions through writing and through visual and performing arts genres in bicultural and technologically accessible forms requires the building of resources across the boundaries of expertise available to any single organization. The analysis of local contexts of political participation in the next section compares educational and employment opportunities for high school graduates and college-educated young people. Where educational institutions are strong, their influence tends to aid the accumulation of local resources, including talents, skills, and economic assets among members of

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local ­communities. The emergence of growing numbers of educated young people enables the growth of local community leadership, which in turn helps the expansion of ethnic civic associations and community-based organizations. Population Concentrations

Besides the institutional environment, other social factors influence the development of civic and political engagement. One important factor is the sheer number of Hmong Americans who live in a particular city. The concentration of ethnic populations in one area often becomes a magnet for coethnic migrants to immigrant from other places. In the history of internal migration between American cities, employment opportunities attracted adult wage earners. The availability of jobs allows for a stable or growing number of families to set down roots in some cities. At the same time, the economic pull factor aids but cannot replace the salutary effect of vibrant networks of local institutions that educate and draw community members into civic and political life. When political participation consists of the formal act of voting in elections, rather than more informal grassroots advocacy for policy reform, the potential for electoral influence of Hmong Americans is greater in cities with sizable populations of Hmong Americans. The ethnic population presents a pool of potential voters, and electoral power depends on numbers. Concentrated numbers, however, is not in itself a recipe for electoral success, because Hmong Americans generally make up a small percentage of electoral districts, even where the ethnic population is relatively concentrated. Hmong American candidates elected to office on city councils and state legislatures have won in districts with a minority of Hmong voters. Their ability to reach out to people of other racial-ethnic backgrounds and mobilize new voters has been crucial.

Local Profiles Fresno, California

The city of Fresno, California, is presently one of the two main residential and political-cultural centers of Hmong American life in the United States;

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the other is St. Paul, Minnesota. Kou Yang provides a portrait of migration patterns: the wartime military leader of the Hmong, the former major general Vang Pao, arrived in the United States with his family in July 1975, first settling in Montana before moving to California. In addition to a handful of Hmong students, several others of the first Hmong families settled in Southern California. Yang has reported that by late 1976, the Hmong could be found in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Chicago, Oregon, Washington State, Louisiana, Texas, Florida, and New Mexico. A secondary migration to Fresno from other parts of the United States began in the late 1970s and reached a high point in the 1980s. In the 1980s and early 1990s, as a result, Fresno was the city with the largest Hmong American population and a center of political, social service, and cultural organizations. In large part, the agricultural base of the Fresno economy made it attractive to Hmong families interested in farming either for commercial reasons or for their own use. By 1995, the population of Hmong persons in Fresno had reached thirtyfive thousand persons. In the mid-1990s, however, Hmong Americans began to move from Fresno and other Central Valley locations to destinations primarily in the Midwest and in the southern and eastern United States. By 2010, the census count of the Hmong population in Fresno was only about twenty-four thousand persons, while in St. Paul, it had grown to about thirty thousand (in Minneapolis, the population was about 7,500). Because of this change, St. Paul became informally known as the capital of Hmong America.9 The reasons for the secondary migration of Hmong Americans to the Central Valley, including the Fresno metropolitan area, and for the tertiary migration out of same area, are rooted in economic factors. The state of California encompasses several economic regions, including the San Joaquin portion of the Central Valley, which includes eight counties.10 California’s economy, including its regional economies, is much larger than the other states where the Hmong have settled in relatively larger numbers, including Minnesota and Wisconsin. Some of California’s smaller regions are as large as many states in terms of population and economy.11 While the Central Valley region had a population of three million in 1990, which was only 10 percent of California’s population, the region ranked relatively high on certain variables compared to whole states. In one ranking system, a rank

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of 1 indicates that the state or region has the highest measured value, while a rank of 52 is the lowest of a particular measured attribute. Compared in this manner, the Central Valley ranked thirty-first for size of resident population. In other words, more people lived in the Central Valley than in twenty-one other states (including Washington, DC). For the variable measuring the number of persons employed in occupations of farming, forestry, or fishing, the Central Valley ranked fourth, after California, Florida, and Texas. Fresno’s economy centers on agricultural production, processing, and distribution. Manufacturing is not well developed. There is no concentration of computer or communication firms or a large hotel industry as in some other California cities, such as in the San Francisco Bay Area or Los Angeles. As a result, there is a relative scarcity of higher-wage jobs, as in the advanced technology industry, and in lower-wage jobs in manufacturing or large hotel and restaurant chains, where in other cities immigrants typically work. It is in agricultural production and ancillary industries that immigrants find work in the Central Valley. Economists have estimated that the Central Valley is more productive in agriculture than any other region in the world. The most plentiful crops include fruits and nuts, vegetables and melons, and horticultural specialties. Growing these crops requires seasonal labor; as a result, low-skilled farmworkers often need to supplement their in-season wages with cash assistance from welfare programs. Low-skilled workers in the seasonal agricultural workforce often need to supplement their income with cash assistance from welfare programs.12 In the Central Valley of California the largest urban area was the city of Fresno, in Fresno County, where most Hmong established themselves, and leaders formed community organizations and small businesses in the area. The Hmong also settled in fairly large numbers in other parts of the state, including Sacramento and nearby towns. A leader of a Hmong American association in Fresno had worked with the organization there since 1984. In an interview in 2009, he offered his thoughts on why Fresno emerged as the US city with the largest population of Hmong in the 1980s: In 1977 the very first families came. Then in the early and middle 1980s, there was a second migration from all over the nation. People heard there

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Turning to discuss migration patterns, the same Fresno leader explained the decision of a sizable part of the Hmong population in Fresno to leave California and move to Minnesota: In the early 1990s, people started leaving Fresno. At that time there was an issue with gangs and the children. The parents knew nothing about the gangs. Then in 1996, there was welfare reform. People started moving to a city that could offer a job and opportunities. We used to have around fiftyfive thousand Hmong in Fresno at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s. Now we have thirty to thirty-one thousand.14 Fresno is not as good as other cities for job opportunities. We have only one or two electronic companies and no manufacturing. The businesses are mostly involved in producing food, some families are involved, and other businesses hire farmworkers. You have to have skills and speak English to work in most companies. Many Hmong people work in the school district, social services, and in public safety in the private sector.15

Yang has described the difficulty newly settled Hmong refugees faced in finding employment in Fresno. The labor market was bifurcated between high-skilled and low-skilled jobs. The problems were complicated in this way: Very few Hmong qualify to apply for the high-skilled jobs, and they are forced to compete with other minority groups for the low-skilled and seasonal jobs. Many Hmong in the Central Valley of California have turned to farming, but their slash-and-burn agricultural skills have not been compatible with agribusiness in Fresno. Those Hmong who want to survive in farming have had to start where the early Chinese and Japanese left off in earlier decades: growing strawberries and other specialty crops, such as lemon grass, Bok Choy, Daikon, and so on.16

The social life of Hmong Americans in Fresno is also influenced by the spatial distribution of residences. The homes of the ethnic population are

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largely scattered across the city and surrounding area. In a few neighborhoods Hmong Americans live in more concentrated numbers, including in rental apartment complexes with residents of diverse racial-ethnic backgrounds. Although Hmong-owned grocery stores and other businesses are scattered throughout the city, there is a clustering of Hmong commercial establishments and nonprofit organizations serving Hmong Americans near the central part of the city, including the Lao Family Community of Fresno and the Fresno Center for New Americans. Despite the economic challenges facing Hmong Americans, the legacy of Hmong associational life is strong in the city. Two major Hmong American organizations have historical roots in Fresno. One such influential organization is Hmong National Development (HND), which was organized to assist Hmong Americans in the process of acculturation, to provide leadership, and to advocate for Hmong Americans in government circles. The other important organization formed in Fresno is the Lao Family Community organization, which provides individual and family social services to Hmong Americans. St. Paul, Minnesota: An Informal Hmong Capital

Although St. Paul has become the center of Hmong American life in the Twin Cities area, it was not the first destination for refugee families. In the mid-1970s, refugee families moved into homes in low-income neighborhoods of Minneapolis; it was later in the mid-1980s that St. Paul neighborhoods began to attract an inflow of Hmong families, including Frogtown, which has become a Hmong commercial area. Hmong families also settled in Summit-University, the North End, and—later in the 1980s—the East Side. In the 1990s, Hmong Americans began to move to the suburbs close to St. Paul, particularly Brooklyn Park, where homes were relatively more affordable than in wealthier suburbs. Over the following decade and longer, Hmong American candidates would run electoral campaigns from districts encompassing Frogtown and the East Side.17 Several factors combined to draw Hmong Americans to the Twin Cities, particularly St. Paul, from other states. In the 1990s, the diversity of job opportunities in the Minnesota economy and relatively liberal social policies in education and housing attracted many Hmong families. Although welfare reform would end public assistance payments for many Hmong

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families, the move to Minnesota was motivated by better job opportunities rather than a desire to receive public assistance in another state. The Hmong also hoped to find employment in low-skilled jobs related to retail, storage, and transport of goods. Large retail firms, such as Target and Best Buy, are headquartered in the Twin Cities. In addition, health-care providers and research enterprises provide employment to new immigrants. The many public and private colleges, as well as the well-developed cultural life of St. Paul, offer a favorable urban environment for the development of an ethnic Hmong community life. Hmong community leaders in St. Paul had created an infrastructure of Hmong cultural and social service organizations. The first Hmong-language newspaper was published in St. Paul. The first Hmong association and two Hmong women’s associations had already been established in the late 1970s. Vang named several organizations that formed between 1990 and into the 2000s, including the Hmong American Partnership, the Hmong Cultural Center, the Center for Arts and Talent, the Hmong National Archives, and the Hmong American Mutual Assistance Association. Because of this, St. Paul gained a reputation among the global diaspora of Hmong as the informal “Hmong capital.”18 St. Paul is also the Minnesota state capital, where the political environment has been favorable for the development of a segment of professional policy advocates and community organizers. Because St. Paul is the political and policy-making nerve center of the state, a large and dense network of social service and policy advocacy groups and professionals grew up in the city. These represent the interests of many diverse segments of the population, including racial-ethnic minority groups, as well as business and labor interests. This creates a favorable environment for young Hmong Americans to receive training and enter careers in public service, the law, philanthropy, teaching, management, and related fields. A leader of the Hmong American Partnership described her educational experience and early motivation to serve the Hmong American community. In high school, she was active as a student leader and later served as president of the Asian club at her college. After graduation, she talked about why she pursued a career in public service: A lot of my passion is like my generation. It is foreign born but grew up here in America. Our parents are illiterate but wanted us to be successful and so we worked really hard. . . . I want to help grow the next generation of leaders. We need asset building and wealth creation. It starts with

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c­ reating places to learn basic things, basic needs—language, access, and how to navigate services. . . . We need to serve whole families—with Hmong youth, the history and cultural pieces is important, and teaching youth leadership. With parents, we are teaching ESL and how to parent in the twenty-first century.19

Refugee service organizations affiliated with churches also play an important role in the life of many refugees in Minnesota, which is an entry point for international refugees from various countries. When they arrive, refugees are often contacted by international missionary workers of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services and Catholic Charities, and churches of various denominations serve as hosts for new refugees. Lutheran churches are particularly numerous and well organized in Minnesota, where many affiliated Scandinavian and German immigrants settled in America. Churches and families from their congregations serve as hosts, helping refugees set up households, donating food and provisions, and teaching them how to navigate social service programs, transportation and school systems, and shopping. The refugee projects of the Lutheran and Catholic churches, though, have a complicated influence on the lives of Hmong Americans, beyond simply providing assistance in settlement. The churches view these services as part of their religious mission, and relationships formed have led to a large portion, though not the majority, of the Hmong adult population converting to Christianity. Eau Claire, Wisconsin

According to the 2010 census, Wisconsin has the third-largest Hmong American population, at nearly sixty-six thousand persons. The ethnic Hmong population in Wisconsin is smaller and less concentrated in any single city than in Minnesota or California, and Hmong live dispersed across several counties. The largest number of Hmong live in Milwaukee County, and smaller numbers in La Crosse, Marathon, Brown, and Eau Claire counties. And with this, the Hmong make up a greater percentage of the population in Eau Claire, La Crosse, and Marathon counties than in the larger Milwaukee county, as Christian, Moua, and Vogeler note: “the Hmong stand out more singularly as an ethnic minority” in these counties, which are less densely populated, “than they do in metropolitan areas like Milwaukee, which is already more racially and culturally diverse.”20

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The spatial distribution of the Hmong American population in Wisconsin counties, including in the city of Eau Claire, stands in contrast to the corresponding patterns in larger cities in Minnesota and California. In St. Paul and Fresno, Hmong Americans are more numerous than in Wisconsin but still a small minority among Asian Americans. In Eau Claire, unlike in both St. Paul and Fresno, there is no central commercial area with a variety of established Hmong-owned businesses and communitybased organizations serving the ethnic community. However, in one Eau Claire neighborhood a few commercial businesses with Hmong owners and managers are concentrated, including a couple of Asian grocery stores, a restaurant, a few other shops, and a Hmong Christian church. There is also a higher concentration of Hmong residents living in the area surrounding these businesses, mostly in rental buildings. Other Hmong-owned businesses are scattered around the city.21 In cities with small numbers of Hmong Americans, typically there is only one Hmong mutual-aid association in the city, and it works along more traditional leadership structures. Hein examined continuities in leadership roles from Laos to the United States, as well as change or adaptation in them. The study showed some continuity of leadership within kinship relations; for example, 38 percent of the leaders had a brother who had been a leader in Laos. As in other states, a statewide Hmong eighteen-clan council consists of clan leaders, who provide assistance to community members and also represent Hmong Americans in interactions with government agencies. However, Hein found that only 6 percent of the leadership positions held in the United States were as clan leaders; most leadership positions were associated with a Hmong mutual assistance association. Moreover, the title “community leader” had been adopted, and it was defined more openly than the traditional clan leader. The community leader provided advice and assistance to groups and individuals.22 Hickory-Morganton-Lenoir Metro Area, North Carolina

Hickory is part of the Hickory-Morganton-Lenoir metropolitan statistical area (MSA) in Catawba County, North Carolina. In 2010, the American Community Survey estimated this area to have 5,688 Hmong American residents. The city of Hickory is a center for Hmong American life in North

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Carolina. The population of Hmong Americans in the entire state was estimated at 10,864 persons in the 2010 census. North Carolina ranks fourth among the fifty states in the number of resident Hmong Americans. The area has attracted new residents because of the availability of jobs in manufacturing and the temperate climate. Hickory previously had been known for its furniture industry, but in the 1990s that declined with competition from manufacturers in China. The majority of employed Hmong Americans in North Carolina work in production, transportation, material-moving occupations, and manufacturing. The ethnic community is served by the United Hmong Association in Hickory, which was established to ensure “successful assimilation and integration of the Hmong in North Carolina into American society without sacrificing our cultural heritage and identity.”23 The association’s aims include preservation of Hmong culture, promotion of self-sufficiency, economic development, and social advancement. A local Hmong-language radio program based in Hickory offers cultural and social programming for the community. The Hmong American families generally live in houses, apartments, and some mobile homes widely scattered through the Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton metropolitan area. There is a small concentration of Hmong American families living in a neighborhood with a mix of residential buildings and mobile homes in Morganton. There is little visibility of ethnic commerce. A Hmong American supermarket is located in Conover, a city within the metropolitan area. Although some families first settled in Hickory and the encompassing metropolitan area after the Vietnam War, it became a more popular ­destination point of an internal migration in the 1980s and 1990s. Many Hmong families came to the region from California or elsewhere because of the low cost of buying a plot of land. People could purchase a small plot of land in the 1980s, big enough for a family vegetable garden, and also find a manufacturing job. Another attraction was the warm climate, which elders found similar to Laos. The Hmong residents generally live dispersed throughout the city. In Hickory, there are a handful of Hmong business owners, including medical providers, but no commercial center for Hmong commercial enterprises. One former leader of the local Hmong mutual assistance association described his own family history in the context of the development of the ethnic community:

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Participation in Local Contexts

When we first came in the 1980s there were forty to fifty families in Morganton already. . . . The weather here is better than in a lot of other places and the geography is similar to Laos, that’s why many people enjoy it here. When I first came land prices were around $2,000 an acre in 1988 and in the 1990s. Now it is $6,000 to $8,000 an acre. People were mostly working in factories—in hosiery mills making socks. . . . They made good money at that time. Some made $70,000 to $80,000 in a year; now you can drive around Hickory and see the factories are closed. . . . You could buy a house for under $100,000; the payment would be about $500 per month. Most bought it on fixed rate, a thirty-year mortgage. You could raise your own food, so it is easy to live.24

Recognizing that the area is attractive to Hmong Americans who want to pursue independent farming, in 2007, the United Hmong Association in Hickory initiated a funding application and partnership to help Hmong develop farming enterprises and culture. The Hmong association collaborated with the Catawba County government, the North Carolina Cooperative Extension–Catawba Center, and agricultural extension programs at the North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro to help teach how to grow Asian vegetables and rice. The program also provided education in how to distribute and sell products in local markets. Assisted by one of ten grants allocated nationally by the Office of Refugee Resettlement of the US Department of Health and Human Services, the program grew to involve thirty-four farms. Training projects such as these have the potential to integrate Hmong American families into the North Carolina agricultural economy and to cultivate the distinctive expertise possessed by Hmong farmers, who bring their produce to farmers’ markets in many cities across the United States. These programs can potentially attract more young Hmong Americans interested in helping their community and in the future of sustainable small-scale farming. However, the scarcity of job opportunities in Hickory, where the local economy is not diversified as it is in larger cities, limits this attraction.

Socioeconomic Indicators: Comparing Local Areas This section compares selected socioeconomic characteristics of Hmong American populations in several metropolitan areas, but principally the

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105

Minneapolis–St. Paul–Bloomington MN-WI metropolitan statistical area, commonly referred to as the Twin Cities metro area, and the Fresno Consolidated Area, which encompasses Fresno and Madera counties and includes the city of Fresno. With a few exceptions, the population estimates reported in this section were collected by the 2006–2010 American Community Survey (ACS), which aggregated survey data across five annual surveys to increase sample size. The ACS is likely to undercount immigrant and refugee origin groups, but it is useful for understanding trends over time and for comparing statistics across states, metropolitan areas, and cities, as well as across population groups, such as racial-ethnic groups and income groups. One reason for the potential undercount is that some Hmong report their racial-ethnic origin as Laotian. The estimates here include persons who reported their race-ethnicity as Hmong alone or as Hmong in any combination with other racial-ethnic categories. There are limitations to the usability of census data to compare Hmong American populations across relatively small geographic units, such as cities. For example, the ethnic populations are generally small at this geographic level. Most survey designs produce small sample sizes, which put strong constraints on the reliability of statistical inference. In the comparisons here, there are indications when differences in percentage estimates are statistically significant. To provide a broader picture and to obtain larger sample sizes, it is customary to use national and state data to demonstrate trends over time. Some helpful portraits are available in census-based publications, such as those provided by Hmong National Development: In the 2000 census, the poverty rate for Hmong American individuals was 53.2 percent in California and 33.1 percent in Minnesota. By the 2010 census, the rates were 33.6 percent in California and 28.4 percent in Minnesota. The narrowing of the gap is related to an overall decline in poverty in the Hmong population, from 40 percent in 2000 to 25 percent in 2010. The effect on these rates of the internal migration of Hmong Americans from California to Minnesota is not known.25 Researchers have also pointed to contrasts between some states on other dimensions of socioeconomic status. Some academic indicators suggest that in California, Hmong Americans have better educational outcomes than in other states. For instance, Vang has pointed out that in California, 76.3 percent of Hmong eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds attended college, compared to only 49.5 percent of Michigan’s Hmong population of the same age.26

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Participation in Local Contexts

These comparisons across certain US states help provide a broad picture of regional differences in the socioeconomic profile of Hmong Americans. Understanding the local context of political participation, however, requires finer-grained data. The next set of sociodemographic comparisons therefore describes both metropolitan and city population characteristics. This approach helps account for how regional economies and immigrant social networks span from neighborhoods in the core of cities into nearby suburbs. The social and economic linkages present in this extended geographic space influence how Hmong American political life develops. It is first important to clarify how geographically delineated statistical areas are defined. Federal statistical agencies delineate a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) as a geographical entity with an urban core populated by fifty thousand or more persons and close economic ties throughout the area. When the urban core has a population of at least ten thousand but less than fifty thousand persons, the statistical area with close economic ties is called a micropolitan statistical area. A combined statistical area (CSA) is the aggregation of adjacent metropolitan and micropolitan areas. The Minneapolis–St. Paul–Bloomington MN-WI Metropolitan Statistical Area is approximately eight thousand square miles, encompassing sixteen counties: fourteen in Minnesota and two in Wisconsin.27 In census reports, it is designated the Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI Metro Area. For ease of reference, this chapter at times refers this geographic entity as the Twin Cities area. The metropolitan area with Fresno at its center is officially designated as a CSA, encompassing Fresno and Madera counties, and it also covers about eight thousand square miles. The census data from the American Community Survey (ACS) includes statistics for Hmong Americans at the city level for Fresno, St. Paul, and Eau Claire, but not for Hickory city. Rather, to describe the ethnic population data for Hickory, it is necessary to use data for the larger and encompassing Hickory-Morganton-Lenoir MSA. The city of Hickory is relatively small, and the Hmong American community spans the metropolitan area. The Hickory-Morganton-Lenoir area encompasses four counties: Alexander, Burke, Caldwell, and Catawba. Eau Claire City is in the Eau Claire Metropolitan Statistical Area. To enable comparison of estimates across metropolitan area and cities, margins of error estimates from the American Community Survey are taken into account and reported in the discussion below.

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107

Metropolitan Area and Combined Statistical Area Comparisons

Hmong Americans living in the suburban areas of the Twin Cities have, on average, attained higher socioeconomic status than those residing in St. Paul, particularly on the city’s East Side, which has been an entry point for Hmong American immigrants moving to St. Paul. Throughout the Twin Cities, nonetheless, Hmong Americans remain connected through social networks, and the state capital and urban center of St. Paul serves as an anchor for the extended Hmong American community. In Fresno, Hmong Americans live in concentrated numbers in the city of Fresno, and are more dispersed in the surrounding suburban and exurban areas of Fresno and Madera counties. As a result, in Fresno, the city serves as the core, but it is a less strong social and political base for the geographically dispersed Hmong American community than in St. Paul. The population estimates reported in the following list are for metropolitan areas (Tables 3.1 and 3.2 summarize city-level data and metro-area-level data for Hickory, but the tables do not include the following estimates for metropolitan areas): • Population size: The Hmong American population in the Fresno combined statistical area (CSA) was estimated in 2010 at 29,711 ± 2,895 persons. In the Minneapolis–St. Paul–Bloomington MN-WI metropolitan statistical area (MSA), it was much larger, estimated at 59,162 ± 2,382 persons. The Hmong American population for only the Minnesota portion of the MSA is not much smaller, estimated at 58,741 ± 2,373 persons. It should be noted that American Community Survey estimates of population characteristics of the Hmong Americans in the Minnesota portion and combined Minnesota and Wisconsin area are generally the same or very close. • Income: The mean per capita income for Hmong Americans was estimated at $11,301 ± $572 in the Twin Cities area. The American Community Survey estimates are the same for the combined MinnesotaWisconsin area and the Minnesota portion alone. This estimate for the Twin Cities metropolitan area is considerably higher than the estimate of $7,943 ± $527 for the Fresno combined statistical area. The mean per capita income for the city of St. Paul is appreciably lower than in the broader Twin Cities metropolitan area. In contrast, the mean per capita income for the city of Fresno is estimated at $7,671 ± $590, not much lower than for the Fresno CSA.

T a b l e 3 . 1   Hmong Americans in four cities: Social indicators Eau Claire city, WI Total

Hmong

Population

65,133 (±262)

marital status Males 15 years and over Females 15 years and over

26,124 28,419

school enrollment Population 3 years and older enrolled in school Nursery school, preschool Kindergarten Elementary school (grades 1–8) High school (grades 9–12) College or graduate school educational attainment Population 25 years and older Less than 9th grade 9th to 12th grade, no diploma High school graduate (includes equivalency) Some college, no degree Associate’s degree Bachelor’s degree

Fresno city, CA Total

Hmong

Total

Hmong

Total

Hmong

484,008 (±182)

22,428 (±1,985)

282,079 (±40)

27,396 (±1,653)

362,665 (*****)

5,688 (±645)

692 775

(X) (X)

175,772 185,882

(X) (X)

7,112 6,985

(X) (X)

106,173 116,690

(X) (X)

8,374 8,855

(X) (X)

143,496 149,680

(X) (X)

2,011 1,799

(X) (X)

22,241 (X) 4.2% ±0.7 3.9% ±0.7

1,009 6.9% 3.0%

(X) ±4.3 ±3.1

156,152 4.7% 5.0%

(X) ±0.4 ±0.4

10,635 2.4% 5.8%

(X) ±1.5 ±1.5

85,815 5.3% 4.5%

(X) ±0.5 ±0.5

12,626 2.1% 6.1%

(X) ±0.8 ±1.4

87,996 5.3% 4.8%

(X) ±0.5 ±0.5

2,678 2.4% 2.2%

(X) ±1.3 ±2.0

24.0% ±1.6 13.2% ±1.2 54.7% ±2.1

32.2% ±7.3 31.4% ±8.5 26.5% ±10.6

41.0% 22.4% 26.9%

±0.9 ±0.7 ±0.8

39.8% 27.7% 24.2%

±3.7 ±2.9 ±3.5

34.1% 20.7% 35.4%

±0.8 ±0.8 ±1.1

41.4% 34.2% 16.2%

±2.7 ±2.8 ±2.8

44.3% 24.0% 21.7%

±0.9 ±0.8 ±1.0

40.0% 29.4% 26.0%

±4.5 ±4.1 ±3.9

37,290 (X) 2.9% ±0.6 4.4% ±0.7

611 (X) 48.0% ±21.9 2.9% ±4.2

276,581 (X) 13.9% ±0.5 11.4% ±0.4

7,516 43.8% 5.5%

(X) ±4.4 ±1.9

172,462 (X) 7.2% ±0.5 6.3% ±0.4

9,788 41.7% 6.8%

(X) ±4.2 ±2.0

247,998 (X) 8.0% ±0.4 14.4% ±0.5

2,166 35.8% 9.7%

(X) ±7.3 ±5.2

±1.5 ±1.5 ±1.1 ±1.5

15.2% ±10.6 13.3% ±12.9 8.3% ±6.4 9.3% ±9.6

23.5% 23.2% 7.5% 14.0%

±0.6 ±0.5 ±0.3 ±0.5

17.5% 13.5% 7.0% 9.9%

±3.5 ±3.5 ±2.2 ±2.6

23.8% 19.2% 6.3% 22.3%

±0.7 ±0.6 ±0.4 ±0.7

24.8% 14.1% 4.3% 7.5%

±3.3 ±3.1 ±1.6 ±2.3

33.0% 19.8% 8.9% 10.7%

±0.7 ±0.6 ±0.4 ±0.5

24.9% 18.5% 7.3% 3.7%

±7.8 ±6.5 ±3.2 ±3.3

27.6% 21.2% 11.9% 21.7%

(X) (X)

2,041 (±401)

Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton, NC, metro area (MSA)

St. Paul city, MN

Graduate or professional degree Total: High school graduate or higher Total: Bachelor’s degree or higher us citizenship status Foreign-born population Naturalized US citizen Not a US citizen language spoken at home Population 5 years and older English only Language other than English Speak English less than “very well”

±4.2

6.6%

±0.3

2.7%

±1.4

15.0%

±0.5

0.7%

±0.5

5.2%

±0.3

0.0%

±1.7

92.8% ±0.8

49.1% ±21.0

74.7%

±0.7

50.7%

±4.4

86.6%

±0.6

51.5%

±4.7

77.6%

±0.6

54.4%

±9.1

±1.8

12.3% ±10.4

20.5%

±0.5

12.6%

±3.3

37.3%

±0.7

8.2%

±2.5

15.9%

±0.6

3.7%

±3.3

2,315 (X) 48.9% ±8.6 51.1% ±8.6

792 (X) 67.3% ±16.4 32.7% ±16.4

101,178 34.9% 65.1%

(X) ±1.2 ±1.2

9,689 46.0% 54.0%

(X) ±6.0 ±6.0

47,543 40.9% 59.1%

(X) ±2.4 ±2.4

13,333 54.2% 45.8%

(X) ±5.0 ±5.0

18,040 29.5% 70.5%

(X) ±2.9 ±2.9

2,701 (X) 59.8% ±11.8 40.2% ±11.8

61,399 (X) 93.7% ±0.7 6.3% ±0.7

1,899 (X) 9.1% ±4.7 90.9% ±4.7

441,556 (X) 57.6% ±0.7 42.4% ±0.7

19,585 5.7% 94.3%

(X) ±1.7 ±1.7

260,136 (X) 74.3% ±0.7 25.7% ±0.7

23,909 4.9% 95.1%

(X) ±1.4 ±1.4

±0.6

37.9% ±10.2

±0.6

48.1%

±3.9

±0.7

51.2%

±3.4

10.4%

32.1%

2.4%

±1.0

2.9%

17.9%

13.2%

340,826 (X) 92.2% ±0.3 7.8% ±0.3

5,076 8.5% 91.5%

(X) ±4.3 ±4.3

±0.2

37.3%

±5.4

3.7%

Source: US Census Bureau, 2006–2010, Five-Year American Community Survey. Notes: This table uses data for the Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton, NC, MSA. Census data on Hmong Americans in the city of Hickory alone were not available in the American Community Survey. The entry of five asterisks in the margin-of-error column indicates that the estimate is controlled. A statistical test for sampling variability is not appropriate. (X) = estimate is not applicable or not available. Hmong = Hmong alone or in any combination.

110 Participation in Local Contexts

• School enrollment in metropolitan areas: In the Twin Cities MSA (Minnesota and Wisconsin combined), the growth of the Hmong American population includes expansion in the suburbs surrounding St. Paul. Among a school enrollment of 25,981 children and adolescents, 8,235 students were enrolled in the ninth through twelfth grades, and 4,291 students were enrolled in college. This number is markedly higher than in the Fresno CSA, where enrollment numbers were 3,723 and 2,946 for school and college, respectively. • In 2010, for Hmong Americans, among occupied housing units 34 percent ± 4.6 percent were owner-occupied units in the Fresno CSA. The estimate for Hmong Americans was 49.3 percent ± 3.1 percent in the Twin Cities (combined Minnesota and Wisconsin). City-Level Comparisons

In general, city-level data describes socioeconomic characteristics of voters in electoral districts more finely than do averages taken across larger geographic units, such as metropolitan areas. In ethnic populations, however, social networks and political associations often extend across metropolitan areas. It is therefore useful to consider the more localized city contexts as well as the wider metropolitan area context. Tables 3.1 and 3.2 compare social and economic indexes from the American Community Survey, 2006–2010. The percentage estimates are for selected features of the Hmong American population in Fresno, St. Paul, and Eau Claire, and in the Hickory-LenoirMorganton metropolitan area. For the latter, the data are not for the city of Hickory, but for the larger metropolitan area, because the city of Hickory is small and ACS data are not available for it alone. Table 3.1 shows comparative social indicators in four localities. Several key comparisons of these social features across the local areas are noted here:28 • The percentages of naturalized US citizens among the Hmong American foreign-born population are higher in St. Paul (54.2 ± 5.0) than in Fresno (46.0 ± 6.0). Because of small sample sizes, the margins of error are large on this estimate of naturalized US citizens among foreign-born Hmong Americans in Eau Claire (67.4 ± 16.4) and in Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton (59.8 ± 11.8). • The percentage of Hmong Americans aged 5 years and older who speak English less than well is greatest in St. Paul (51.2 ± 3.4), slightly

Participation in Local Contexts

•

•

•

•

111

less in Fresno (48.1 ± 3.9), with smaller numbers in Hickory-LenoirMorganton (37.3 ± 5.4) and Eau Claire (37.9 ± 10.2). The percentage of high school graduates among Hmong Americans aged 25 years and older is greater in St. Paul (24.8 ± 3.3) than in Fresno (17.5 ± 3.5) and Eau Claire (15.2 ± 10.6). The highest percentage is in Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton (24.9 ± 7.8). The percentage of Hmong Americans enrolled in high school is higher in St. Paul (34.2 ± 2.8) than in other cities, including Fresno (27.7 ± 2.9). The percentage of Hmong Americans aged 25 years and older with a bachelor’s degree or higher is greater in Fresno (12.6 ± 0 3.3) and St. Paul (8.2 ± 2.5). However, the estimates for Eau Claire (12.3 ± 10.4) and Hickory (3.7 ± 3.3) have a large standard error relative to the estimate, which makes comparisons unreliable. There are significant disparities in social status between Hmong Americans and the general city population. For example, among the total population, the percentage of high school graduates is 23.5 ± .06 in Fresno but only 17.5 ± 3.5 for Hmong Americans. This gap is also large in Eau Claire and Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton, but in St. Paul, the disparity is not large.

Table 3.2 shows economic indicators for the Hmong Americans and general population in four localities: the city of Fresno, the city of St. Paul, the city of Eau Claire, and in Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton. Where the differences between population estimates for specific localities are statistically significant at the 90 percent confidence level, this is noted. The most notable comparisons of economic features across the local areas are summarized as follows: • The largest percentages of Hmong American adults aged 16 years and older in manufacturing jobs are in Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton (56.9 ± 6.7) and Eau Claire (44.4 ± 9.8). St. Paul has the next largest percentage (29.2 ± 3.8), larger than the total population (10.5 ± .06). Fresno has the lowest (16.3 ± 3.6), which is still substantially larger than in the general Fresno population (7.3 ± .5). There is a statistically significant difference between all these cross-city comparisons. • Fresno has a relatively large percentage of Hmong Americans aged 16 years and older who are employed in educational and health services

T a b l e 3 . 2   Hmong Americans in four cities: Economic indicators Eau Claire city, WI Total Population

65,133 (±262)

Fresno city, CA

Hmong 2,041

(±401)

employment status (population 16 years and older) In labor force 72.3% (±1.3) 67.2% (±8.1) Civilian labor force 72.2% (±1.3) 67.2% (±8.1) Employed 67.8% (±1.3) 60.5% (±8.7) Unemployed 4.5% (±0.6) 6.7% (±3.6) Not in labor force 27.7% (±1.3) 32.8% (±8.1) Civilian labor force unemployed 6.2% (±0.8) 10.0% (±5.5) occupation (civilian employed population 16 years and older) Management, business, science, and arts occupations 30.2% (±1.5) 14.2% (±6.9) Service occupations 20.5% (±1.6) 22.4% (±7.5) Sales and office occupations 28.5% (±1.6) 26.2% (±10.1) Natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations 7.0% (±0.9) 0.00% (±2.7) Production, transportation, and material-moving occupations 13.8% (±1.3) 37.2% (±9.8) industry (civilian employed population 16 years and older) Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, and mining 1.0% (±0.4) 4.0% ±4.7 Construction 5.1% (±0.9) 0.0% ±2.7 Manufacturing 11.7% ±1.1 44.4% ±9.8 Wholesale trade 2.6% ±0.6 0.0% ±2.7 Retail trade 15.4% ±1.3 4.8% ±4.8 Transportation and warehousing, and utilities 3.9% ±0.7 0.7% ±1.5 Information 2.1% ±0.7 0.0% ±2.7 Finance and insurance, and real estate and rental and leasing 5.9% ±0.8 1.8% ±3.0

Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton, NC, metro area (MSA)

St. Paul city, MN

Total

Hmong

Total

Hmong

Total

484,008 (±182)

22,428 (±1,985)

282,079 (±40)

27,396 (±1,653)

362,665 (*****)

63.6% (±0.5) 63.5% (±0.5) 55.6% (±0.7) 7.9% (±0.4) 36.4% (±0.5)

53.0% (±3.1) 53.0% (±3.1) 44.5% (±2.9) 8.4% (±1.5) 47.0% (±3.1)

70.4% 70.4% 64.0% 6.3% 29.6%

(±0.6) (±0.6) (±0.7) (±0.4) (±0.6)

61.9% 61.9% 55.0% 6.8% 38.1%

(±3.0) (±3.0) (±3.4) (±1.8) (±3.0)

62.5% 62.4% 56.3% 6.1% 37.5%

12.4%

15.9%

9.0%

(±0.6)

11.1%

(±2.8)

(±0.7)

(±2.7)

Hmong 5,688

(±645)

(±0.7) (±0.7) (±0.7) (±0.3) (±0.7)

75.7% 75.7% 68.5% 7.2% 24.3%

(±4.9) (±4.9) (±5.0) (±2.4) (±4.9)

9.7%

(±0.5)

9.5%

(±3.1)

29.0% (±0.7) 20.6% (±0.7) 27.2% (±0.7)

21.9% (±4.0) 20.3% (±3.2) 30.2% (±4.4)

41.0% (±0.9) 18.1% (±0.7) 23.7% (±0.8)

15.3% (±3.4) 22.0% (±3.3) 28.0% (±3.7)

27.2% 16.1% 22.1%

(±0.8) (±0.6) (±0.7)

5.7% 11.8% 26.1%

(±2.3) (±3.1) (±6.9)

11.3%

(±0.5)

4.9%

(±2.1)

5.5%

(±0.5)

2.0%

(±1.0)

10.1%

(±0.5)

3.0%

(±2.3)

11.9%

(±0.6)

22.7%

(±4.0)

11.8%

(±0.6)

32.6%

(±3.8)

24.5%

(±0.8)

53.4%

(±6.9)

3.8% 6.4% 7.3% 3.3% 12.3%

±0.5 ±0.4 ±0.5 ±0.3 ±0.6

3.4% 0.4% 16.3% 3.2% 14.9%

±2.0 ±0.4 ±3.6 ±1.4 ±3.6

0.8% 3.8% 10.5% 2.4% 10.6%

±0.2 ±0.4 ±0.6 ±0.3 ±0.6

0.0% 1.3% 29.2% 2.7% 11.4%

±0.2 ±0.7 ±3.8 ±1.3 ±2.6

0.9% 6.9% 26.3% 3.7% 11.0%

±0.2 ±0.4 ±0.7 ±0.4 ±0.6

0.8% 0.3% 56.9% 0.8% 9.2%

±1.4 ±0.6 ±6.7 ±1.1 ±3.9

4.3% 1.8%

±0.3 ±0.3

3.6% 1.5%

±1.6 ±1.0

3.9% 3.2%

±0.4 ±0.3

3.7% 1.9%

±1.7 ±1.1

4.6% 1.0%

±0.4 ±0.2

2.7% 1.5%

±3.0 ±1.1

5.9%

±0.5

5.3%

±1.9

7.6%

±0.5

5.2%

±2.1

3.3%

±0.3

2.3%

±1.9

Professional, scientific, and management, and administrative and waste management services Educational services, and health care and social assistance Arts, entertainment, and recreation, and accommodation and food services Other services, except public administration Public administration

6.9%

±1.0

9.9%

±8.7

9.5%

±0.5

4.6%

±1.6

11.3%

±0.6

7.9%

±2.6

5.7%

±0.4

0.7%

±1.0

26.6%

±1.5

18.4%

±13.1

24.4%

±0.7

24.3%

±4.6

26.8%

±0.9

18.2%

±3.0

21.4%

±0.6

6.6%

±4.6

11.6%

±1.4

13.7%

±6.4

9.5%

±0.6

15.3%

±3.7

10.0%

±0.5

10.9%

±2.7

7.0%

±0.5

16.5%

±4.6

4.1% 3.0%

±0.7 ±0.6

2.3% 0.0%

±2.9 ±2.7

5.1% 6.4%

±0.4 ±0.5

1.7% 5.5%

±0.8 ±1.9

5.0% 4.1%

±0.4 ±0.4

3.8% 3.7%

±1.5 ±1.7

4.6% 3.7%

±0.4 ±0.4

1.3% 0.3%

±1.6 ±0.5

156,226

(X)

3,668

(X)

111,534

(X)

4,958

(X)

138,854

(X)

1,133

(X)

8.9%

±0.5

25.9%

±4.3

5.7%

±0.5

20.9%

±3.8

3.6%

±0.3

4.9%

±3.4

8.8%

±0.5

31.1%

±5.2

7.5%

±0.6

22.4%

±4.8

1.5%

±0.2

1.0%

±1.7

15.5%

±0.7

45.5%

±5.8

13.0%

±0.6

42.2%

±5.9

10.3%

±0.5

16.7%

±7.1

income and benefits (in 2010 inflation-adjusted dollars) Total households 26,497 (X) 444 (X) With Supplemental Security Income 3.2% ±0.7 10.8% ±10.0 With cash public assistance income 1.6% ±0.4 3.2% ±4.9 With food stamp/SNAP benefits in the past 12 months 8.5% ±1.2 27.7% ±12.9 Median household income (dollars) 41,565 ±1,168 24,079 ±7,941 Mean household income (dollars) 55,248 ±1,992 35,501 ±7,088 Per capita income (dollars) 23,041 ±822 7,622 ±1,689

43,124 ±752 58,764 ±1,189 19,709 ±374

34,692 ±3,237 43,604 ±3,421 7,671 ±590

percentage of families and people whose income in past 12 months is below poverty level All people 18.6% ±1.2 41.8% ±13.3 24.9% ±0.9 37.7% All families 9.7% ±1.5 45.1% ±14.2 19.9% ±0.9 34.4% With related children under 18 years 17.8% ±3.0 55.6% ±16.2 28.6% ±1.3 37.4% With related children under 5 years only 26.6% ±7.0 62.7% ±36.1 27.5% ±3.1 35.5%

45,439 ±928 61,798 ±1,054 25,066 ±378

40,308 ±3,853 48,385 ±4,455 9,330 ±788

40,346 ±879 52,829 ±944 21,061 ±363

43,906 ±3,526 50,838 ±4,769 9,221 ±743

±5.6 ±5.3

22.0% 16.4%

±0.9 ±0.9

37.7% 34.6%

±4.4 ±4.1

14.8% 10.9%

±0.8 ±0.8

17.3% 13.9%

±8.4 ±7.1

±5.6

26.3%

±1.4

40.6%

±5.0

16.7%

±1.2

15.2%

±8.3

±17.1

26.1%

±3.8

49.3%

±15.6

20.0%

±3.1

4.2%

±10.3

Source: US Census Bureau, 2006–2010, Five-Year American Community Survey. Notes: This table uses data for the Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton, NC, MSA. Census data on Hmong Americans in the city of Hickory alone were not available in the American Community Survey. The entry of five asterisks in the margin-of-error column indicates that the estimate is controlled. A statistical test for sampling variability is not appropriate. (X) = estimate is not applicable or not available. Hmong = Hmong alone or in any combination.

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(24.3 ± 4.6), as compared to St. Paul (18.2 ± 3.0). In Eau Claire and Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton, the standard errors are large relative to estimates. • Mean per capita income for Hmong Americans is greater in both St. Paul ($9,330 ± $788) and Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton ($9,221 ± $743) than in Fresno ($7,671 ± $590). The differences between estimates for Fresno and St. Paul and for Fresno and Eau Claire are statistically significant. It should be noted that household-level measures of income can be misleading, because Hmong American households are larger on average than other households, which tends to boost household income. Because of this complication, the data for household and per capita measures are shown in Table 3.2 to illustrate the contrast. • The percentage of Hmong Americans living below the poverty line is similar in Fresno (37.7 ± 5.6) and St. Paul (37.7 ± 4.4), but there is a statistically significant difference between the percentage receiving cash public assistance in Fresno (31.1 ± 5.2) and St. Paul (22.4 ± 4.8). The estimate for Eau Claire is high (41.8 ± 13.3), but the standard of error is also large relative to the estimate. • The percentage of Hmong Americans aged 16 years and older in the civilian labor force who are unemployed is higher in Fresno (15.9 ± 2.7) than St. Paul (11.1 ± 2.8), a statistically significant difference at the 90 percent confidence level. The comparable percentage of unemployed Hmong American adults in Fresno is greater than Hickory (9.5 ± 3.1), a statistically significant difference. These comparisons help illustrate which social and economic factors as indicated by the summary measures across localities may influence differences in levels of engagement in politics, including informal grassroots activism and formal participation in elections. Four relevant comparisons are drawn here. First, comparing the two metropolitan areas of Fresno and St. Paul, including some suburban neighborhoods, there are significant contrasts in socioeconomic attainment. In the Twin Cities there is higher per capita income, rates of home ownership, and educational attainment than in St. Paul and Fresno. Second, the relatively large number of Hmong American enrolled stu-

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dents in high school and college in the Twin Cities creates the potential for the infusion of greater numbers of young adults into positions of political leadership and community activism. How fully they realize this potential is likely to depend on the contextual factors described in this chapter, including the presence and activity of local institutions of citizenship education that can prepare them to participate in politics and civic life. In other cities or metropolitan areas with sizable concentrations of Hmong American college students (e.g., Fresno), their presence similarly creates a base for political activism, but the concentrated numbers in St. Paul are a particularly favorable factor for participation, especially coupled with the industrial profile of the Twin Cities, which offers diverse employment opportunities for young people. At the college level, ethnic student networks extend across metropolitan areas. In the Twin Cities region, young people tend to stay in the area more than in Fresno because of the diversity and number of job opportunities. As a result, the steady growth of this youthful population segment serves as a pipeline for political activism, which in the Twin Cities is centered in St. Paul but has extended to other cities in the region. At the same time, the number of Hmong American college students in the Fresno CSA is also sizable and growing; this is a positive factor in favor of prospects for expanded political activism on the part of young Hmong Americans in Fresno. Community leaders have built leadership programs and an active community of writers and artists in Fresno. These programs attract Hmong Americans from the large state university and the college system in the Central Valley of California. Beyond the implications for politics, a fast-growing number of Hmong American students enrolled in college signals future change in the occupational profile of Hmong American communities. Increasingly, more Hmong Americans will have the educational qualifications to enter a range of professions, such as teaching, health services and sciences, government service, and the law. The growth of an educated segment of the Hmong American population signals a change from the situation in Fresno during the 1980s, as noted earlier. Still, fewer such jobs are available in Fresno than other cities, including other cities in California with more diversified economies. Third, the relatively large proportion of elder Hmong Americans who speak English less than well in all these cities underscores problems of social and cultural isolation. Moreover, the disparities between the social status of Hmong Americans and the general population in these several cities are

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considerable and point to obstacles to participatory parity. The conditions are present for policy advocacy to address both dimensions of disparity— economic distribution and recognition—and for younger Hmong Americans to help forge an antipoverty and antidiscriminatory reform agenda that incorporates intergenerational concerns. Fourth, high levels of poverty in a city and small ethnic populations do not preclude the election of Hmong Americans to city councils or school boards. In Eau Claire, for example, poverty is very high, yet Hmong Americans regularly hold a seat on the city council. Eau Claire, moreover, does not have a large, concentrated Hmong American population. The success of Hmong American candidates running for local office in Eau Claire is in large part a result of the strength of leadership in the Hmong American community.

Local Institutions This section turns to compare the presence of local institutions that provide aspects of citizenship education in city contexts. Institutions for citizenship education help new immigrants acquire skills they need to understand the nature of disparities of participation and to speak out and organize actions on their own behalf. Members of the language community are likely to express claims for parity in terms referring to “fair” and “equal” treatment in policy arenas related to educational and economic opportunities, affordable housing, safe neighborhoods, and quality health care. A school system that helps remedy problems of devaluation of minority racial-ethnic or cultural groups and is successful in preparing students for entry into the job market provides the foundation for building a stable population of young people in any city. Sustaining engagement of the community in informal grassroots and formal electoral politics requires building two-way intergenerational citizen education that involves both younger and older Hmong Americans in voicing their claims for recognition and the fair distribution of economic resources. In addition to training students for employment, a public education preparing them for citizenship teaches skills in democratic participation that recognize their culturally distinctive way of expressing ideas about individual freedom, equality, and membership. The recognition of the cultural

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component is captured in the concept of cultural citizenship, which gives persons of minority cultures a voice in democratic life.29 Educational researchers have examined the educational disadvantages faced by Hmong Americans. One study examined California high schools with majority Asian American populations in the communities served. Because racial-ethnic data were not available for the student bodies, the authors used data on the communities where the students lived to estimate the effects of segregation on educational outcomes. The schools in majority Asian American communities numbered forty-eight in the year 2000. Schools in Southeast Asian neighborhoods compared to those in Chinese American neighborhoods had a higher English-language-learner rate (a measure of limited English proficiency: 31.5 percent for Southeast Asian, 16.9 percent for Chinese); a higher percentage of parents without a high school diploma (33.6 for Southeast Asian, 19.2 for Chinese); and a higher percentage of students receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (26.1 for Southeast Asian, 11.9 for Chinese). Within the schools comprised of Southeast Asian students, in Fresno, only 2.5 percent of students at schools in Hmong communities met academic requirements for admission to the University of California.30 In view of the high educational hurdles faced by Hmong American students, community leaders in Fresno have called for policy reforms that account for the social context of their educational disadvantage. In 2009, having served on the board since 2002, Tony Vang was elected president of the Fresno Unified School Board. Vang offered his view on why it is important for Hmong Americans to hold elected offices: For me, we see so many Hmong kids in the school district but Hmong parents have little voice in policy making, in getting scholarships, mentors, and programs. They tend to fall behind. Twenty-five years ago I always advocated [that] we need to have Hmong teachers and staff to deal with parents more effectively. . . . Now we have 15 percent Hmong kids among all students in the district[;] we need at least 15 percent teachers and administrators. Our school system expects parents to be involved. For Hmong parents it is not that they don’t want to, but they don’t know how to talk to the secretary, for example. We need an open door, a friendly school policy. That’s why I ran. Now I have Hmong staff in the office who can talk to parents, a lot of Hmong teachers, around 150, six administrators, one principal, four to five vice principals, maybe seven counselors.31

118 Participation in Local Contexts T a b l e 3 . 3   Per pupil educational expenditures in four states, 2006–2010 California Minnesota North Carolina Wisconsin

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

8,486 9,138 7,388 9,970

9,152 9,539 7,883 10,267

9,863 10,140 7,996 10,680

9,657 11,098 8,587 11,078

9,375 10,685 8,409 11,364

Source: National Council of Educational Statistics (NCES), Common Core of Data (CCD), Agency file, Local Education Agency (School District) Universe Survey, https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/pubagency.asp.

Another type of comparison focuses on public school services. Table 3.3 shows per pupil expenditures on public education at the state level in California, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, from 2006 to 2010. The level of expenditure is only a rough indicator of quality, but the numbers facilitate comparison. In dollar amounts, Wisconsin’s level in 2010 was highest at $11,365, followed by Minnesota, at $10,685; California, at $9,375; and North Carolina, at only $8,409. To be effective, citizenship education must help younger Hmong Americans construct and adapt an ethnic identity. Among the benefits of doing so are some related to the mental health of adolescents. Researchers have found that when young people have positive affect toward their own ethnic group, this increases self-esteem; when they perceive that others view their ethnic group in a positive way, they report fewer symptoms of depression.32 At first glance it might seem that second- and third-generation immigrants—or the children of refugees—are more inclined to engage in American politics than their parents are, especially when they have grown up in the United States and are more familiar with its political culture than the older generation.33 The paths toward such participation of USborn children of immigrants are not unencumbered, however. Contrary to conventional wisdom, personal experiences of discrimination or social exclusion can discourage US-educated offspring more than their parents, who enter the United States with a focused intent on making a better life for their families and so are motivated to take advantage of the promises of opportunity and individual freedom associated with long-term residence in a country with advanced democratic institutions, despite its inequalities and discrimination. Their children, however, who are raised and attend schools in the United States, may more acutely feel the effects of barriers to social and economic advancement rooted in discrimination. This experience may exacerbate a sense of social marginalization, which the first generation does not necessarily understand.

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In her study of Latino identity in Los Angeles, Bedolla found that when local community groups recognize minority group identities, this helped reduce a sense of isolation and political inefficiency among Latinos. For Hmong American communities in various cities, certain types of institutions fostering citizenship engagement and empowerment are important. First are the public school systems, which train young people for jobs and citizenship. Second are certain community-based organizations that provide forms of citizen education and act as information conduits for immigrants and refugees. The community organizations, for example, can give access not only to employment opportunities but also to information about social life, including such vital matters as health and food security. Some organizations facilitate participation in group-based deliberation on community affairs. In the analysis that follows, I argue that the most effective networks of community organizations address the specific needs of younger and older Hmong Americans. But in addition, they will bring younger and older members of the community into dialogue and collaborative actions.

Interviews of High School Youth Interviews of Hmong American high school students help illustrate the importance the youth attach to community concerns and civic engagement. The text of the questionnaire used for the interviews is found in Appendix A. Appendix B includes a table summarizing participants’ responses to the questions. The questionnaire was administered in semistructured interviews with thirty-eight high school students of Hmong ethnic background in Fresno, the Twin Cities, and in two schools with concentrations of Hmong American students in the Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton area.34 The interviews took place in Fresno during the winter of 2008; in St. Paul during the summer, spring, and winter of 2008 and 2009; and in Hickory, during the winter of 2008. The questions probed several topics, including how the students identified themselves in relationship to racial-ethnic categories, attitudes toward political participation and Hmong Americans’ running for elected office, the nature of conversations they engage in with family or friends about politics or discussions about Hmong American history at home, and personal experiences of discrimination and their thoughts about discrimination as it affects Hmong Americans more generally.

120 Participation in Local Contexts

The research team used convenience sampling to recruit interviewees. The approach differed across cities. Some students were recruited through Hmong clubs and social science classes in schools and others were contacted through Asian or Hmong social clubs in the school. Because participation in a Hmong or Asian club is likely motivated by an interest in Hmong identity and issues related to Hmong community welfare (or participation influences students toward such interests), the samples may be biased toward students who are aware of and interested in those issues; that is, the participants are not likely to be representative of the full range of interest in these subjects among Hmong student populations in the schools. For recruitment, first students in social science classes were invited to participate in three schools; one was in Hickory, one in Morganton, and one in Fresno. In Hickory, in addition, some students were recruited through the school’s international club, where the activities included Hmong cultural education and events. In the Fresno school, students were also contacted by the faculty adviser to a Hmong culture club, as they were in Hickory. In Minneapolis and St. Paul, eight of the ten high school students were recruited from a program preparing them to major in business in college. Of these, only three had taken part in an Asian or Hmong club, compared to the overwhelming majority in other cities. Both students in St. Paul, however, recruited through a community-based Hmong arts program, had participated in an Asian or Hmong club at school. In assessing the educational backgrounds of the students, we inquired whether they had taken a civics or government class. All eight students recruited from Twin Cities high schools had taken a class in civics or government; seven out of ten had taken such a class in Hickory-Morganton, but only one in eighteen had taken such a class in Fresno. Pooling responses from all thirty-eight student participants in Fresno, St. Paul, and Hickory-Morganton, twenty-eight students were naturalborn US citizens and three were naturalized US citizens; four were not citizens. Thirty-one students identified themselves primarily as Hmong; three identified mainly as Hmong Americans, and none identified as “Asian American,” although we did not probe further to ask if whether any of the students might have identified with the term “Asian American” as a secondary identity. Twelve students spoke the Hmong language mainly at home, while eight spoke mainly English at home and eighteen spoke a mix of Hmong and English.

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Our interviews presented a picture of a youthful segment of the Hmong American community that is for the most part engaged in conversations about politics and aware of problems affecting the welfare of their community. Among participants in the pooled sample, twenty-nine of the thirtyeight students said they intended to register to vote when they reached the eligible age; one did not intend to register. Thirty-three of the students said they talk about Hmong history at home, in contrast to four students who did not. These conversations about ethnic history can lay the groundwork for these young people’s evolving identity. Thirty-five students expressed the opinion that participating in politics will “make a difference.” Thirty-two students said that it was important for Hmong Americans to run for office. Twenty-seven students reported that they talked about politics with their family, and nine students said they did not. Twenty-six students said they talk about politics with their friends and eleven did not. Twenty-five students had volunteered in a community organization. Twenty students said they had not attended a community meeting, compared to fifteen who had attended at least one such meeting. Twelve of these students themselves had thought about being a government official, which is not a small number, compared to twenty-two who had not thought about this option as a career. Considering their young age, it is likely that many had not yet formed strong preferences about career choices. Twenty-four students felt that discrimination experienced by the Hmong is a problem. Twenty-three reported having personally experienced discrimination, including eleven in Fresno and eight in Hickory. Because a scientific sampling strategy was not used, there is no reason to believe that students in Fresno and Hickory experience more discrimination than students in St. Paul or Minneapolis. It is quite possible that recruitment of participants in Fresno and Hickory from Hmong or international clubs produced a larger proportion of participants who discussed discrimination in their clubs than in St. Paul and Minneapolis, where the students were not recruited in this manner. Twenty-six of the students said they thought Hmong people face problems as a group, compared to only two who did not think so. Twentyfour answered affirmatively to a question of whether Hmong people share a common fate. In attitudinal surveys in the social sciences, the question of whether respondents believe that members of an ethnic group sharing a

122 Participation in Local Contexts

“common” of “linked” fate has been used to measure a form of racial-ethnic consciousness.35 Members of an ethnic group may believe they share a common fate of misunderstanding or prejudice based on their minority status, for example. In view of the students’ recounting the centrality of oral narratives of Hmong history in their home and their own recognition of problems faced by Hmong Americans, it is not surprising that Hmong American community leaders and educators have advocated the hiring of Hmong American teachers and counselors in the schools. One Hmong American educator also successfully lobbied to include some discussion of the Hmong American experience in the California high school curriculum, and it has become standard in the St. Paul schools. Where Hmong Americans are a much smaller minority in Hickory and Morganton, some participants reported attending international clubs that include a Hmong cultural focus. In these schools with few enrolled Hmong Americans, several students indicated their interest in Hmong culture and issues facing the Hmong in the area. In St. Paul, Hmong Americans account for about 90 percent of Asian American students in the district. To equip the schools to meet the needs of Hmong American children, community efforts have focused on electing Hmong Americans to the school board and calling on school leaders to create culturally relevant curricula and establish teaching proficiency.36 In St. Paul the school board has included Hmong American representatives for longer than in any other city. When Choua Lee won a school board seat in 1991, she was not only the first Hmong American but also the first former refugee of Southeast Asian origin to be elected to any public office in the United States. In her twenties, Lee brought energy to the work of preparing the school system and teachers to adapt classroom materials for Hmong American students, most of whom were English-language learners. It is not possible to directly compare educational outcomes between Fresno and St. Paul because the relevant data were not similarly collected across the two cities. There is some available data disaggregated by ethnic populations in the St. Paul schools suggesting that educational administrators have placed some priority on evaluating educational outcome for specific ethnic groups. For example, the research department for the St. Paul schools reported that in 2003 and 2005, Hmong American students in seventh through tenth grades performed at or near the citywide average on Minnesota standard-

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123

ized reading tests. This represented an increase in the proficiency of students in the former grade levels but not to the St. Paul average in grades 3 and 5. In mathematics, Hmong American students were performing near or above standardized grade levels in all grades.37 For promotion of citizen education and engagement in the adult sector of the Hmong American communities, especially those adults with limited English proficiency and formal education, several enabling features are present in some community-based organizations. At a minimum, English-­language programs are needed in public adult education and community-based organizations. But beyond this, programs involving Hmong Americans in preserving and developing their ethnic culture and history, including experiences of discrimination and active rights claiming, lend a sense of self-reliance and empowerment. In the 1990s the Hmong American community in St. Paul emerged as the center of this form of Hmong American ethnic cultural life and political advocacy. The cultural environment of St. Paul is distinctive because of the complementary roles of an array of Hmong American nonprofit and community-based organizations. These include agencies providing adult community services, such as job training, English and citizenship classes, and farmers’ assistance and legal aid; organizations promoting Hmong American arts; the first Hmong studies programs in higher education; and the presence of two Hmong American newspapers and radio stations. In addition, some groups offer specialized leadership training with financial support for young Hmong American women. These latter programs address inequalities and role expectations related to gender. In Fresno, community programs providing these services and training are also present but not as numerous. The most important example is the Fresno Center for New Americans, which provides services and educational programs for Southeast Asian Americans, including the Hmong, Laotian, Vietnamese, and Cambodians. In recognition of the importance of training new community leaders, the center has developed a leadership program for people of Southeast Asian descent to become “civic participants” and “proactively engage in policy-impacting activities” in conjunction with community-based organizations and consulting firms that can benefit from these new leaders. In addition, Fresno and neighboring cities have been the site for Hmong American oral history projects, museum programs, and health-care services attuned to the spiritual beliefs of Hmong Americans about health.

124 Participation in Local Contexts

Some community groups facilitate inclusive racial-ethnic alliances to attain parity of participation in both economic and cultural realms of social life. By recognizing ethnic cultures but not reifying differences between them, these institutions are beneficial when they promote a sense of socially inclusive values and an understanding of how to achieve cooperation across racial-ethnic boundaries. Take Action Minnesota and the Jane Addams School of Democracy are two organizations working in this manner with Hmong American activists in St. Paul. In Fresno there is no comparable organization, but the Fresno Center for New Americans works intensively with Southeast Asian Americans and has cooperative partnerships with other racial-ethnic groups and organizations. A rough indicator of a local civic culture conducive to citizen education and engagement is the presence of community organizations carrying out this type of work in a city. The National Center for Charitable Statistics of the Urban Institute collects and reports information from federal tax reports of nonprofits classified by the nature of their work or services. Table 3.4 shows a comparison by county of the number of registered nonprofits in 2010 classified by three categories: (1) community improvement and capacity building; (2) civil rights, social action, and advocacy; and (3) arts, culture, and humanities. The comparison includes three cities (Fresno, St. Paul, and Eau Claire) and one metropolitan area (Hickory-LenoirMorganton). In the first category, Fresno and St. Paul have the same numT a b l e 3 . 4   Registered nonprofits by county, 2010 Number of registered organizations

Total revenue report on Form 990 ($)

Assets reported on Form 990 ($)

community improvement and capacity building Catawba, NC 57 29 Eau Claire, WI 47 23 Fresno, CA 308 150 Ramsey, MN 308 191

4,773,428 6,260,987 33,917,839 191,701,516

8,597,703 36,434,304 55,812,703 168,473,202

civil rights, social action, and advocacy Catawba, NC 5 Eau Claire, WI 4 Fresno, CA 20 Ramsey, MN 100

0 2 9 18

0 4,718,573 2,388,723 7,205,656

0 2,737,680 1,463,284 5,245,432

22 13 90 198

8,655,526 3,108,103 19,636,596 292,920,180

24,922,726 7,774,345 74,349,911 901,416,781

arts, culture, and humanities Catawba, NC 45 Eau Claire, WI 43 Fresno, CA 210 Ramsey, MN 376

Number of organizations filing Form 990

Source: IRS Business Master File, data compiled by National Center for Charitable Statistics, Urban Institute, http://nccsweb.urban.org/tablewiz/bmf.php.

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125

ber of nonprofits (308), but St. Paul has five times as many nonprofits as Fresno (100 versus 20) in the second category. St. Paul has many more nonprofits in the arts, culture, and humanities (376) than there are in Fresno (210). Comparing the number organizations across the four cities, it is important to take into account the much smaller populations of HickoryLenoir-Morganton and Eau Claire. As illustrated earlier, Fresno and St. Paul have both offered programs in the public schools that afford culturally attuned services and address problems of devaluing the Hmong American experience in the curriculum. In both cities community-based organizations provide job training, as well as civic and leadership training. Therefore, before turning to compare the extent and nature of these institutions in Fresno and St. Paul, a description of their contrasting civic and social environments helps put these problems in context. In Hickory, North Carolina, there are less favorable conditions for building a participatory culture and sense of collective efficacy among Hmong Americans. The limited employment opportunities for young college-­ educated persons make it hard to build a concentration of young activists. There is less recognition of the Hmong American experience in the schools and fewer community-based organizations engaged in citizenship education. But Hickory is by no means exceptional in this regard. It is similar in many ways to other cities where Hmong Americans have settled in the South and northern United States, where they comprise a very small and largely invisible ethnic population. In Chapter 4, for example, Hmong American leaders voiced similar concerns about the invisibility of Hmong Americans in Detroit and its suburbs. Interviews from Hickory illustrate these themes from the perspective of Hmong American community leaders: When we first came the hosiery and furniture industries were still very strong. Getting a job did not require a high education or English-speaking ability. Most jobs are handwork or manual. . . . They could buy more land and live outside the city limits and can have flexibility—have maybe half an acre, from one half to up to two hundred acres, and then you can raise cows, chickens, for our enjoyment. That’s part of the culture we keep and activity we enjoy doing. . . . Unfortunately, by 2000 to 2003, job opportunities slowed down and people started moving out. . . .We lost four to five thousand people, moving back to California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

126 Participation in Local Contexts . . . Technology-wise we lose highly educated people because there aren’t enough opportunities when they graduate.38

The Hmong association in Hickory has placed a priority on making the Hmong Americans known and understood in the broader community, where their small numbers and racial difference have made them largely invisible: In the 1980s the Hmong community was very isolated. People were not anticipating or involved in the community at large. My vision was we can’t live isolated . . . we are part of the community and city . . . we have to work with elected officials, with organizations, local and statewide service providers. . . . The community now understands where we came from; they know the name “Hmong.” They knew before about Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans and said to us, “Are you Chinese, Japanese, or Korean?” We said no, we are Hmong, and they asked—what is Hmong? Who are the Hmong? Now people know more and ask, “Are you Hmong?” We participate in the Hickory Community Relations Council, a Hmong representative sits on it, and [the] Western Piedmont Council of Government.39

However, even with greater name recognition of the Hmong as a minority group, the ethnic association has focused on two serious social problems: lack of economic opportunity in the area and racial discrimination. A form of “brain drain” depletes the population of educated young people, and it is hard to recruit Hmong Americans to move to Hickory from other parts of the country, particularly when these social problems are generally known. With small numbers it is also hard for viable candidates for public office to emerge: We have several graduates in pharmacy and medicine and some lawyers, and quite a few of them move out of the state. We work hard to see if we can make progress here to bring them back here. We try to recruit in Minnesota, to encourage people to move here, but we have not convinced enough yet. . . . We don’t have anybody to run for office yet, but very soon someone will come up and run, but at this point we are still engaging in interaction, education with the community.40

In summary, the cities of St. Paul, Minnesota, and Fresno, California, are home to politically active ethnic communities. Eau Claire, Wisconsin, also has a Hmong American community with influence in local politics

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­ espite its small size. The ethnic community in Hickory-Lenoir-Morgand ton, North Carolina, is relatively undeveloped politically but has still organized to serve the needs of residents in social services and in an innovative farming program. Some of the features limiting activism in particular cities are evident. One is the effects of brain drain, which tends to deplete the size and stability of circles of young people who, in larger numbers, can help create a vibrant cultural and political life in the community, exploring and expressing new forms of cultural and political thinking. From this social life a continuing stream of new candidates can develop. However, St. Paul and Fresno are similar in the still limited but important recognition that Hmong Americans have made in teaching their ethnic history and culture in the public schools, as well as in recruiting Hmong American teachers and counselors. These steps help break barriers to social inclusion in the community at large and prepare young Hmong Americans to become engaged as citizens. In politics, sustained rights claim making is influenced by the general environment of civic engagement promoted not only by traditional Hmong American organizations and service groups but also by their partnerships with organizations and leaders in other immigrant or minority communities that are working to attain participatory parity for minorities in cities at large. In the next section the experience of Hmong Americans in the Central Valley of California, including Fresno and Merced, shows that Hmong American candidates can win office when they can gain the support of others with common interests, even with smaller communities of intergenerational Hmong American activists. The latter two California cities are not likely to produce as many candidates and officeholders, or to provide as strong a center for multifaceted community activism and the arts as St. Paul, but alliances between Hmong Americans and Latinos in California can significantly influence progress in the struggle for parity.

Political Activism and Local Institutions St. Paul features a sizable and growing pool of young people with better opportunities for employment than in the other three cities studied here. In comparing Fresno and St. Paul, the levels of poverty seem not to be the principal differentiating factor for the number of successful candidates and

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officeholders. The nonprofit community-based organizations work to alleviate poverty, improve services, and give voice in public life to newcomers. But unlike in Fresno, in St. Paul there is a concentrated urban population of Hmong Americans. The proximity of resources and talent tends to speed community development and capacity building. That is, talent for community organizing and issue advocacy can more easily be leveraged through ethnic networks and an older generation of community leaders, as well as newer established professionals and college graduates. The large number of young people in the school system creates a growing pool of voters and potential activists. Politics in St. Paul occurs on multiple levels, with opportunities for building connections to political party organizations and office seeking in community school boards, the city council, and the state legislature. Eau Claire is only forty miles from St. Paul, and Hmong American residents of Eau Claire are not walled off from intercity communication and social connections across state lines. However, Eau Claire has a more dispersed Hmong American community and fewer jobs for young college-­ educated people. A smaller pool of Hmong American activists is found in Eau Claire and its nearby cities. Yet historically, community leaders in both cities understood the importance of developing a presence and connection in local government, starting with school boards. In Eau Claire, Hmong Americans achieved an early breakthrough because the groundwork had been laid for community self-organization and advocacy. There also was less competition from the incumbent. But it is not so much competition from other minority candidates who stood in the way of early Hmong American candidates seeking a city council seat in St. Paul. Rather, established white incumbents with ties to unions were difficult to unseat. St. Paul, however, was the site of the first successful Hmong American candidates running for seats on the school board and in the state legislature. These candidates for the state legislature took advantage of openings in the political environment. Mee Moua first ran in a special election, and Cy Thao won in a largely Hmong district by mobilizing new voters through the caucus system. From these early successes, voter enthusiasm and experience grew along with networks of political activists. In subsequent elections there has been a flourishing of youthful political activism, which made itself felt in a multilayered political system of both local and state offices. The racial-ethnic geography of electoral districts also shapes candidates’ campaign strategies. Two racial-ethnic density maps on the author’s website

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show the relative concentration of Hmong and other racial-ethnic populations in two electoral districts where Hmong American candidates have succeeded in winning elections.41 One of those maps, “Population Density of Hmong in Selected Electoral Districts, Twin Cities, MN,” shows the districts represented by Moua and Thao in St. Paul according to the boundary lines drawn as a result of the 2000 census. Another map, “Population Density of Hmong in Selected Electoral Districts, Fresno, CA,” shows city council districts, including District 1, which is represented by Blong Xiong, who was a member of Fresno’s city council. The district boundary lines were drawn before Xiong served his first four-year term, which began in 2008. The online maps also show that Minnesota Senate District 67 and Legislative District 65A—won by Mee Moua and Cy Thao, respectively—have a much higher concentration of Hmong Americans than does Fresno’s City Council District 1. Both Mee Moua and Blong Xiong relied on winning over voters not only of Hmong American descent. Compared to the proportion of Hmong Americans, Mee Moua’s district included a large proportion of white constituents, and Blong Xiong’s district had a large proportion of Latinos. Hmong Americans reside in concentrated numbers in ethnic enclaves in some large cities, but others live in more dispersed patterns throughout a metro area and alongside residents of other races or ethnicities. In the metropolitan area encompassing St. Paul, there is a relatively large concentration of Hmong Americans living in Minnesota’s Senate District 67. As Hein has noted, about one-quarter of all Hmong Americans in the Twin Cities area lived in this district in 2010. Hein counted instances of collective action by Hmong Americans in the metropolitan area, finding that about one-fifth took place in this district.42 Nearness of residence potentially aids the process of face-to-face communication of neighbors and may shape a shared identity of local place, although countervailing factors may prevent such an identity from forming. For example, living with neighbors of similar economically disadvantaged circumstances can give rise to competition or cooperation, depending not only on the economic circumstances but also on traditions and institutionalized social interaction across ­racial-ethnic boundaries. When Hmong Americans reside in neighborhoods close to other racialethnic groups, there can be competition over resources or, in contrast, cooperation may evolve. The stance of leaders in such ethnic enclaves toward

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cross-ethnic or cross-racial cooperation is important. At the same time, certain social institutions provide channels for cooperation. If institutions provide opportunities both for recognition of specific ethnic culture and cooperation across racial-ethnic lines for common purposes, then this allows for progressive inclusion on both dimensions of parity, as specified by Fraser.43 Thus, an institutional environment that recognizes minority cultures of not a single ethnicity, but of all racial-ethnic groups, potentially widens the field of allies for each minority. This increases the capacity of Hmong American community activists to attain inclusion not only within but also across ethnic boundaries. In one respect, the elder refugee members of the community are able to retain and build an ancestry-based identity, or a sense of belonging to an ethnic diaspora. In another way, young people are aided by a sharper sense of belonging to a multiracial and multiethnic society and education, which will enable them to communicate and reach common understanding with people of different nationalities or ethnic origins. In St. Paul, Hmong Americans have enhanced the breadth and cultural diversity of members of Democratic-oriented political coalitions. One of the more influential of these coalitions is Take Action Minnesota, a statewide organization working for “social, racial, and economic justice.”44 Take Action has an established Hmong American program to train community activists. In 2013, it included twenty-six organizations and about eleven thousand individual members. The member organizations include twelve labor unions, a group promoting prochoice women leaders in various political parties, two organizations working to develop leaders in the Somali American communities, and organizations for the homeless and for residents of low-income neighborhoods. The members pay nominal dues and then can participate in meetings about candidates whom Take Action will endorse. A more racially diverse and much larger state, California has no comparable single organization of labor unions and community groups that endorses candidates and focuses on voter mobilization. Take Action played an important role in mobilizing Hmong Americans and voters of other racial-ethnic backgrounds in the first campaigns for Moua and others, but as multiple candidates later ran to succeed Moua when she would not run for a third term, the organization’s endorsement was less influential because Hmong American voters did not unify around the endorsed candidates. As interviews indicate, though, the initial excitement of having the first Hmong American candidate or officeholder has subsided, and inter-

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nal competition among Hmong American candidates has complicated the landscape of ethnic politics. Moua remarked: I don’t know that people have necessarily moved to the East Side of St. Paul or to Minnesota, but I do think that the political activities here has generated, has transformed Minnesota into a very friendly hotspot for young people, young Hmong Americans in the US. And you couple that with the arts and culture movement here, you couple that with the other activities that are very supported here, like the GLBTQ movement, you couple that with the housing condition and the working conditions here, . . . all of those things you add them together and it creates a quality of life factor that has made Minnesota very attractive to Hmong Americans all across the country.45

A much larger state with more numerous and diverse racial-ethnic minority populations, California has no single organization bringing together labor unions and community groups to endorse candidates. In November 2006, Blong Xiong won his bid to represent Fresno City Council District 1 by a margin of more than eight hundred votes in a district with few Hmong Americans. In contrast to St. Paul, about 40 percent of Fresno’s population is Latino. Xiong emphasized his commitment to make the voice of immigrants heard, a goal for which he had worked as a former deputy director of the community-based Fresno Center for New Americans. The election took place in the months immediately following protest marches against proposed federal legislation that would have classified undocumented immigrants and those who assist them as felons while increasing other penalties for their migration to and stay in the United States. Xiong gained the support of local community organizations and unions. One immigrant volunteer from Oaxaca, Mexico, reflected the campaign message: “We told people he was an immigrant, like us, and that he understood our situation,” says Oralia Maceda, a native of Oaxaca, Mexico, who participated in a local Latino voter drive. “Xiong is a member of an ethnic minority and now is the time to unite and support him.”46

Xiong also spoke of the need to bridge differences between generations and clan affiliations: It’s about community. It’s not about young, old, or clan. General Vang Pao is the only recognized leader we have; there will not be another one to

132 Participation in Local Contexts follow him—there are different leaders with different skills sets. We have to grow, the elders have to grow too[;] it is harder for them. For people who are thirty or forty, with a set of skills, it is important to acknowledge the difficulty of the elders. As for the high school kids, they helped on my campaign. It’s important to bring more young people in because in four years or eight years if we can’t build capacity, it won’t be a success. We had a leadership conference, a pilot project. We invited persons—only those active in communities—and we talked to those interested in running for office. We gave a reality check to them—it’s a long process. Most were college age or a little older. There were 220 participants, and campaign managers and consultants. Next year there will be a full-blown academy. Part of it is getting them to understand [that] what’s involved is beyond their level of comfort—beyond what is familiar in the Hmong community or clans. It involves sacrifices, networking, finding opportunities, learning how to engage in Asian American and mainstream communities.47

Because Fresno does not offer as varied employment opportunities for young people as the nearby San Francisco Bay Area or other urban centers with relatively larger Hmong American communities, most notably St. Paul, networks of young Hmong American activists are smaller there. One of the biggest challenges in Fresno is to train successive generations of young Hmong American to become interested in leadership roles in various fields, including political activism and careers. In California training programs for Asian American and other minority youth are accessible and increasingly popular, but these are not always tailored to the cultural understandings of Hmong Americans. While Fresno does not have the same level of Hmong American youth activism as St. Paul, it is not necessarily a hindrance to Xiong’s political career—he has never relied heavily on the Hmong American vote to win office. Winning support among Latinos is very important for him. In 2012, Xiong ran to represent California’s newly formed Twenty-First Congressional District, which encompasses nearly all of the city of Fresno. Xiong won the endorsement of Congressman Jim Costa, a Democrat who represents the Twentieth Congressional District, but in an open primary he took third place, with 20.9 percent of the vote. The Republican Party placed a priority on picking up the Twenty-First District. It was won by state assemblyman David Valadao, who came in first place with 57 percent; the Democrat John

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Hernandez, executive director of the Central California Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, placed second, with 22.1 percent of the vote. Xiong has also carved out a message of identification as an immigrant with a family background and policy agenda shared between Hmong Americans and Latinos. It has been important for candidates to gain the endorsement of local parties in partisan races, but drawing teams of volunteers for voter education and mobilization depends on the candidate’s ties to organizations, including community-based organizations engaged in ongoing citizen and voter education and labor unions of low-wage workers. Blong Xiong was successful in his 2006 bid to represent a largely Latino and white downtown district on the Fresno City Council. Since 2007, he continued to serve on the city council and ran to represent a newly formed congressional seat, which he lost to a Republican contender in 2012. Among the leaders interviewed for this study, Xiong is the only one to continually serve at the city level, then seek higher elected office when term limits precluded another run. In 2013 he launched a campaign for the Fresno Board of Supervisors. The experience community members gained in running electoral campaigns enabled a culture of electoral activism to take root in Fresno, St. Paul, and Eau Claire. The knowledge was shared within and between cities. Mee Moua described the process of developing and sharing political organizing skills among young political activists: The campaign nurtured a generation of campaign organizers who then learned the trade secrets. . . . In fact, we have not been shy about sharing the tricks of the trade or the tools that we used and other individuals have been able to use that and replicate it. . . . The office and the achievement have become a symbol so that parents point that out to children to look at and say, “Yep, that’s doable.”

Cy Thao first ran as an independent in his first attempt to win office, which was not successful. In his subsequent attempt, the local ­Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party was not very receptive to his candidacy, and he had to build his own base of support within the party. He was the first Hmong American candidate to take advantage of the party caucus nominating system in Minnesota. In some states where this party nominating system is used, it can be beneficial to new candidates because it

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enables them to mobilize their own supporters to vote at a caucus, which elects delegates at the precinct levels to the nominating convention at higher levels—the districts, in Cy Thao’s case. Having an effective voter mobilization operation in the field—which brings together neighbors, friends, family members, and others—makes the difference and has enabled seemingly “maverick” candidates to bypass the preferences of party regulars. Thao won the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party endorsement of his candidacy through effectively working this caucus system. At the same time, he did not dismiss how some luck played into his victory: I needed one hundred delegates to go to the convention—so when I knew I had more than one hundred Hmong voters who could be delegates in my district—I talked to five hundred people, all committed to becoming delegates. Then two hundred showed up at caucus, that number went down to fifty delegates. After the caucus and subcaucus and the fight for delegate seats, I had fifty delegates committed to me, out of one hundred who showed up in convention. I had already 50 percent, I needed ten more, I went and hustled to get the ten more, not from the Hmong community to support me.48

Winning a seat on the St. Paul City Council is a goal that had eluded Hmong American candidates until 2013, when Dai Thao became the first Hmong American elected to this local body. In Minnesota, Dai Thao was one of a growing number of Hmong Americans running for office for the first time after Mee Moua and Cy Thao’s retirement from the Minnesota state legislature. Why Hmong Americans faced difficulties in winning a seat on St. Paul’s city council is of interest because Hmong Americans had earlier been elected to both houses of the Minnesota state legislature and the St. Paul board of education. Since 1996 there also has been a presence of Hmong Americans on the city council of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The East Side of St. Paul had one of the largest concentrations of Hmong Americans of any neighborhood in the United States. The character of local party politics and its established constituencies made a breakthrough difficult in St. Paul. If a new and unknown candidate could not win the endorsement of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, it was difficult to unseat incumbents who had the support of well-organized interests, including the powerful teachers’ union, as well as other unions representing government workers and the skilled trades. This was the circumstance Pakou Hang faced in 2007, when she challenged incumbent Daniel Bostrom in the elec-

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tion to represent the Sixth Ward on the St. Paul City Council. Bostrom, a former St. Paul police officer, had gone unchallenged in the previous two elections and had the support of powerful unions. Hang had received a bachelor’s degree in political science at Yale and was pursuing a doctorate at the University of Minnesota. She had developed and honed her organizing skills as campaign manager for her cousin Mee Moua and by working for the late Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone. Hang mounted a formidable challenge to Bostrom, articulating a progressive “change” agenda and organizing a volunteer operation that put a hundred workers in the field for weeks in a row and mobilized two hundred volunteers on election night. She brought enough delegates to the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party convention to block the party’s endorsement of Bostrom on close votes. In the first convention vote, Hang and Bostrom received 108 and 122 votes, respectively. On the second and last vote, only five votes divided the two candidates, and as a result, the party endorsed neither Hang nor Bostrom. Most of Hang’s delegates were elder Hmong Americans, which I observed while attending the party caucuses at the precinct and ward levels. Hang’s volunteers were mainly young people in their twenties and thirties, who spoke at meetings of their commitment to the campaign because of its message of progressive change and inclusion. Hang lost the election by only 365 votes, declaring to her supporters: “We weren’t just trying to win an election . . . we were trying to start a movement, and that is something that I can be proud of.” Reflecting on her campaign strategy several months after the election, Hang suggested that she may have underestimated the conservatism of white voters in the district when faced with a choice between herself and an incumbent whose racial-ethnic background was like their own and who also had the support of powerful labor unions, including the labor council and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees ­(AFSCME). For their part, Hmong American voters were not as energized as in previous elections because intense excitement about having a Hmong American representative in St. Paul for the first time had subsided by the third or fourth time a Hmong American candidate asked for their votes. This was confirmed by Cy Thao’s conversations with Hmong American voters a few years later, in 2010, and he remarked that there was a growing sophistication among Hmong American voters when presented with a choice between candidates. They ask more questions about what any candidate will do for them.49

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Both Mee Moua and Blong Xiong initially ran in special elections, which helped them because they did not face an incumbent, as did Pakou Hang. A partisan election can help the Hmong candidate if he or she wins the party endorsement. Minnesota’s caucus system can help unknown newcomers. Cy Thao mobilized supporters from the Hmong American community to attend the precinct and district caucuses of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Hang was able to block that party’s endorsement of the incumbent Dan Bostrom by mobilizing Hmong American supporters to her caucus in the Sixth Ward. Despite an energetic and effective outreach effort to bring Hmong American voters to party caucuses, Hang was not able to override the strength of her opponent’s voter base, particularly among labor unions in the city. Eau Claire, Wisconsin

In Eau Claire, Wisconsin, four Hmong Americans have held a seat on the local city council since 1996. The first was Joey Bee Xiong, who won an at-large seat and served from 1996 to 2000. Xiong coached Neng Lee, a caseworker at the Hmong mutual assistance association, to succeed Xiong. Neng Lee won the second seat out of eight candidates and served from 2000 to 2002. Subsequently, Saidang Xiong held a seat from 2002 to 2004, and from 2004 to 2013, Thomas Vue, former president of the Eau Claire Hmong Mutual Assistance Association, held a seat on the council.50 Lai has documented the role of fund raising not only in Eau Claire but also throughout Wisconsin as a means for candidates to win support from Hmong voters.51 Despite low turnout by Hmong Americans, particularly before increases during the 2012 election, donations are a persistent source of candidate support. Lai identifies a few sources of the Hmong American candidates’ success. The Hmong Americans rely on government services and so recognize the importance of having a voice in governance. In addition, the Hmong Americans are the second-largest racial group in a city that is predominantly white. As a result, Hmong American candidates have not had to contend with competitors who seek to represent other racial minority groups. In entering politics Hmong American leaders have consequently focused on cooperating with white political leaders and building support among white voters as well as Hmong American voters. Furthermore, electoral rules allowing election of at-large representatives to the city

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council allows Hmong American and other voters to cast their ballots in favor of a candidate without forming an influence constituency within a district; as noted earlier, Hmong Americans do not live in concentrated numbers in neighborhoods in Eau Claire County or in Wisconsin more broadly, where they otherwise might form an influential bloc of voters in an electoral district.52 With the ethnic population spread out across the state, leaders in cities with larger concentrations of Hmong Americans follow political developments across the state. Our research team asked one leader of a Hmong association in Eau Claire about the fact that the Hmong continually retained a seat on the Eau Claire city council. He replied: The Hmong community is dispersed here. The majority still do manufacturing work. A lot do farming, sell in a small farmers’ market. . . . They also sell to other farmers’ markets. A city council seat has been held for at least a decade. The Hmong community is aware enough that having some political presence is important so they are by and large supportive. Our history helps a lot . . . having at least a council member for over a decade. . . . Eau Claire is a small city and the Hmong community is small and Hmong people know each other.

The reliance on government services is certainly a strong factor motivating political participation, but this is a common feature of Hmong American residents across all cities. Hmong Americans constitute a larger racialethnic minority in some California cities other than Fresno. In Sacramento, for example, the Hmong American population numbers about sixteen thousand. Many require social services because of disparities in educational attainment and poverty, but no Hmong American has won election to the city council. The small size of Hmong American populations in California cities compared to other Asian Americans and other racial-ethnic groups, as Lai argues, is a more influential factor in differentiating the emergence of candidates and their success in some cities but not others. They would not be able to succeed, however, without the groundwork laid by community organizations in making the needs of Hmong Americans heard in the public sphere and as advocates in government circles. In fact, Lai has documented the important role of the Eau Claire Hmong Mutual Assistance Association in voicing Hmong concerns to government by reaching out to officials and sponsoring community forums and social events.

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Interviews in Eau Claire shed further light on the role of the local Hmong mutual assistance association in preparing the way for the pathbreaking candidacy of Joey Bee Xiong. The association appreciated the importance of documenting the problems Hmong Americans faced and framing claims for fair treatment by local government and an opportunity to participate in the economic sphere as well as to remedy problems of misrecognition. They demonstrated political skill in documenting parity claims and disseminating information to the community, as evident in the account of Yong Kai Moua, who was a principal leader in the community in its formative years.53 Moua had arrived with his family in Eau Claire in 1976, one of the first four families to settle there. Born in Laos, where he had attended college, Moua cited three problems facing the community in the early 1980s: “problems in the public housing, discrimination and communication, and no jobs”: Some of the elderly who completed adult education did not receive jobs. At the same time, there were lots of Hmong moving in, a migration moving to Eau Claire from other places such as California. Many of these people moved into old houses that have many cockroaches. Many landlords did not want to rent out their homes to the Hmong because they thought that the Hmong were bringing with them the cockroaches. That was the first problem. The second problem during that time was discrimination. Because we have dark skin, they thought we looked like Vietnamese and discriminated against us because they heard that Vietnamese people eat dogs. When problem of accusations like this occurred, many Hmong decided that they cannot live this way and moved to California, North Carolina, and other places.54

Over the following few years, association leaders devised a strategy to bring attention to the problems facing the community and gain a voice at the policy-making table. The board of the association invited members of school boards, university officials, and city and county government officials to help the community solve these problems. Forming a partnership, the community leaders decided to conduct a community survey, asking whether residents received any support from the city on education, work, or housing. The board tapped a variety of resources, obtaining research assistance from a university and funding from the United Way. Once completed, the survey findings showed, in Moua’s summation, that Hmong “didn’t have housing, we didn’t have jobs, and we weren’t receiving education from the county.”55 The association board brought the results to the city government and worked with government officials to request pooled

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funding from local businesses, government funds, and a community development grant to enable a local technical college to provide job training. In no small part, animosity toward the Hmong and cultural misportrayals during the early settlement experience prompted Hmong American leaders to such organized collective responses. In one incident in 1991, for example, an Eau Claire city manager reported that he received an anonymous postcard that read: “Please don’t saturate our area with flocks of Orientals and goof up our quality of life. You got us supporting enough gooks as it is.”56 In the late 1980s, in a telephone survey of 458 participants conducted in La Crosse, Wisconsin, about 120 miles from Eau Claire, researchers found an even division of opinion about growth of the Southeast Asian refugee community, which was predominantly Hmong. About 43 percent of respondents opposed growth of this refugee community and about 42 percent were not opposed; only 15 percent were indifferent. The researchers’ findings suggested that ethnocentrism as well as concern about immigrants taking jobs away from longtime residents influenced opposition to the arrival of more Southeast Asians at that time.57 In Eau Claire, the early and strategic response of Hmong American community leaders to racial stereotyping, their advocacy for social services, and their electoral breakthrough have all been recognized in other US cities. For example, in 1997, Hmong National Development Inc. held a conference in Eau Claire that drew about 1,500 Hmong American participants from different US cities. The conference discussed the effects of federal cuts of public assistance to noncitizen legal immigrants, among other subjects. The partnerships between the local Hmong mutual assistance organization and university researchers have today expanded to include faculty and students in the state. The University of Wisconsin is a leader in scholarship and teaching on the Hmong American experience, having begun one of the first Hmong American studies programs at a major US university. The program has brought students and faculty into cooperative activities with Hmong American community activists throughout the state.

Conclusion Community-based organizations have played a critical role in giving a voice to Hmong American concerns and in providing training in civic skills as well as job training. Their educational programs also include voter

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r­egistration assistance for new voters. The greater extent of elected office holding in St. Paul is influenced by larger networks of young people drawn to job opportunities and the rich, ethnic cultural and political life of this relatively large urban and metropolitan center. The opportunities for office holding at the local and state levels in the Minnesota state capital also draw political and community organizers to the city. The political leaders who have emerged as elected officeholders in Fresno, St. Paul, and Eau Claire championed policy agendas that illustrate the concept of two-dimensional participatory parity; that is, the policies address not only issues of recognition but also reforms that would help enlist government’s role to assist all people facing economic disadvantage to become self-reliant. They tell a story of Hmong American aspirations but also of immigrants and low-income people of diverse racial-ethnic backgrounds struggling to move out of the social margins that are created by the barriers of economic disparity and social subordination. As a result, Hmong American leaders have called for cross-racial alliances. Blong Xiong of Fresno, for example, has shown the importance of alliances with Latino voters. Moua, Thao, and Hang of St. Paul placed a message about the commonality of interests between low-income Hmong Americans and minority residents of other racial-ethnic backgrounds, including African Americans, Latinos, and whites. As more Hmong Americans move out of cities such as St. Paul to nearby suburbs, one challenge facing leaders will be to retain and continue building the core ethnic organizations that have grounded political activism in the city. Even as some Hmong Americans accumulate the economic resources and education that open up opportunities, poverty persists at a high rate in cities and surrounding areas. There will be an ongoing need to couple antipoverty and antidiscrimination social reform. There are many US cities with small Hmong American populations that are dispersed geographically. In a few like Eau Claire, candidates have emerged or run successfully, but in most they have not. Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and Hickory, North Carolina, share some characteristics—for example, few jobs to keep college graduates from moving away. In both Hickory and Eau Claire, Hmong American leaders have tried to gain recognition and assistance of local officials. But the nonprofit sector in Hickory is smaller than in Eau Claire. Hmong Americans in Hickory have not actively engaged in self-organized collective action to combat racial prejudice and make public claims for equality as in Eau Claire.

Four

Views on Politics From Leadership and the Grassroots

The diversity of viewpoints of Hmong Americans on political and civic life reflect their varied experiences, including the trajectory of family and individual life in Laos and in the United States, generational and gendered perspectives, and personal proclivities. This chapter uses field interviews of Hmong Americans from many walks of life to examine the commonality and differences in views. A team of bilingual research assistants conducted most of the interviews in these US cities: Fresno, California; St. Paul, Minnesota; Hickory and Morganton, North Carolina; Eau Claire and Sheboygan, Wisconsin; and Detroit, Michigan. The interviews are described in two parts. The first part consists of excerpts and commentary on interviews of political leaders. These include elected officeholders and former candidates in St. Paul and Fresno, as well as community leaders in two Wisconsin cities, Detroit, and Hickory. The second part describes interviews of individuals who did not hold leadership positions in the community and were recruited from grassroots settings.1 The pool of interview participants was constructed using convenience sampling. The recruitment targeted individuals holding leadership positions as well as ordinary residents from grassroots settings in ethnic communities. In this manner, it was possible to solicit, record, and consider their different vantage points. For the grassroots interviews, the research used convenience sampling, designed to recruit interviewees who would represent varied experiences with respect to associational ties, employment status, occupation, education, age, gender, family relationships, and place of residence. Their 141

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time of entry into the United States varied, ranging from the mid-1960s to 2009. Among the community and political leaders were representatives of organizations with diverse ideological and political ­leanings. The interviews used several open-ended questions that have become standard in political science studies of immigrant populations, including inquiries about notions of what politics is, perceptions of discrimination, reasons for voting or not, and many other topics. Several new questions were written to shed light on notions likely to be distinctive among Hmong American adult refugees. Participants were asked to explain in their own words, for example, what they thought were the qualities of a “good” leader and whether they had aspirations for their children to enter political careers. From consultation of the historical literature and advice received from Hmong scholars, it appeared in advance of this survey that many Hmong refugees’ current concepts of politics and leadership are still strongly influenced by ancient Confucian teachings passed down orally over many generations.2 The interviews explored cultural-political disjunctures in everyday notions about politics and systems of governance. On one side are persistent notions about politics formed from past immersion of the Hmong in a subsistence agrarian life in Laos and their struggles for survival during wartime. On the other side, the underlying values and practices of participation in the modern-day US system of representative democracy have been adopted to one degree or another. The differences between the two politicalcultural perspectives present difficulties to refugees trying to adapt to life in a new society. In some cases it was evident that refugees misunderstood the US system of governance, as when one participant suggested that a president in the United States was like a “king” in the old country. Some research participants holding leadership positions in the community pointed out that in important respects, certain traditional Hmong values, such as ancestor veneration, do not necessarily stand in conflict with democratic participation. In fact, if the separation in thinking is bridged and effective educational approaches developed, an “amalgam” of cultural perspectives can have positive effects on participation. Practices honoring ancestors, for example, can still help ground Hmong Americans in an appreciation of the collective historical struggles of families and a people to whom they feel a deep affinity and desire to serve. One apparent cultural disconnection concerned notions of an ideal Hmong ethnic leader. The traditional notion is that the Hmong ethnic

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leader is wholly dedicated to the Hmong as a people. It is a notion formed in the context of a history of persecution of the Hmong by ethnic majorities in Asia and the hardships of surviving in the face of poverty and violent intrusions on Hmong homes and villages during interethnic and civil wars. Mee Moua, the Hmong American Minnesota legislator holding the highest office among Hmong Americans at the time of our study, spoke about her sense of duty to help Hmong Americans in her district and in the United States at large, but her responsibility was to represent all constituents in her multiethnic, multiracial district. She spoke of her work to improve access to services for all constituents, working to end discrimination and to address problems that the poor face disproportionately. In this sense, Moua’s policy concerns encompassed both dimensions of parity—recognition and redistribution. In other words, the policies addressed discrimination and misunderstandings rooted in cultural and racial differences, as well as systematic economic inequities. One challenge Moua faced was to educate those Hmong Americans in and outside her district about her office and the US political system—helping them understand that expectations for her to fit the mold of the traditional “Hmong leader” were unrealistic. Considering the way that parity in the realm of recognition and economic redistribution overlap, there is certainly political potential in the cultural disjuncture if it can be effectively bridged in the future. The divide can be lessened with greater education of Hmong American voters and an active role of younger US-educated Hmong Americans to bridge generational divides in the understanding of politics, as Pakou Hang pointed out in her interview.3 As the interviews show, a crucial part of the notion of the ideal Hmong leader is the leader’s affection for the poor and desire to serve them. In the words of many of our research participants recruited from grassroots settings, the best leader “loves the people” and “loves the poor.” The ethical position that values a leader’s dedication to the poor is at odds with dominant currents in American politics, where moneyed interests prevail, but it naturally reflects the sentiment of low-income working people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. When culturally and economically marginalized people are able to voice this sentiment about leadership in the mainstream political arena, it enriches the public debate about politics and policy. A related carryover of traditional thinking concerns the respect afforded to politics as a career option for young people. Many adult respondents said they would like their children to run for political office. There is

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e­ vidence that notions of high honor afforded to government officials in ancient times remain influential among an important sector of US-educated Hmong Americans. The nature of government officialdom has changed, however; in the Hmong experience in Asia, the official was typically an outsider whose role was tax collector and respect for him was reluctant. In contrast, traditionally Confucian societies afforded even more respect to certain government professions than to business occupations or military service. The positive view of politics as a profession potentially bodes well for the continual emergence of young political activists and leaders. However, expectations that contemporary leaders and officeholders will behave as they remembered Hmong ethnic leaders did before the exodus from Laos are unrealistic. The differences between old and newer notions of leadership pose difficult challenges to the younger leaders. The tensions are a potential ground for positive adaptation of Hmong culture and identity to democratic life if ideas of overreliance on a single “leader”—traditionally male—undergo change and the initiative of individuals can be unleashed while an understanding of the positive value of many traditions is fostered. Whether this cross-generational understanding is realized, the interviews suggest, depends on innovative and bidirectional approaches to crossgenerational education. A note on our method: we conducted in-depth, in-person semistructured interviews. The English version of the interview questionnaire used for adults is found in Appendix C. The questions were translated in writing using the Romanized Popular Alphabet (RPA) script for oral administration of the instrument in either of the two major Hmong dialects spoken by Hmong Americans. There was an opportunity for participants to give extended responses to interview questions, communicating in idioms they were comfortable with. The Hmong tradition is oral, and people generally communicate through face-to-face conversation—often extended—in which contextual and cultural cues are important. Phone interviews would not capture the nuances of expression on the complicated matters of interest. Moreover, US-educated leaders’ viewpoints were in the process of change as dreams held by some elders that they could return to Laos faded, and younger Hmong Americans entered adulthood and had pressing concerns about social advancement and full inclusion as US citizens. In-person interviews were most likely to enable interviewees to express their thoughts, including uncertainties and ambiguities, in their own terms.

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In five cities individuals were asked to participate in the interviews because of their position as elected officials, community agency or association heads, or current and former candidates for elected office. In three cities, individuals were recruited in everyday community settings. The research participants in the latter category were recruited in a variety of ways. In Fresno and St. Paul, where there were low- and middle-income apartments or public housing complexes with concentrations of Hmong Americans, the research team conducted door-to-door canvassing from a randomly selected list of household addresses in the housing complexes. In Hickory, where there were no similar large apartment complexes with concentrations of Hmong American residents, the team canvassed homes in neighborhoods with concentrations of Hmong residents. In all three cities individuals were also recruited from community sites where Hmong Americans regularly congregate or meet, such as Hmong flea markets, community associations, and in English or citizenship classes. A third recruiting strategy was to invite professionals at places of business or work by calling persons listed as Hmong professionals in community telephone books. The expressed opinions about social problems in the community and policy issues were diverse between and within both segments of our interview sample, that is, leaders and grassroots community members. With expectations of such diversity, the interview procedures sought a cross section of respondents with different characteristics in terms of immigrant generation, education level, occupation, and degree of exposure to various types of US social institutions and political campaigns. There was a wide range of views on what problems face the Hmong American community, the qualifications of leadership, and the sense of a “shared fate”; moreover, interest and experience in voting and with political campaigns and parties was rich in its diversity.

Viewpoints of Leaders The first set of interviews includes reflections from two state legislators in St. Paul: Minnesota state senator Mee Moua and Minnesota legislative representative Cy Thao. In a third interview, Pakou Hang recounts experience from a 2007 campaign to become the first Hmong American member of the St. Paul City Council. Hang fell short in her challenge to an ­incumbent.

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The St. Paul interviews are followed by two others of elected officials in the Central Valley of California: Blong Xiong as a member of Fresno’s city council, and Noah Lor on the Merced city council. Each of the elected officeholders described how the personal decision to become engaged in public service was formed not only from experiences growing up in the United States but also from a set of values and a sense of efficacy rooted in cultural identity and traditions of the Hmong. For example, grandparents, parents, and other relatives recounted stories of a collective Hmong experience and acts promoting communal welfare in the homeland as children. In America the youngsters saw these elders working hard for the welfare of family and community while confronting prejudice in America. The interviewees also offered views on paths for the continual maturation of political understanding and engagement of members of the community. The electoral circumstances faced by the candidates are not comparable in other important respects. There are significant differences in the political-economic geography of the cities and the political districts represented by Hmong American legislators. These political conditions bear on electoral politics in the wider social and institutional context described in Chapter 3. Of particular importance for understanding the election prospects and constituencies represented by Hmong American legislators is the racial-ethnic mix of districts. The interviews suggest that electoral success in the first instances of Hmong American candidacies depend on several factors. These include (1) the available pool of viable candidates; (2) the alignment of party support for the new candidates; (3) support from nonparty organizations that can mobilize support, such as community-based political organizations and labor unions that engage in voter mobilization; and (4) the potential to aggregate ethnic votes and build alliances in the context of electoral district characteristics. St. Paul, Minnesota

No electoral breakthrough can occur for members of a minority ethnic group without strongly motivated and capable candidates who are able to gain confidence of voters and represent not only Hmong but also nonHmong voters. As described in Chapter 1, in recent years these young adults

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have begun new identity projects to integrate their own experiences with the stories told by grandparents and parents about their native homeland life and to find connections with the Asian American and civil rights activism of people of color in the United States. In the sphere of politics the legacy of a clan-based social structure and village style politics are a core of the adaptive process of constructing a Hmong American political identity and style of popular engagement. Asked about the impact of this legacy, Mee Moua noted that the communal ethic of the clan system is not unfamiliar in American ethnic history; however, the separation of the Hmong community along clan lines can potentially lead to interclan rivalry, since the lines are cleanly drawn: I don’t think it’s any different from political culture in general. I mean, the north end of the East Side of St. Paul has its own political culture where they say, “We take care of our own.” The East Side of St. Paul has a culture where they say, “We take care of our own. If you’re an East Sider we’re with you.” So that sense of “we take care of our own” is not unique to the Hmong American community. I mean, it is a sense of family, a sense of loyalty that manifests itself in any kind of a setting but in the Hmong American community some of that sense of family loyalty is a little more defined, and it’s defined, I think, more along the lines of the family, the clan system, because we’ve always presumed it goes back to the metaphysical, the cosmological, you know, you can’t marry another person with the same last name. . . . Like I said, again, that was a strength that I drew on, but that could be the challenge [and] if not managed correctly that could become the challenge and the barrier to our success, because in essence . . . it’s so cleanly defined that it’s also a very easy break point.4

There was a hopeful expectation among some elder members that Moua would be a “Hmong leader” in dedicating her energies almost wholly to benefiting the Hmong ethnic community. The notion of a Hmong American leader serving as a broker between Hmong Americans and governing authorities derives, no doubt, partly from concepts of ethnic leadership as they evolved in Laos, as discussed in Chapter 1. Moua took note of some unrealistic expectations and misunderstandings about the nature of her office as a senator representing a multiracial and multiethnic district. No Hmong American legislator has represented a “Hmong district” or even a majority Hmong American district, and successful Hmong American candidates have worked to represent the interests of all their constituents,

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particularly low-income and minority persons. At the same time, they have acted as public spokespersons for Hmong Americans and Asian Americans in the country at large: I think people in the Hmong American population often say, “You’re the Hmong senator,” and people outside of the Hmong American population often say, “You’re the Hmong senator,” and yet each group means something different. When they say you’re the Hmong senator, internally within the Hmong American community, it seems like I’m both a senator who happens to be Hmong American, but I also am the senator that is supposed to be representing all Hmong people. And when people outside of the Hmong community say that you’re the Hmong senator, I tend to think that again there is double meaning there—“Oh, yes, we’re proud that you’re representing your people.” But what’s not being said is that because you’re the Hmong senator, we see that you represent your people, we see that you don’t really represent us, in both a positive and negative way. . . . So I think that’s the reason why I always come back to the fact that, just like Senator Anderson, who’s a Minnesota state senator, I’m a Hmong state senator who just happens to be Hmong American or Asian American. Because that responds to both groups—those within the Hmong American community and those outside of the Hmong American community.5

Moua’s response to those in the Hmong community who were disappointed that she did not do enough to benefit the Hmong is noteworthy in view of the urgency of issues of equitable redistribution of economic resources to communities of low-income residents and people of color. Although not typically framed by ethnic spokespersons as “Hmong issues,” they concern endemic poverty and its consequences. As many of our grassroots interviewees expressed in excerpts from transcripts reproduced later in this chapter, they feel discrimination not only or even mainly because of race but because of their economically impoverished status: But the reality is that if I’m working to lower property taxes on the East Side of St. Paul and if you’re a Hmong American home owner, doesn’t that benefit you? And if I’m working to restore nutrition services for senior citizens of Minnesota and in particular I want to pay special attention to the special dietary needs of the communities of color in Minnesota, doesn’t that benefit the Hmong American community? And if I’m working really hard to protect charter school funding, doesn’t that benefit the Hmong American community? . . . So if you understand the work that I do and

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the issues that I work on then you know that 99.9 percent of the work that I do here actually benefits the Hmong Americans.6

In reflecting on the impact of her election, for Moua what was perhaps most important was the creation of a sense that Hmong Americans can be effective actors in politics, that their vote matters and that engagement makes a difference: Well, I think that we’ve jumped over the hardest hurdle, which is that we’ve inculcated a culture of political efficacy among the Asian American and in particular, the Hmong American community. And when I say Asian American I really mean that because the visibility of the Hmong American success in the political arena, I think, has really tugged at the other Asian American communities here in Minnesota to be curious and to invigorate them to want to participate. And I think it’s brought the Asian, the pan-Asian American community closer, because it’s become kind of our collective success. But the sense of political efficacy among the Hmong American community is something that you can’t make happen, but really it’s a process that has been evolving for the last ten years. I think it’s permanent and it will continue.

In Minnesota’s lower house, Cy Thao represented District 65A, where a significant concentration of Hmong Americans reside, as shown in Chapter 3. The district includes low-income neighborhoods where Hmong refugees first settled. Thao’s decision to run for elected office seemed to flow naturally from his upbringing and experiences as a young man educated in the United States. He noted that his father had set an example of publicminded service as a political leader in Laos: “They divided up the province in two sections and my father had one of them. I never thought about it but as I grew up I was civil minded, I wanted to be part of that process.”7 Thao identified with civil rights protests in other minority communities, and as a result he helped lead the protest against a St. Paul radio station’s racist depictions of Hmong Americans. He and other Hmong American activists drew from a repertoire of social movement tactics. Why did Hmong American activists of his generation like himself become interested in political careers and not enter business or other professional occupations as young adults? Like many other research participants, Thao emphasizes that doors to political participation as citizens had been closed to the Hmong before coming to the United States:

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We never had the chance before. This is the first time it’s open. We said to ourselves, is it true? Don’t take it for granted, work harder, and work smarter. Me and my friends realized that politics really drives policy. You have to be at the table. . . . We had that hunger. . . . Some try to go back to Laos for that hunger, only because that’s something they could understand. . . . They don’t understand the system here so they can’t participate.8

Pakou Hang’s experience running for a seat on the St. Paul City Council and losing to the incumbent illustrates the difficulty of unseating established incumbents in local democratic politics. The initial momentum and strength of her volunteer operation spurred her opponent, who had gone unchallenged in the two preceding elections, to mobilize his base. In her comments to me, Hang suggested that she had underestimated the difficulties of mobilizing white voters on the East Side of St. Paul. Already in a recent school board election the Republican candidate had done well. Hang’s opponent decided to mobilize Republicans. Because the city council election is a nonpartisan race, Hang said she did not play up her Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party affiliation, and in retrospect she thought she should have done more so. Some voters thought she was a Republican. Her opponent had name recognition. Also Hang noted in retrospect that white Democratic Farmer-Labor voters in her district on the East Side were more conservative than she had thought. Despite the loss, Hang’s campaign was emblematic of a style of Hmong American electoral politics that has become more common. One of its aims was to train young political activists who can in turn educate Hmong American elders about political institutions and issues in order for them to become engaged and informed voters from one election to the next, over the long term. Although the Hmong refugees from Laos have a limited store of understanding about the workings of American politics, the younger members of the community can help bridge gaps in this knowledge by helping their parents’ generation. Hang remarked on the need for the younger generation to acquire a grounded self-understanding of their own community’s historical experience in Laos and in America. She also spoke about the importance of her formal education, which is “what allowed me to articulate even in the late 1980s how Hmong people were being pigeonholed or stereotyped.”9 Drawing from these several sources of knowledge, including her grandparents’ and parents’ influence, and from her own

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personal experience and education, Hang elaborated on how she attempted to bring Hmong elders and young people together in her campaign. Her campaign outreach in her district had two components—one focused on Hmong Americans and another addressed the voters who were not Hmong. Speaking about the former, building intergenerational bridges in politics was a central goal: Of course I would help my father and mother fill out the ballot. I would help Hmong elders in the community in the same way. There is one example. There was an older man who told me he got his citizenship in 1982. He said, “I took the forms twenty years ago.” Twenty years later! I said, “Grandpa, you never voted.” This story was so powerful. There are simple solutions the young people can learn to help, and how to do it in a way that don’t embarrass them. I asked myself, how would I feel about my own grandfather, how would they make a decision they could feel good about? I would say, look at the Democrats and the Republicans and their platform, give them an example . . . let them make their own decision. I would give concrete examples of how the economic situation affects a Hmong family.10

Hang also commented on the role of political parties in influencing Hmong Americans’ voting choices. In her estimation, a candidate’s party affiliation is not so important as his or her “associations”—in other words, who the Hmong voter sees as persons supported or closely affiliated with the candidate. In my own observation of a get-out-the-vote effort by Hmong American supporters of Mee Moua in 2006, campaign workers communicated with Hmong elder voters from this same perspective, describing Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidates on the ticket as individuals on Mee Moua’s “team,” rather than referring to them as candidates of the same political party. As Lien pointed out in her study of immigrants from Taiwan, it is common for immigrants who have grown up in other countries to have notions of what a political party is typically shaped by their homeland experience, and parties there can bear little resemblance to US parties.11 Fresno and Merced, California

After the breakthrough elections of the first Hmong American state legislators in Minnesota, there was more excitement about Hmong American

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political success when Fresno saw the election of Blong Xiong in 2007. The political circumstances were different, as Blong Xiong lived in a downtown district with an even smaller proportion of Hmong voters than Minnesota’s Senate District 67 (East Side of St. Paul) or St. Paul’s Legislative District 65A (encompassing Frogtown, where many Hmong Americans live). The author conducted two interviews with Blong Xiong, one in December 2007 and another in July 2010. Many of Blong Xiong’s remarks struck themes that were very familiar from the interviews of Mee Moua and Cy Thao. He was motivated to serve a disenfranchised community that had been denied the opportunity to participate and field political candidates: The Hmong community sees the value of elected leaders a little differently. It is equally important as a doctor or a lawyer. Why? Because of our history, look at the political dynamic—we didn’t have an opportunity in the old country, the old communities . . . I ran because of my own personal experience coming to this office. . . . It is something I value giving back to this community. It is something positive you can contribute. We’re the newest group, we’ve had many successes. Whether doctors, professionals in education or serving in the military forces—having a voice in politics is one way we are making progress. We have the council president and the school board president, Tony Vang, now—as to how far we’ve come it depends on which lens you are looking through. From a Hmong lens in thirty years we have come a long way and it makes me proud. From an American lens we still have a way to go. We need to understand where to go five to ten years from now—to see the bigger picture we need to go beyond our community. We have our own diversity—with the Hmong New Year celebration every year everyone comes. There is the old leadership and the young leadership; we have a dialogue—what works for us—I avoid the label of “leader.” I see the work as mediation.12

Like Mee Moua said in the context of Minnesota politics, Blong Xiong made clear that he is “not a Hmong representative,” suggesting that he faced the problem of meeting unrealistic expectations of some in the Hmong community that he would attend mainly to their concerns as an ethnic group. Xiong further pointed out that no person could designate himself as a Hmong leader in any case, as it is an appellation that fits a different circumstance in Hmong history, and he did not intend to try to fill those shoes:

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I have learned about what it means to take a public service position. I am not a Hmong leader in any way. It happens I am Hmong. My work is community based. We need to get the grassroots involved. When I make or take a policy position I think about it in terms of the community. . . . Being a Hmong leader is not simple. People will say, who gave you that title? Our community doesn’t give that title. It is hard enough to represent our district let alone to be a Hmong representative. . . . I try not to think of it that way. My district is not a Hmong district. . . . I try to get my community involved in the more mainstream community and politically. My community is transitioning. Minnesota is a little ahead of us. Opportunities are wide open—how we understand we are one community, understand our culture and the larger picture—getting things done in education, health care . . . We are like any growing city but we are one of the fastest growing. We are the sixth largest, right behind the other five. We are the number-one producer of agriculture in the world. With the market downturn—foreclosures, budget shortfalls, real estate value going down—this really affects low-income immigrants and refugees. We need downtown development, public schools, health care, and attention to air quality.13

Xiong particularly emphasized the importance of building unity with Asians, Latinos, and African Americans and pointed out his role in responding to concerns of importance, such as farmers’ access to water. Despite the focus of Fresno’s economy on agriculture, it presented few opportunities for Hmong American children: “for young children, who wants to farm with Mom and Dad, work in the fields in 112 degree heat. . . . I don’t even see them cutting grass if there is an alternative in the secondary economy.”14 The second interview of Blong Xiong took place in 2010, soon after a large number of Hmong Americans had convened in Sacramento, California, to demand the exoneration of Major General Vang Pao, who had been accused of plotting the overthrow of the Laotian government—a charge later dropped.15 Xiong commented on how far the Hmong Americans had come in achieving recognition and respect from the community at large: There were eight thousand people. A huge turnout, and it was peaceful. . . . It is very interesting because in the general population there has been a shift and change in perception of the Hmong. We were not able to see it five to ten years ago. Our community worked hard to say we’ve

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contributed and to see the community talking about us in this way is a change. We need partnerships to have an impact. When what happened with the general’s arrest, it was not just the Hmong community that came out. Latinos and African Americans came out and supported General Vang Pao. They saw it was not just a Hmong issue—we need state, local, and community-based partners. . . . Many people still don’t know who we are. But we’ve been getting a more positive message out. We give, we contribute, we have compassion for our people, but we respect the law. Because of our history we lost a generation, we paid the ultimate price. Now we are starting to come out.16

While leaders in both cities expressed that youth leadership was important to develop, the pool of future leaders in Fresno was smaller than in St. Paul. One reason for this is young people with college educations often prefer to move to cities with more varied job opportunities. The economy in Fresno still revolves around agriculture. The Central Valley is a region of California with a growing number of successful Hmong American candidates for public office. In one Central Valley city, Noah Lor won a seat on the city council in 2007, and in his second run for office he received more votes than any other candidate. Lor described his motivation for running: I served in my communities before and that helped a lot in the campaign. What really got me to decide was the Patriot Act, it made we think we were here because we helped the US, not to consider us as terrorists. It made me feel sad the way my brothers, cousins, uncles served and many died during the war. So I think if we don’t participate in the political process and without a say and without knowing what is going on we’ll continue to suffer.17

When asked if his parents encouraged him to run for office as a child, Lor replied: No, my father was a captain in the armed forces. Then when he retired he was elected to be mayor of our village. He is a leader, right now he still holds a high status in our clan. But when I first proposed to my dad about me running he didn’t object—if you have the capability to run for office then go ahead. . . . Public office is important service. The drawback, money to run, is an issue, if you don’t have money.

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During the 2008 recession Merced suffered the worst home foreclosure rate in the country. In 2009, Lor provided a picture of occupations of Hmong in this small city and the impact on the severe economic downturn: If you drive around there are lots of vacant homes. Many have to move. Lots of people lost their homes due to the economic recession. The majority are working at places like a phone book publisher and color press, or at Foster farms in Livingston, though there are a lot of layoffs some are still working. Several are working at a boat company but almost all were laid off. In farms, most are strawberry growers and rent their land, mostly in Atwater. For a family growing vegetables and rice for their own use, irrigation doesn’t release much water; it is from the Merced irrigation district. The majority are still doing farming for their own use, farming one to two acres. Our people don’t have businesses. In Merced we have just a few retail businesses, maybe four professional businesses. For businesses selling produce, it is maybe less than 10 percent of the Hmong population. You need say five or ten acres to get a contract with a company. Many don’t have that much land. Without a contract, they wait until it is time to harvest and, at that time when they are ready to harvest, ask if the company will buy it. Other crops sold are vegetables, sold in the flea market.18

Ethnic social connections spanning across cities in the same region have served as an important resource for candidates. When Lor decided to run, he relied on supporters in the region. Lor mobilized the support of friends and family in California communities near Merced, including Sacramento, Fresno, and Stockton. The Hmong leaders consulted about campaign goals and assisted in fund raising.19 In general, pooling regional resources of this relatively small ethnic group is an important factor in building political capacity. Community Leadership in Sheboygan, Wisconsin

Sheboygan is a city of about 49,000 people (smaller than Eau Claire) and is the core city of the Sheboygan metropolitan area, which encompasses fifteen cities and towns. The Sheboygan metropolitan area has a somewhat larger population of Hmong Americans, who numbered 4,168 persons in the 2010 census, compared to 2,749 persons in the Eau Claire metropolitan

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area and several hundred fewer in the city of Eau Claire. Among Wisconsin cities Sheboygan has one of the largest Hmong populations, along with Green Bay, La Crosse, Milwaukee, and Wausau (not including Eau Claire). Chapter 3 described the emergence of Hmong American political leaders in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Responding to a question about why Hmong families came to Sheboygan and why many stayed, the leader of the local Hmong American association stated: In the beginning the first one or two families were sponsored by the church, mostly the Lutherans. In the early 1980s, there was a secondary migration from Chicago because the elderly felt isolated and out of place in Chicago. Here people can go out and go fishing, walk on the street, feel more safe. It has had to with the first people who settled here. One was my father, a colonel in the army in Laos, one of the respected leaders. So the soldiers who knew him also moved here. . . . Some came from Minnesota and California. Then in the 1990s when there was a shortage of manpower in the labor market, a large number of people moved from the Central Valley of California, Fresno, to work here doing factory work. There were lots of younger people who graduated from college there without jobs; there weren’t enough jobs in the Central Valley except farming, so they came here to find jobs.20

The experience of the Hmong community in Sheboygan further illustrates the variety of social programs developed by local Hmong mutual assistance associations to make family life sustainable in the area. More recently, there has been an uptick in voter engagement. Hmong Americans are the largest racial-ethnic minority group in the city. The leader of a local mutual assistance association informed us, “Most of the Hmong work in factories, not so much in farming anymore, but many still do small garden projects, the farmer[s’] market, most vendors are Hmong.” The mutual assistance association developed its own program to help finance home ownership, which served to attract Hmong residents to Sheboygan and enabled them to stay in their own homes, which were generally dispersed across the city: I would say 60 to 65 to 70 percent own their own homes. Because in the mid-1980s to 2000 our association had a housing loan program, we worked closely with the local banks to provide a small low-interest loan, like $3,500

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at zero interest. They could use it for the down payment and closing costs. We were able to do this because we got a grant from the state. The family only had to pay $40 a month repayment of the loan. We used that to put it back in our association housing loan account.21

Concerning the extent of interest in politics, this leader of the mutual assistance association offered his impression of voter preferences in the 2008 presidential elections: People are interested in diversity, they are open to see the importance of multiculture. . . . I think most voted for Obama, the first African American—they see a chance for minorities to make history. Also he is very articulate, he can also speak well to all people, people with different backgrounds and experience. I think everybody was supporting him, they wanted to see a change.22

More generally, he added, there is a growing interest in voting in the community: There’s getting to be more interest every year, even with the older people. When they get citizenship that will be the first time they are voting, but they’re getting involved, they’re talking about who is running, a lot of interest. . . . I think most people are registered to vote. . . . In the last 10 years, people are more excited . . . . In the beginning the youth helped take older people to the voter booth, went out and encourage[d] them to vote, but right now most people decide themselves to go on their own, except for a few elderly people.23

A generational change is taking place among community leaders in Sheboygan. The new leaders have an average age in their thirties. More are college educated than the previous community leaders. One indication of this transition is in the renaming of “clan leaders,” who are now called “group leaders”; as the mutual assistance leader described, this was to create more openness. One of the younger leaders in the Hmong community owns a small health-care company, and 90 percent of his employees are Hmong. He pointed out that importance of local politics: the mayor of Sheboygan, for instance, influences the climate for business and job creation. Speaking about the engagement of the older community members in mainstream politics and their voting preferences, this business owner pointed out that

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the views of political candidates are not always clear to Hmong Americans. One way to help educate the community is to run a local Hmong radio station. The hosts have facilitated discussion on the radio about candidates, with conversations about questions such as “What does McCain or Obama mean for you?” As the business owner stated: Most Hmong people are very conservative . . . but if you look at it in terms of helping out, getting people off their feet, they will vote for Democrats. . . . Most Hmong people like to hunt, so they don’t want gun control. . . . They voted for Obama, it’s because they just want change, I’m pretty conservative, and I voted for Obama because I wanted some change out there. . . . At least it is doing something that will benefit the economy. The damage is done, it’s not easy to turn things around. To be active in mainstream politics, the difficulty is this: in order for them to accept it, they have to understand the difference between liberal and conservative. It is very difficult for them to understand that. When we try to explain it, we give examples. Gun control is very important to the conservative and liberal parties. We also explain to them . . . about international policy—I think Hmong people have to understand the difference between liberal and conservative. . . . I think only 25 percent understand.

This association leader also observed that Hmong Americans in the community care most about education and jobs. As a result, even though they are conservative, they are inclined to vote for a liberal candidate because they “want change” from the political status quo, although when this desire is expressed, the policy content of the change is not necessarily clear. Concerning generational change, he noted that younger people are generally more liberal in outlook than older people. Some in the younger generation are thinking about what they should do to run for office, but they do not yet know how to get started in politics. In his view, the first step a young person needs to take “is to volunteer in the community; the younger people should volunteer to help at the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, not only just at the Hmong association, any organization to get involved.”24 Problems of Job Loss and Invisibility in North Carolina and Michigan

In cities where Hmong Americans face problems of invisibility, small numbers and social isolation pose significant obstacles to achieving a voice in public life. Our interviews with community leaders in two cities, Hickory,

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North Carolina, and the metropolitan area of Detroit, Michigan, illustrate ethnic leaders’ efforts to overcome a social isolation exacerbated by job loss during the 2008 recession. The necessary conditions for the emergence of successful Hmong American candidates are generally not present in these circumstances. While the mutual assistance associations have worked on behalf of Hmong Americans in these cities, the small size and relative social isolation of the Hmong communities seems to make the emergence of youthful leadership of an intergenerational ethnic politics difficult. In our interviews of community leaders in Hickory, two former and current leaders of a local Hmong American association named job loss as the main problem facing Hmong Americans in Hickory. With the closing of factories, many families’ income declined dramatically. A third leader felt that racial discrimination remained the biggest problem facing Hmong in the area, although this assessment was not shared by several of the residents we recruited from grassroots settings, as reported later in this chapter. The racially discriminatory climate in North Carolina and low levels of union coverage in the state place racial minorities and immigrants in a vulnerable position, with little protection from unequal treatment in the workplace: The biggest problem for the Hmong in this area is discrimination. Because the Hmong people are ignorant of the rules, this causes the larger community to discriminate. In labor we usually get paid less—an American works two or three years and gets the same pay as we would being here for five years. At work you can’t talk, you can’t do anything about it—they say, “So you don’t want to work?” I filed complaints at the EEO [Equal Employment Opportunity] office.25

Responding to a question about voter participation, one association leader noted that a degree of insularity of the ethnic community may influence thinking about voting: There are at least one thousand eligible Hmong voters in Catawba County. Burke has 90 percent of the population—probably 80 percent of the Hmong population in this state is in two counties. People are not that active in politics like in Minnesota and California—the reasons are this: In the past the job market was OK, people could get a job and be treated decently and so the urgency to elect people to office was not there. Plus many people living here are sick and tired of politics from the past—they moved from Minnesota and California. . . . The reason people don’t participate

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much in politics—the mutual aid association solves all problems, people don’t need to go outside of it. Also many people feel tired of Hmong politics—differences over party and ideologies, differences in the past—tend to divide us. It is typical in American communities for two politicians like Hillary and Obama to fight a vicious battle and then work together. In the Hmong community if we engage in that kind of battle, after it’s over it is tough to get back together. So the conventional wisdom among the elders is stay away from politics—be civil, stay together—so we make it a rule not to get involved.26

In these interviews in Hickory, the comments of community leaders indicated an understanding of multifaceted and deeply rooted social-­economic disparities. The problems of economic disadvantage and discrimination are interconnected and lie at the root of isolation of the community from the mainstream community, which the mutual assistance association has been striving to overcome. Two leaders of a Hmong American association in Detroit described the effects of job loss in the Detroit metropolitan and surrounding areas. As in Hickory, Hmong Americans migrated out of the Detroit area as auto factories closed in the 1990s. Some moved to towns and cities surrounding Detroit. Others moved to Minnesota, where jobs were more plentiful. Both leaders also described how two clans moved from Detroit to Arkansas to work as contractors raising chickens for Tyson Foods. The social and political environment leaves Hmong Americans feeling invisible in the Detroit metropolitan area. The first leader described the Hmong ethnic landscape in this way: The Hmong people in this area live in Warren, Pontiac, Lansing, Saginaw, and Eastpointe. The last ones came in 1997. People came here for jobs at the Big Three automakers. They heard in Detroit the pay is better, they’d have a chance to save money for a good home, and the schools are good. At that time they were doing general labor, like assembly line and auto parts. Some are union jobs. The population at that time was about 70 percent in assembly jobs. Since 1997 only six or seven new families came from Thailand. Most buy homes. In 2000 things start getting worse. If recession continues, population will decline. As for businesses, in Michigan we’re doing well in the restaurant business. Thai and Chinese restaurants are Hmong owned. There are a lot of pharmacists too.

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As for any Hmong candidates running for office, the Hmong population is not big enough to be recognized, people don’t know who we are— when I say “Hmong” they say “Mongolian?” I want to be known, to have a face in the community.27

The second association leader added these observations: The younger generation sees benefits in voting; among the older generation, fewer do. But some did vote . . . in the McCain versus Obama election most voted for Obama. I think most older people vote Democrat because they think Democrats care about poor people. In our Hmong association—before more elderly people were involved, but now to move forward we need a professional vision to present to donors. There has been a switch to younger people in leadership. There are more younger people representing clans—for the coming year there will be four about my age in their twenties.28

The decision of the Hmong association in Detroit to help promote a new generation of young professional leaders indicates that new models of leadership continue to evolve. In this case, the model has adapted to local conditions. The centers of both traditional and newer political leadership of the Hmong were never located in Michigan, but commonality of ethnic interests among the Hmong Americans keeps younger people involved in building a Hmong association to serve a large metropolitan area. The leaders explained in our interviews that to sustain the organization financially and to attract new members, young leaders have paid close attention to presenting a public profile that conveys the association’s modern and professional operating style.

Views from the Grassroots This section describes the views of ordinary Hmong American citizens on identity, community problems, and politics. A summary of responses and illustrative comments are presented on various topics: citizenship and political engagement; the meaning of “politics”; notions of what a good leader is; thoughts on the main problems facing the community; experiences of discrimination; political participation, including voting, criteria for choos-

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ing candidates, whether party affiliation and the Hmong ethnicity of a candidate matter, and other forms of participation; parents’ aspirations for children to participate in politics, including running for office; a sense of shared fate; and views on human rights in Laos. All names used here are pseudonyms. The table in Appendix D provides demographic information on the interview participants and a description of their responses to a subset of questions asked in the interviews.29 The interviews took place in Fresno during the summers of 2007, 2008, and 2009; in St. Paul, during the summer, fall, and spring of 2007, 2008, and 2009; and in Hickory, during the winter of 2008. There were fourteen participants from St. Paul, twenty from Fresno, and five from Hickory. In St. Paul and Hickory, there was not a discernible disparity in gender balance, but in Fresno, fifteen women and five men were interviewed; most of these persons in Fresno were recruited in a daytime US citizenship class. If the data on responses are combined across the three cities, all thirtynine participants were born in Laos or Thailand except two who did not know their birthplace. In other respects, the demographic profile was varied. Four persons were younger than thirty years old; seventeen ranged from thirty to fifty years old; and twelve were older than fifty. Only one person had resided in the United States for less than a year. Thirteen persons had lived in the United States between three and ten years, seven reported a length of residence of more than ten years, and sixteen indicated twenty or more years of residence. The description of interviews begins by identifying some common themes across many interviewees’ comments in all three cities. The themes were identified through a process of reading and coding the text of interviews to identify categorical answers to questions when suitable, or identifying categories of ideas expressed in more open-ended comments. Bilingual research assistants performed the coding after producing a written translation and transcription of interviews conducted in Hmong or simply an English transcription of interviews conducted in English. Citizenship and Participation in Politics

Only seven of the twenty-nine, combining responses across the three cities, replied yes when asked if they “participate in politics.” However, other responses indicate a higher rate of participation in the sample of ­respondents.

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Apparently, the phrase “participate in politics” did not have a clear or consistent meaning to participants. When asked whether they had ever voted, for example, among the thirty-seven who responded to this question, thirteen said yes and twenty-four no. Only fifteen who reported having voted were citizens, however; thirteen who reported voting out of fifteen who were eligible was a fairly large proportion. Responses to questions asking specifically about nonvoting forms of political participation yielded more information. About the same number had attended a community meeting in each city, although the proportions of participants varied: four of the fourteen participants in St. Paul, four of the twenty participants in Fresno, and three of the five participants in Hickory. Only one of fourteen participants in St. Paul had contacted a public official; two out of five participants had done so in Hickory, and none in Fresno. When participants were asked whether they had volunteered in a community organization, the number of affirmative replies was one of the fourteen participants in St. Paul, four of the twenty participants in Fresno, and four of the five participants in Hickory. It should be noted that in Hickory, two of the five participants were recruited through social ties with a community association; thus, the small sample in Hickory is not representative of the wider ethnic population, including those who do not have ongoing relationships with a community organization. In their own words, participants gave varied explanations for why they vote. Nou Lee came to the United States through a refugee resettlement program in Thailand twenty years earlier and had been a citizen for ten years. She lives in St. Paul and says she votes because I am in America now. I want to be American. I want to help America and participate in elections, the selection of our leaders, and I want to help improve the country by participating in electing leaders who will do that.

Kaliah Yang, a Fresno resident, was studying to take the citizenship test. She had no formal education except taking English classes so she could apply to become a citizen, and she was trying to pass the test for the third time: “This year my husband just got his citizenship. I want to be one because I really want to vote but I’m illiterate. And I want to be a part of this country and vote for our leaders too.” In his early fifties, Long Vang of St. Paul was born in Laos and is the father of six children, two of whom died in the jungles while fleeing the war

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in Laos. His desire to become a US citizen is firm: “Although I don’t have my citizenship, I want to become a citizen. We’re not citizens yet because we’re the newcomers, we haven’t lived here long enough. We haven’t lived here more than five years.” Long Vang also intends to vote after receiving his citizenship: “If you don’t vote, you’re ostracized. You’re not seen as a responsible person and you may be treated bad and neglected.” Most Hmong refugees had little formal education in Laos. Some of their remarks reflected misunderstandings about American laws and politics, such as a comment offered by Teng Her: “I’ve voted ever since 1993, voting for the King, we say President, but it is like a King. We’ve voted for all levels here in the state too, every year.” Vaj Chang is a retired auto mechanic and has lived in Fresno since 1989. He went to high school from the ninth through twelfth grade in the United States and afterward had a couple of years of technical training. He became a citizen because, he said, “You are going to be here for a while and you’re useless if you’re not a citizen in this country. To get citizenship is to become equal to others.” Bai Xang, in her fifties, lived in Fresno and was born in Laos. The mother of twelve children, she is disabled and cannot work. As a child in Laos she went to school until she was seven or eight years old but left school because she was bullied. She hadn’t returned to school until deciding to enroll in an English class at the time of our interview so she could become a citizen, because, she said, “With citizenship you can do anything. You have the right to help the country. I wish I could vote.” In choosing a candidate, she said she would want to elect a person who has a good mind, loves all the people, and doesn’t cheat us. He must lead justly and execute no injustices. . . . He must represent us, fix the roads, improve the buildings, the education, hospitals, and keep training leaders of the next generation.

In Hickory, as earlier noted, one association leader had suggested that traditional leaders do not encourage voting because it tends to divide the community. However, most interviewees did see the importance of voting, and in that respect they were not different from others in other cities. Only one person among the thirty-nine participants from all three cities answered no when asked if “participating in politics will help anyone” or “make a difference”—fifteen answered yes and six did not know or gave an

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ambiguous answer. Past experiences in other countries before coming to the United States is a factor in this for some individuals. Tsu Thao, a married man with three children who had come to Fresno only a few years earlier, expressed doubts. He was not a citizen: “If I were a citizen, it would be most important because I have the chance to vote.” However, he expressed ambivalent feelings about whether participation can make a difference: Yes [I participated in politics], when I was in Thailand, I went with soldiers, the people and the community to decide ways to better our community. I talked with public officials a lot. . . . At the beginning I thought it was very important, but then later on I didn’t think it was worth so much anymore. . . . It can help the people as well as not help them, depending on your intelligence.

Vang Her, a middle-aged man who had earned an associate’s degree and pursued a professional career in Fresno, expressed strong skepticism about the benefits of voting: I liked Lincoln, but I couldn’t vote for him, but Bush was the first person I voted for, but none of them can deliver their message so now I don’t vote, it’s not worth the vote. They have to really be able to do what they say. I understand they do what they can, and don’t just do whatever, and do things for the citizens, but you can’t just do whatever. . . . Like I’ve told you, in this country, I’m never satisfied with the voting, so I never vote, only once, it was for Bush, but he never did what he said, so I never voted again. I won’t vote now either. What Is the Meaning of the Word “Politics”?

There were many different notions about the meaning of the word “politics,” and these clearly influenced the way people answered our questions about whether they were “involved in politics” or wanted their children to be “involved.” Thus, we asked participants to explain their own understanding of the terms. It was apparent that some individuals had formed a definition of “politics” from their education in the United States. Others had ideas formed in homeland contexts and, as for people of all racialethnic and educational backgrounds, concepts were often somewhat vague. Participants variously referred to the activity or process of “voting,” “choosing a leader,” “the system of lawmaking,” “influencing the government,”

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and other ideas. Doua Her, who was born in Laos in 1973 and had lived in the United States only since 2004, would have liked to vote but was not a citizen yet. In the course of explaining her own rather broad idea of what is politics, she described the kind of leader she would want: I don’t know what politics is, but I think of ideas about how I can go help support and elect a Hmong person into office. We should be able to elect our Hmong people into government so that our people will have respect and dignity as well. We should love each other and support each other to advance to get a Hmong elected so that other races can respect us and not look down on us.

Doua Her described her current political participation as “taking part in community meetings and forums, talking about elections as being a constructive role model for her children that one day they too may become active citizens.” Pao Lee of Hickory offered his observation about the understanding of the term “politics” in the community: Regarding politics, it’s a vast definition; we Hmong aren’t educated enough to fully comprehend the significance of that term and improve our own participation, we listen to gossip and follow each other or listen to the stronger clan as leader, or follow relatives into a camp or towards a leader. So whoever becomes a leader we count them as our own. Concepts of a Good Leader and Candidate Choice

In talking about politics, a strain of communal thinking was evident, especially about the shared needs of the poor. If there was one phrase most often used by these individuals to describe the qualities or personality that would help them decide whether to vote for candidate for public office, it is that the leader “love the people.” The phrase in Hmong can also be translated as “care for the people,” but it conveys an affective sense that is most accurately translated as “love” in the context of traditional community relationships of common people to their leaders. All in all, eighteen of the thirty-nine participants used this familiar phrase. When asked a different question about what “important issues or ideas held by the candidate” they keep in mind when deciding to vote, nine used a similar phrase, saying that they wanted to see leaders who “respect the poor and illiterate,” and eight said the leader

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“must love and be honest toward all the people.” The intended meaning of these three phrases is not evidently different. None of the US-born individuals used this specific wording to describe criteria for selecting a candidate. In the excerpts from interviews we recorded, several of the interviewees in their thirties who had immigrated from Laos or Thailand elaborated on the meaning of the common phrase “love all people” and similar expressions in Hmong conversational language about leadership and politics. It should be noted that several (but not all) of the persons who described the qualities of a candidate they would vote for were not eligible to vote but had strong opinions of what a “leader” should be like. When asked which issues would help her decide whom to vote for, one interviewee noted that concern for the poor was important: “He must help all people. All of us. He must support his own citizens, help the poor and jobless. He must support the access and funding of education for our children.” There were some individuals who had not attained citizenship and still felt strongly that concern for the poor was the principal criteria for supporting a candidate. Gao Thao of Fresno had not learned to read as a child but was diligently studying to pass her citizenship test so she could vote after having lived in the United States for nearly twenty years. She wanted to vote in the future for “a leader who can lead in a just manner, who loves the poor, works on unemployment issues and improving education.” With a similar experience, Ying Lo came to the United States in 1990 and is the mother of ten children. Born in Laos, she had not become a US citizen and thought that passing the English test would be too difficult. When asked to reflect nonetheless on how she would select a candidate to vote for if she were able, she remarked: The most important thing . . . is someone who has kindness, who helps the poor. Whoever is poor, they must help. Those who don’t love the poor don’t get the vote, those who do love the poor do. Those who love has the most—100 percent of the time they will get the most votes. Whoever is poor will come and ask, “Oh, we’re poor. We’ll stick with you if you can help us.” This is what the poor will say and then that person will look for ways to help.

Long Vang described his candidate preferences in this way: I want someone who loves the people. . . . He must know how to govern the country and keep the laws just. He must oversee the justness of the

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government. He must have intelligence, and there are four things which I require. The first thing is that he acknowledges the parents and helps them and other fellow citizens. He must stimulate the jobs and help with employment, that’s the second thing. Thirdly, he must invest in health care, especially for the elderly. And the last thing is that he must have the wisdom to correct people, to preach right from wrong and to be judicious like that.

In village life in Laos, the traditional manner of learning about politics was through face-to-face conversation with close associates—clan leaders, family members, and neighbors. The Hmong traditional way of passing along knowledge is oral rather than through reading and writing. In our research, interviewers learned that Hmong candidates had targeted their campaign outreach efforts in the public housing projects of St. Paul. Several participants mistakenly believed our college-age interviewers were campaign workers until it was explained that they were carrying out an academic study. The residents’ experience with campaign outreach efforts was evident in their responses. For example, Mai Thao had lived in the United States for fourteen years and was a citizen for three years. A resident of St. Paul, she said that she hears about candidates from a local Hmong radio station and from campaign workers who had come to her housing project and distributed campaign literature. But she said that her own family members are the ones who influence her decision about which candidate will receive her vote, and her children who are educated help her decide: “If others tell me that that person is good and will love the people, then I’ll vote for him too.” Mai Thao is nonetheless sure that when evaluating candidates, several issues are important to her: helping the less fortunate and illiterate, helping resettle Hmong refugees, helping those who can’t work and poor people in general, and lowering medical costs—and she said that she “doesn’t like taxes.” A candidate’s concern for the poor was also an important criterion for Nou Lee, quoted earlier, who described which issues would help her decide whom to vote for, and concern for the poor was important: He must help all people. All of us. He must support his own citizens, help the poor and jobless. He must support the access [to] and funding of education for our children. That is very important.

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Expressing a similar sentiment, Gao Thao, who had lived in the United States for nearly twenty years, said she wanted to vote in the future for “a leader who can lead in a just manner, who loves the poor, works on unemployment issues and improving education.” These thoughts were not unlike those conveyed by Ying Lo, mother to ten children, had come to the United States in 1990. Born in Laos, she had not become a US citizen and believed that passing the English test would be too difficult. When asked to reflect nonetheless on how she would select a candidate to vote for if she were able, she remarks: The most important thing . . . is someone who has kindness, who helps the poor. Whoever is poor, they must help. Those who don’t love the poor don’t get the vote, those who do love the poor do. Those who love has the most—one hundred percent of the time they will get the most votes. Whoever is poor will come and ask, “Oh, we’re poor. We’ll stick with you if you can help us.” This is what the poor will say and then that person will look for ways to help.

On issues of employment, she added: I speak for myself, my husband and myself don’t have much education, right now I face a lot of financial problems because of the economy is like this, so it’s hard for people like us, it’s hard to make and not make it, we struggle so it’s hard, regardless of friends or races, anyone you meet, that’s the struggle, it is this.

But for Fue Lor, a middle-aged man from Hickory, differences within the Hmong community are the biggest problem: The biggest issue is culture. Our culture is involved with religion, we Hmong don’t know how to separate culture from religion and vice versa so there is conflict. Our Christians and non-Christians don’t get along. This culture clash makes it tense. Things regarding death, funerals, weddings, we involve religion with culture and it conflicts. Experiences of Class and Racial Discrimination

When asked if they had ever personally experienced discrimination in the United States, six interviewees of the thirty-nine in all three cities said yes,

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and twenty-six said no. However, when asked if discrimination toward Hmong people is a problem, twenty-one said yes and seven no. Some of the interviewees elaborated on their views of poverty and race as the reason people discriminate against the Hmong. A US-born man, Tou Khang, for example, offered a comment about how prejudice is based on economic status: It’s not really a race issue. It’s more like if you were to dress in normal clothing. . . . [T]hey don’t greet me or help me out. But if I come back to the same store, dressed up like I’m rich or something, they’ll end up helping me more. Sometimes I feel that when I go to certain neighborhoods, for example, I live in the suburbs and I feel it most of the time because we’re one of three Asian families that live over there. They really treat us really bad. They think that we might bring the ghetto into the suburbs.

Two individuals made very similar remarks about how poverty was the reason that people discriminate against them, not race or ethnicity. As Mai See Xiong put it: When I think about my life, people don’t like me for two reasons. When we lived in Laos and Thailand, I was treated bad because I was Hmong, but in America, I am treated bad because I am poor.

When asked if they had personally experienced discrimination in the United States, only two persons in Fresno and three in St. Paul responded affirmatively. The largest number among those living in Fresno (twelve) said they had not personally experienced such discrimination, and the largest number in St. Paul (eight) said they did not experience it (many did not know or did not answer). We can speculate on reasons for the larger number of individuals in Fresno who said they had not experienced discrimination. For example, it might be because a large proportion of interviewees in Fresno consisted of recent immigrants recruited through citizenship classes and on average had not lived in the United States as long as those in St. Paul. Yet when asked if Hmong people face discrimination, rather than whether they had personally experienced it, comparable numbers responded affirmatively, seven of the participants in each city. One woman said she had faced discrimination not because she is Hmong but because she is Asian. The two US-born persons who recounted experiences of personal discrimination described its manifestation in public

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spaces such as neighborhoods or stores. Two immigrants cited instances of workplace discrimination. Two of the interviewees mentioned Vang Pao’s leadership as an important factor in helping Hmong people combat discrimination. In the view of Mai Thao, Hmong people face discrimination especially because they don’t have a leader to unify them. For the welfare of the Hmong people, she urged, “Listen to the leader—General Vang Pao. We should all be in harmony.” She expressed that with Vang Pao’s waning stature at the time of his arrest, the Hmong in America would be especially prone to discrimination. Without a leader, “no other races will respect our human dignity.” A few people told vivid stories of discrimination. Chai Moua related a story about a friend who was told by his adult school English instructor to go back to his country soon after he had arrived in the United States. The teacher was disciplined by being suspended for a week. Reflecting on why this occurred, he said: “It has to do with Hmong folks’ language proficiency and the way the white majority treats us.” Chai Moua feels sometimes Hmong people are treated like “animals.” He also said with anger and frustration that sometimes he would accompany his wife to temporary work agencies and companies where the employers would refuse her application because “her English isn’t good enough.” Va-Meng Lee of Hickory commented: I think it is a good state of affairs now, if we came before 1975, we would have faced the same things the Koreans or the African Americans faced before the civil rights movement. We got here and the laws were already fixed so our discrimination we face is minor compared to that.

Fue Lor, who was quoted earlier, described harsh discriminatory treatment experienced by the Hmong wherever they have lived, and noted that progress is slowly taking place in the United States: Yes, I’ve seen it with my eyes. In Laos and here in this country. In Laos, when we were in school, a few of us ostracized the Hmong from the hill who came to rest in our village on the way to the Laotian lowlands. The Lao boys would throw rocks at Hmong boys entering the village like throwing things at an animal. In Thailand the officials don’t speak to you, they hit you and maul you to the ground to make a statement, like you’re an animal! In this country it is similar. When we first came, few of us spoke English, in lines for lunch they spit at you, throw punches at you,

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pull down your pants. It didn’t occur to me but I’ve seen all this. Laos and Thai don’t respect us because like I said, earlier about Iran and North Korea, we can’t compare to them, we’re not recognized as equals so they don’t respect us. Now we’ve been in the US for about thirty years, we have many educated people, and are now slowly gaining recognition and they are respecting us more, more guts, more education, now we have more of these.

In a similar way, Kou Lee, a resident of a town near Hickory in Burke County, took note of dramatic improvements in the lives of Hmong Americans. Lee came to the United States in the 1990s and had earned an associate’s degree: When we first came we got clothes from the Goodwill and Salvation Army, and wore soccer cleats and pajamas to school. Now it’s different, we’ve come a long way. Especially income standards, our incomes have climbed a good deal. . . . We’re not the very bottom anymore. . . . I don’t know about other counties but here in Burke County, every year I go to high school graduations and at least four or five Hmong people are in the top ten and some are even valedictorians. I’m like, all right, that’s great.

Koua Fang, another woman who had come to the United States from Laos almost twenty years earlier, thought it was especially unfair when Hmong people face discrimination from employers in the workplace, where they are simply working to make a living. At the same time, she took note of improvements in race relations after living for almost two decades in the United States and acknowledged the support given by whites to Hmong politicians: You see that white people at work stand and talk a lot and no one does anything. For us dark haired, we have to keep on working. If we were to stop and talk, our American boss would peek in and we would get into a lot of trouble. This isn’t fair. We have to remember that when we talk, our hands have to keep moving to keep our job. I think that Hmong and whites have begun to understand each other. If this wasn’t so, they wouldn’t have given political offices to Hmong. After thirty years, this has been a good improvement.

Two persons mentioned the Chai Soua Vang case, which involved a Hmong man from Minnesota who was convicted of killing six white hunters in Wisconsin in a racially charged altercation in 2004. The circumstances that led to the shootings remain unclear, but the incidents increased

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racial tensions and hate speech directed against Hmong people in both Wisconsin and Minnesota. Kong Yang, a twenty-three-year-old man born in St. Paul, commented, “I think that the Chai Vang case made it known that racism is a big thing . . . and made the whole nation think of Hmong men as violent.” Another US-born woman, Mee Xiong, a nineteen-year-old college student, conveyed some vivid memories of racism experienced in Minnesota: People have yelled racist comments at me. People have looked at me as Hmong and don’t talk to me because of it. I think it is a big problem. It’s serious when people don’t realize that it’s a big problem when it’s staring at them in the face. I’ve experienced people giving me the eye. I get disrespect because I am Hmong. Political Parties and Voting

Among the thirty-nine persons interviewed in Fresno, St. Paul, and Hickory, five said they had no preference for a party and eleven said they did not know about (or were not familiar with) parties. Three preferred the Republicans, and two preferred the Democrats. When asked if party was a factor in their decision about whom to vote for, only two said yes, while fourteen said no and fifteen said they did not know or were not sure. While these responses indicate that for most of the interviewees political party was not important in determining their vote choice, some indicated a partisan preference based on drawing distinctions between domestic and foreign policy. In Hickory, Long Dao, for example, remarked: Mostly, for myself, I tend to vote Republican a lot. But if it’s local then I like Democrats. For state and federal, I’ll go Republican. What I like is that Democrats can help the local citizens more immediately, but I like the attitude of Republicans and their conduct of foreign policy more than Democrats.

Chai Moua was born in Laos in 1973. In national politics, he stated a preference for Republican candidates because he thinks the Republicans are tougher on national security and defense issues: “The Republicans know how to control the country and are strong on defense. They keep the country safe.” In contrast, at the state and local level of politics, he said that party does not matter to him. He explained that he paid attention to ­elections on

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television, radio, and newspapers; he has agreed to post lawn signs (at his house) in the past and has been contacted by campaign workers’ personal visits to his home. Xang Vue of Hickory stated: “The person I vote for, rich or poor, regardless of that, he must have the heart to love the citizens, to love the people he’s appointed to oversee, that’s what I vote for.” The comments of a few individuals indicated which factors other than party matter to them. Koua Fang is a married woman in her fifties with five children, and she has lived in the Twin Cities for nearly twenty years. After coming to the United States from a refugee camp in Thailand, she received her citizenship in 1996. In her recounting of candidates for whom she had cast a vote, party was not mentioned; rather, it was who had helped “the Hmong people”: I’ve voted since Reagan. I voted for Woodrow, George Bush, Bill Clinton, Cy Thao, and Senator Mee Moua. . . . When it’s time to vote for Tim Pawlenty, we vote for Tim Pawlenty right away because he has helped Hmong people.

It was not unusual for individuals to report voting for candidates of both parties in past elections. Fue Lia, a resident of Fresno who had completed high school and two years of vocational technical training, also remembered voting for Bush and Clinton in past elections. The election of Hmong American candidates was especially important to Fue Lia: So now they can respect you more like their own. Before we had no city councilmen, now we have Blong Xiong. People are very proud of Blong Xiong. It shows that we too have courage and intelligence.

Mary Fang, a US-born woman contacted by our door-to-door recruiting in a St. Paul housing project had completed one year of college while working in a retail establishment. She said, “I don’t find myself too interested in politics. It’s too complicated.” She did express opinions, however, about what kind of political leader she favors: I think I would vote for someone who talks about equality for all people. . . . I would vote for someone who has an agenda to change unjust laws that are not fair to some people because everyone should be protected by the government, not hurt by it.

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Mary Fang and a couple of other US-born individuals more readily recounted experiences of racism than the elder individuals interviewed. Mary Fang’s interest in a candidate who believes in “equality” may be related to her personal experience. Responding to the question about whether she had experienced discrimination, she said: “Well, not because of being Hmong but because of being Asian. White and black kids would make fun of me and call me chink.” In another example, the college student Mee Xiong, who was born in the United States and lived her entire life in the Twin Cities, said she was not politically active and had never voted because she did not have the time, but she reflected on the qualities she likes in a candidate in this way: The person I would want to vote for should be able to help my community, for example, taxes. Someone who isn’t racist—someone who is interested in other cultures and religions—someone who thinks about helping other communities other than their own. It should be someone who listens, who looks at a lot of points of view before making decisions.

Tou Khang is a twenty-six-year-old single man, born in the United States. He finished three years of college and was working as a maintenance employee cleaning airplanes. Tou Khang explained that he had been voting since he was eighteen and got involved in campaigns when asked to help: When it comes to voting, I usually just vote for who I believe is to be a successful candidate . . . whoever stands for pro-life I usually go for that. . . . I voted for Jesse Ventura. . . . I voted for him because he’s not afraid to speak out what he believes in. . . . I voted for Paul Wellstone before he passed away. I voted for him because he loved people around him . . . Support for a Hmong Candidate

Individuals were asked whether they would support a Hmong candidate if that candidate were running against an equally qualified person who was not Hmong. They were also asked whether they would support a Hmong candidate if that candidate were less qualified than a competing candidate who was not Hmong. Among the thirty-nine participants in all three cities, nine persons responded that they would choose a Hmong candidate over a candidate who was not Hmong even if the Hmong candidate was

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less qualified; thirteen persons would choose the candidate who was not Hmong if that person were better qualified. Pang Lee of St. Paul said that whether the Hmong candidate was equally or less qualified than the candidate who was not Hmong, she would vote for the Hmong candidate. Pang Lee reasoned: “If the two candidates were equally qualified, I would vote for the Hmong candidate because you should help out your fellow Hmong people.” If the candidate who was not Hmong was more qualified, “I would still vote for the Hmong because he can become a better person with the right coaching.” In contrast, Phoua Yang said: “If they were equal, I would vote for my own: Hmong. But if they were not equal then I would vote for the non-Hmong. It doesn’t matter because if he is better qualified, then he will love everyone.” Blong Cha said he did not vote because he was not a citizen but would give his vote to the “best and most honest person,” and this person would most likely be easier to “get along with.” Mee Xiong gave a more complex answer, showing resistance to the feeling of “being pressured” to vote for a Hmong candidate simply because the candidate is Hmong. If a candidate was not Hmong and was more qualified, she reflected on the dilemma: Usually, I would vote for the Hmong person but then it would take me a really long time [to decide] and, personally, I would just avoid it all. People would just say [to me], “Oh, just vote for the Hmong person because we’re Hmong.” I feel pressured sometimes like that. If they were both equally qualified candidates, I would just not vote at all. I would not vote at all because if they were both equally qualified then I rather keep it that way. Aspiration for Children in Politics

Among the thirty-nine participants, twenty-seven parents expressed hope that their children would become engaged in politics, and twenty-two said they hoped their children would run for political office. Not only immigrant parents expressed their hope for children to become leaders in the community; when asked, US-born young adults also seemed open to the idea that their children enter a political career if they were interested. Their support for the idea was based on the high status they felt such a career would confer on their children.

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In reply to the question about whether he hoped his children would become involved in politics, Chai Moua offered this comment: Yes, it’s important that they get involved in politics. That they vote too. I really encourage them because I came here alone as a person. My parents, family, everyone died in the war! What did I have? I didn’t have anything or anyone when I came here to this country. We should educate ourselves and give the chance to our children and our people to get an education and to get involved in politics. I hope my children will get involved. We need to encourage our people to get into government—so we can see our own educated people up there with them.

Dia Xang had no opportunity to receive formal education either in Laos or after coming to the United States. She described her hope for her children this way: Yes, if my kids are educated enough and are born in this country, to have a chance to run for office, I’d encourage them. If they are older and have the guts to run for office, then that’s great.

Pang Lee of St. Paul spoke about the potential benefits of involvement to the children themselves: Yes, I do hope that my children get engaged. I hope kids are responsible. I hope that they get good grades so that someday they’ll become a government official or something like it. We hope that they don’t become poor and hard manual laborers like their parents.

Shao Cha was born in Laos and came to the United States in 1984. Speaking about her four children, she commented: “Yes, I always tell my children to go to school and get involved in what other people are doing too. I tell them to follow the paths of people who are doing good.” In answer to the inquiry about whether she would like to see her children run for office someday, she replied: “Yes, I would like my children to be a leader one day and make a name if they have the courage to do it. I would support them.” Other parents who had come to the United States from Laos gave similar reasons for actively encouraging, not merely supporting their children’s involvement in politics. For one woman she would do so because it would be “good for them.” In her view:

178 Views on Politics To be able to participate in politics, you need to have an education. Look at those who came to America and were big hearted and patient—those who are in politics are more successful. I want our young to do well, not only my children but I want you to do well too because we are Hmong.

Not all were as enthusiastic as Shao Cha about their children’s political involvement, but none expressed reservations, except for the fact that the Hmong community’s educational level was not high enough to prepare many people for this career. A few individuals were careful to qualify their remarks, saying they would be supportive if their offspring “wanted to” get involved in politics or “had the potential” or “were interested.” Dee Kang of St. Paul, an immigrant who has two children and had voted once in the past, explained why she would like to see her children run for office: “Yes, I would like to see them make it and become a leader. Because it shows that they are smart and talented.” Even Mary Fang, who had already explained she was not interested in politics, had no children, and had never voted, nonetheless said she would encourage her children to participate in politics, including running for office, “because they would be able to change things and make it better. Also, it gives them an honorable title.” Apparently, for both immigrants and the US born, a career in government is not only desirable for their children because they believe it is a worthy life goal that will help the community; the career path can also provide a chance for upward mobility in economic and social status. If social incorporation can be advanced through children’s pursuit of political careers or other professions in the public sector, then the interview responses suggest that members of the group will be favorably inclined toward those careers. The opportunities may not be present in all cities, however. In some cities, moreover, pursuing opportunities in private enterprise may be more promising depending on the local economy and niches already occupied by ethnic groups.

Professionals Recruited from Business Directories The last group of interview participants was recruited from published lists of private-sector professionals, including Hmong community phone books and Internet business listings in Fresno and St. Paul. The purpose of this

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outreach was to increase the proportion of participants who had received an education beyond high school in the United States. The table in Appendix E reports their responses to a questionnaire, which used the same questions shown in Appendix C in the instrument for other adults, with some minor differences. For example, more detailed information was asked and recorded about occupational categories than for the other adults. These interviews were conducted during the same months and years as the interviews of other adults. Any patterns are again merely suggestive because of the small sample size. The interviews took place during the summer of 2009 in Fresno and the metropolitan area encompassing Minneapolis, St. Paul, and the suburb of Brooklyn Park. The tallied number of responses reported here combine the data from interviews in both of these areas. The responses we received were quite mixed. The small number of participants in this group makes it impossible to discern central tendencies. As the 2012 National Asian American Survey also showed (see Chapter 1), there was a positive view of Democrats and of Obama’s candidacy, though a mix of Democratic and Republican party preferences. Party was not an important factor in determining candidate choice among this group of participants as a whole. For example, eight out of thirteen participants said party was not a factor, compared to two who said party was a factor. The participants reported various forms of participation in politics. Nine of the thirteen respondents said they had voted in an election, with only one replying in the negative. However, when asked if they “participated in politics,” only two replied in the affirmative, suggesting that the phrase “participate in politics” did not have a uniform or clear meaning as in interviews of other adults. When the participants were also asked about specific forms of participation, the answers were more informative. Six persons had donated to a candidate, and four individuals said they had not. Three persons had helped a candidate run for office, and six had had not given such help. The meaning of the term “help” with respect to a candidate’s run for office apparently did not include for every respondent the practice of donating to a campaign. Six individuals reported having donated money to a candidate’s campaign, while four said they had not. As for “contacting a public official,” none reported having done so. Seven persons had volunteered in the community. Preferences for either the Republican or Democratic Party were mixed. Pooling answers in both Fresno and the Twin Cities, four individuals stated

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a preference for the Democratic Party; one preferred the Republican Party; and four had no preference. The number of missing replies and unclear responses is noted in the table in Appendix E. A few excerpts illustrate both the variety and some of the tone of remarks offered by participants. Fong Vang was the leader of a corporation in the communications industry. He completed five years of higher education after high school. Describing his idea of “what is politics” and why participation is important, he said: Well, for instance, in my opinion, politics gives us a broader view of ideas. If we have people voting on an issue, there will be a wider range of how that issue is viewed and how people think it should be dealt with. However, in the Hmong community and maybe in other communities as well, some may be more pessimistic than that. Some may think that their vote may not matter and no matter what they do it won’t change anything. But now it is catching on. I remember five or six years ago, my grandma and grandpa were afraid that because now they were citizens they had to vote, but they didn’t know who to vote for. Nowadays, it is changing little by little.

In contrast to the others who cited economic problems as the main ones facing the Hmong community in his city, Fong Vang spoke about culture and social adaptation: The Hmong have a hard time adapting; the elders are not opening up to new ideas and American life. The younger generation, we’ll move forward and blend in with the American society no matter what; we will become American. Maybe three or four generations, we’ll probably lose our Hmong culture and forget about Hmong. What is good and integrated will live forever and what is bad and not integrated will die forever. What is good will prosper and what is bad will die forever. If the Hmong way is good, it will prosper and not die out.

Yang Her, a medical professional in private practice, stated: “I am a Republican and my wife is a Republican, but it doesn’t matter because whoever is just and a moral person, we’ll vote for them.” His vote for president did not follow his party identification: I voted for Obama because like I said, politics is about who has power and control. The white person wants to be in control all the time. Obama is

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mixed, he’s outside of the box, the white people box. He’s not just American. All the world wants something to change in America and it is the fate of the world that wants the world to change so that’s why Obama’s idea of change got people really excited. And it changed all of a sudden Obama is now in control. . . . I didn’t choose Obama just because of that. As long as someone is just and has morals, can lead the people, has the love and passion for humankind to move forward, it doesn’t matter what race he is. If he has the capability, is honest and has integrity, peaceful, calm, and a strong leader—it doesn’t matter what race or gender—I will vote for them.

Pheng Lee is an unmarried man, born in Laos. He held a bachelor’s degree and worked as a home health worker. He was not interested in political participation because the two-party system limits his choices: In all honesty I don’t because of the way the political system is set up, I really have a dislike for it. . . . I really don’t like the two-party system. . . . Because you know how they say you can believe whatever you want, they have the green party and all sorts of different parties you can follow, but those groups already have it hard enough participating in politics. Even just within the judicial system, every judge is referred to as a Republican or Democrat.

John Fang, married with four children, is an insurance agent who had finished two years of community college. Thirty years of age, he was born in Thailand and had lived in a refugee camp for eight years. He said he had little interest in politics, not “touching” or “paying attention to it,” but if he were to vote for a candidate, he would value one who was “honest, considerate, smart, friendly.” Thoua Her is a graphic artist. She said: I’ve only voted for Barack before. I don’t really care about voting because it doesn’t really matter to me. It’s just white person after white person, how are they going to help us? They don’t even have a background similar to us. A lot of the population is middle and poor class. Barack grew up poor and his life was similar to us.

As in responses from nonprofessional participants, it seemed common for professionals contacted from business directories to express support for Obama’s candidacy because they felt he identified with their minority racial-ethnic background and the economic concerns of many Hmong

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Americans. Because this same sentiment was expressed by leaders of the Lao Family Community associations in Fresno and St. Paul, which have a history of affiliations with the Republican-oriented traditional leadership of the communities, it is not surprising that identification with Obama’s candidacy extended across occupational lines.

Conclusion In the interviews of Hmong American leaders and community members, there were important common themes in responses. As each of the elected representatives whom we interviewed (i.e., Blong Xiong, Mee Moua, and Cy Thao) pointed out, a sense of heightened importance has developed concerning the right to vote because it represented a passage out of political history of social and political marginalization. Before gaining US citizenship, the Hmong “never had a country” in the identity narrative at the core of the notion of freedom aspirations. Having the right to cast a ballot as a US citizen gives Hmong Americans a sense of dignity and a voice in the electoral process of a national community for the first time. Many grassroots respondents expressed a desire to participate in elections and associated doing so with American citizenship. Also common was a recognition of the need to cross significant hurdles before full parity of participation in society will be attained. Poverty and joblessness emerged as strong themes in the interviews, posing obstacles to such parity. Considering the high rates of poverty among Hmong Americans compared to other Asian Americans, it is not surprising that they expressed feeling a more acute sense of economic hardship, particularly given the status of affluent residents of the same city or perceptions of customary American lifestyles. Concern about racial discrimination was also a recurring theme, but perceptions of discrimination attributed its source not only to race but also to poverty. Many Hmong American immigrants do not understand or accept the multidimensional meaning of “liberal” and “conservative” ideological categories in American politics. As a community leader who owns a small business in Wisconsin noted, of great concern to Hmong Americans is “bringing food to the table,” and this is a reason they would vote for Democrats. At the same time, for many elders their military background and certain

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aspects of their lifestyles would otherwise make them inclined to see themselves as “conservative.” In this respect, community leaders have learned to talk about the multiple dimensions of the so-called liberal-conservative divide, and distinguishing those policies, but this makes American politics hard to understand. In the 2008 and 2012 national elections, it appears nonetheless that the priority voters placed on an antipoverty agenda led the majority of Hmong Americans to favor the Democratic presidential candidate. In light of these sentiments and shared notions of the qualities of a good leader, there was a predominant sentiment: in selecting a candidate for whom to vote, the leader’s dedication to serving the poor was critical. This helps explain the preference for the Democratic Party even among leaders of traditionally conservative ethnic associations, particularly the Lao Family Community associations. The widely held notion that government and leaders should help the most impoverished members of society is clear and straightforward in the interviews of adult refugees, and this is potentially a source of commonality with economically disadvantaged persons of all races. Considering the value placed on participation in electoral politics, the Hmong American identity narrative can potentially enrich public discourse in cities where they are politically active. Their journey from life on the margins of nation-states in Asia to citizenship in the United States has been fueled by long-standing aspirations for participatory freedom and parity. The lessons elders and younger members of the community disseminate about this collective experience can inject a fresh perspective into conversations about the nature of political leadership in localities with large gaps between the wealthy and poor. There is at the same time uneven and limited understanding about the constitutionally mandated role of elected representatives in the American political system among the refugee adults who have limited English proficiency. Without further education about American politics and laws, there is bound to be some disappointment and misunderstanding when elected leaders identify themselves as representatives “who happen to be” Hmong American, rather than representatives who define their political commitments and responsibilities primarily by ethnic obligations. The strong ethically defined social obligations and compact infrastructure of the clan system facilitate self-organization for political advocacy in the electoral process. Compared to a more loosely committed and diffuse

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social organization, the clan system is easier to mobilize. Two impediments to self-organization may emerge at any particular time, however. One is heightened competition between clans when more than one decides to field or support a different candidate running for the same office. Other intraethnic conflicts may also be intensified by the close-knit character of the ethnic communities, as a community leader in Hickory suggested. The tightly organized clan system also intensifies the tensions that inevitably arise when young, US-educated Hmong Americans begin to value the autonomy of their own decision making in politics and no longer defer to the opinions of clan leaders. The challenge facing Hmong American communities as they move beyond the initial steps of electoral participation is to begin to adapt the positive aspects of communal responsibility—or a sense of community—to an American culture that strongly values individualism. A continually renewed Hmong American identity needs both preservation and adaptation in this environment where disconnections between older patriarchal and newer individualist norms create stress in families, clans, and communities. In each local community, public schools and neighborhood-based education on inclusive citizenship norms help support the emergence of new leaders with sensibilities and knowledge to carry out the necessary cultural translations and education.

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Human Rights Advocacy Across Borders

Beginning the in the late 1980s, Hmong community leaders organized a series of advocacy campaigns bringing attention to the human rights of the Hmong in the United States and abroad. Particularly vulnerable to human rights abuses were the Hmong who had taken sides with US forces during the war and continued to suffer the consequences of these actions, considered traitorous by the Pathet Lao government. After providing an overview of US-based campaigns focused on protecting the rights of Hmong refugees abroad, this chapter describes an advocacy campaign initiated by Hmong Americans to protest the desecration of Hmong graves in Thailand. The project engaged the cooperation of elected officials, community leaders, academic researchers, and human rights advocates. These participants constructed a legal argument based on international human rights law and presented it to United Nations officials in 2010. Their deliberations entailed an intergenerational collaboration of Hmong Americans in the public narration of an identity story that highlights the cultural rights of an indigenous minority in Thailand.

The Hmong Refugees in Thailand Framing the human rights claims of the Hmong in Thailand in terms of rights of an indigenous people helped underscore the importance of enabling the Hmong to preserve and practice their own culture. The Hmong 185

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in Asia had not defined practices of ancestor worship or animism as a religion. The defense of burial practices and protection of graves against desecration can nonetheless be defended in international law by reference to religious rights of an indigenous people to practice veneration or worship of ancestors, which are rooted in Confucian traditions as well as animism. The historical development of the Hmong in Asia fits the definition of an indigenous people from a landmark 1980s study by Jose Martinez-Cobo, the UN special rapporteur who reported to the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, which includes indigenous communities, peoples, and nations. Anaya writes that the ­Martinez-Cobo study became a “standard reference for discussion of the subject of indigenous peoples within the U.N. system.”1 Indigenous peoples are, according to this definition, those which having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and precolonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of societies now prevailing in those territories, or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop, and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal systems.2

Scott has offered a provocative account of the indigeneity of the ethnic minority groups living in the highlands of Southeast Asia, whom Thai authorities refer to as “hill tribes,” including the Hmong of Laos and Thailand. Scott views indigeneity as a framework to “dream about rights.”3 In Scott’s account, members of hill tribe communities developed a way of life and art of politics based on “ungovernability,” and they seized whatever ideological materials were available to them to make their rights claims. In some circumstances the ideologies were based on messianic themes found in legends; in other contexts they were constructed in the framework of Christianity brought by missionaries who wove together messianic themes from Hmong legends and a Christian belief system.4 Scott’s argument illuminates how the minority groups developed an ingenuity that leveraged a marginalized status in politics. Under colonial rule and the constitutional monarchy in Laos, a line of Hmong leaders held governmental posts and used these to act as brokers between the Hmong ethnic minority and gov-

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ernmental authorities, as was discussed in Chapter 1. Today, it is common for Hmong Americans to celebrate the talent of these political leaders and point to the precedent they set for Hmong community leaders to run for political office. Nonetheless, Scott’s insight about indigeneity as a framework for dreaming about rights points to the power of this ideational construct when tied to human rights claims. Indigeneity helps frame a story of collective struggle to attain human dignity, freedom, and fair treatment. Indigeneity also helps frame a story of empowerment in the face of cultural and political domination, even though designation of the Hmong as an indigenous people is not widely accepted and does not fit the history of the Hmong in America. In seeking protection for Hmong refugees who remained in Thailand, Hmong American leaders have learned to adeptly manage the levers of legislative politics. These leaders have appealed to lawmakers in Congress and to legislators in states with concentrated populations of Hmong, such as California and Minnesota. They were supported by broad unity in Hmong American communities around the goal of protecting Hmong living in Laos and Thailand from human rights abuses. The US-based advocates told their version of the Secret War story with some success to help win allies among a handful of American legislators, although US government officials had very little leverage to be able to influence the treatment of the Hmong abroad. The lobbying efforts had increased in energy and sophistication by the 1990s. The leaders of several Hmong organizations cultivated relationships with legislators whose districts contained sizable Hmong constituencies, educating them about US obligations to the Hmong war veterans and families. The advocates also identified legislators who would be most sympathetic to the Hmong for a variety of reasons, such as their human rights commitment or interest in helping Vietnam War veterans. With the help of these allies, by the mid-1990s, Hmong rights advocates had successfully placed their concerns about refugee rights on the congressional agenda. They gained the admission of several thousands of Hmong refugees from Thailand as a result of the lobbying campaign. Advocacy for the human rights of Hmong refugees in Thailand unified the Hmong community across generational lines and partisan affiliations. The Hmong advocates worked to win support from a bipartisan coalition of legislators in Congress, but at a crucial juncture in the 104th Congress,

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when the Republicans controlled a majority in both congressional houses for the first time since the 1950s, several Republicans played a crucial role in opposing the Clinton administration’s support for UN-sponsored agreements with Thailand and Laos to forcibly repatriate Hmong refugees who had remained in Thailand after the war. The State Department had concluded that the Hmong refugees need not fear persecution if they returned to Laos because the country was not systematically violating the human rights of the Hmong who had sided with the United States against the reigning Pathet Lao government. The Hmong in America and rights advocates had strong evidence to the contrary, however. In an attempt the slow the continuing movement of refugees from Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia to Thailand, the UN High Commissioner for Refugee Rights had instituted a new program to screen refugees in 1989. Supported by the United States, the program allowed certified asylum seekers to resettle from temporary refugee camps. But other refugees had to return to their home countries, a process called “repatriation,” which was supposed to occur under a guarantee of safety. Laos had agreed to repatriate the sixty thousand Lao refugees living in Thailand, including several thousand Hmong people. Very few of the Lao refugees, however, were willing to return voluntarily. Pressure to resettle the refugees grew as the Thai government worked to close its remaining refugee camps. Fear about safety in Laos spread among the Hmong refugees in 1993, when a former Hmong soldier disappeared in the Laotian capital after returning from Thailand. The disappearance was widely publicized because the US embassy had asked the particular soldier to return to Laos as a model, supposedly demonstrating the safety of such a decision. The conflict between Congress and the Clinton administration sharpened when both houses of the 104th Congress appropriated funds to immediately resettle the Hmong refugees who remained in Thailand in the United States, but President Clinton declared he would veto this legislation. The Hmong American advocates displayed great energy in lobbying Congress. One strong grassroots campaign led to the convening of a congressional hearing in early 1994, when hundreds of Hmong American constituents arrived wearing traditional Hmong clothing. Although witnesses agreed on the principle that the United States held some responsibility for the fate of refugees who had fought as US allies, there were two diametrically opposed evaluations of the situation the refugees faced. Pobzeb Vang,

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chairman of the Lao Human Rights Council, claimed that four thousand refugees forced to repatriate to Laos since 1991 had been persecuted and in some cases killed by the Laos regime. Contradicting Pobzeb Vang, the American diplomat Phyllis Oakley said that the returned Hmong refugees had not been abused in any serious way.5 In the autumn of 1994, Hmong leaders of a refugee camp in Thailand sent a request to Congress. Signed by five thousand individuals, the petition asked the United States to intervene to stop the forced repatriation to Laos. The Thai government arrested six of the petitioners, threatening further arrests if more refugees protested the repatriation. In response, several prominent US legislators protested Thailand’s action, issuing a letter to the US secretary of state. The signers included Senators Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA), Daniel P. Moynihan (D-NY), Paul Simon (D-IL), and Alan K. Simpson (R-WY).6 Despite these protests, the Hmong communities were disappointed to learn that the United Nations had sponsored an agreement that would return eight thousand Hmong refugees to Laos by the end of 1994, and an additional four thousand by the middle of 1995. Moreover, closure of the only two remaining refugee camps for the Hmong in Thailand was scheduled by the end of 1994. Few of the Hmong refugees in Thailand agreed to return to Laos, however, and as the Thai prepared to close the camps, the crisis led to a turnaround in American policy.7 Pressure mounted on the Clinton administration when a Wisconsin congressional representative, Steve Gunderson, whose district included several thousand Hmong residents, went on a fact-finding mission to Thailand with three members of the Lao Veterans of America and Philip Smith, director of the Center for Public Policy Analysis. Gunderson issued a report stating that “the systematic forced and coercive repatriation of Hmong and Lao refugees from Thailand to Laos is a disgrace to the United States and its Vietnam veterans.”8 Moreover, Gunderson’s report described the Ban Na Pho refugee camp as “a concentration camp” for forced repatriation, and charged that the State Department knew of the conditions and “did little to improve them.”9 The delegation also visited the Buddhist temple of Wat Tham Krabok, which was also serving as an unofficial place of asylum where a Buddhist monk had organized shelter and other services for about ten thousand Hmong refugees. The report called on Thailand to stop repatriation and to reopen

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the refugee camps so that the United States could screen refugees for settlement, and for the United States to reduce economic aid to Laos until progress in its human rights record could be seen. The Hmong Americans’ persistent lobbying finally bore fruit in 1996, when the United States agreed to accept fifteen thousand Hmong refugees from Thailand. In addition, the Thai government’s plan to force repatriation of seven thousand Hmong to Laos was halted. Over the following years, as the official refugee camps were closed in Thailand, the Hmong who remained moved to temporary camps or to Wat Tham Krabok, the Buddhist monastery. In 2003, when plans to close the monastery were imminent, the United States agreed to admit the remaining refugees who had registered there by the autumn of that year. This led to the last wave of Hmong refugees to the United States in 2005, most of whom settled in California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, where many already had relatives. Still, several thousand Hmong from Laos remained in Thailand. Some were refugees from the Vietnam War and had moved to rural areas or residences in the cities or lived in hiding. Beginning in 2003, however, newly arrived Hmong from Laos went to Huay Nam Khao camp in Petchabun Province to seek asylum. Although some sought protection as war refugees, according to screening by the Thai army, most at Huay Nam Khao sought asylum for other reasons, including a desire to improve their economic situation or to join relatives in the United States. The Thai government therefore classified persons in the latter category as economic migrants, not refugees. In Nong Khai, a detention center near the Thailand-Laos border, however, the United Nations had certified that 158 Hmong had legitimate reasons for seeking political asylum. The official Thai policy was not to recognize any international obligations to protect refugees, and these Hmong refugees were considered illegal migrants. In late December 2009, the refugees at Huay Nam Khao in Petchabun and at Nong Khai were forcibly repatriated to Laos. The repatriation was carried out jointly by the governments of Laos and Thailand. At Huay Nam Khao, during the previous four years, the four thousand Hmong refugees and migrants had been denied access to UN staff who wanted to evaluate claims for protection for fear of political persecution, and there was consequently no way to evaluate Thailand’s assertion that all were economic migrants. While this was a flouting of international refugee conventions,

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international observers were even more disturbed by the deportation of 158 refugees at Nong Khai, including ninety-seven children who had already received UN protection papers.10 The deportation drew criticism from many quarters, including the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the US State Department, the president of the European Union, international humanitarian groups, and Hmong Americans and their allies in the United States. Despite this, regional politics and cooperation between the Laotian and Thai governments precluded a policy reversal. Representatives from both countries explained that a bilateral agreement had been reached, under which the Laos government had assured the Thai that the Hmong would not face persecution. The Thais claimed that they would continually monitor treatment of the Hmong once they were resettled in Laos. Although US legislators and members of the executive branch were subject to this limited but passionate advocacy by rights advocates at home, the governments of Thailand and Laos had no set of laws that would hold them accountable to protect the rights of the Hmong refugees. Nor was there a democratic system that allowed public support to be voiced with any force. As a result, these governments were not accountable to international norms of human rights and refugee protection. In fact, the explanations given by the Thai and Lao governments for the forcible repatriation showed that the refugee situation became a political bargaining chip. The potential of US-based lobbying for the rights of refugees in this instance was dissolved by forces in international and Southeast Asian politics, which clearly create environmental mechanisms that operate independently of the political mechanisms that Hmong advocates could control. As economic development in Laos fell behind the progress of Vietnam, its neighbor and political ally, the Laotian government moved to open its trading relationships and integrate its economy with regional and international trading partners, a process Vietnam had begun more than a decade before. In an agreement seen as a step toward improved trade and political relations with Thailand, Laos gave assurances that it would protect the rights of Hmong if Thailand forcibly repatriated them. The fate of Hmong refugees and migrants in Thailand remained unresolved more than thirty years after the end of the Vietnam War because some Hmong were opponents of the Laotian government and lived in Thailand; at the same time,

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others had crossed the border from Laos to Thailand as economic migrants, hoping they could follow the path of Hmong who had resettled in the United States even though they did not fear political persecution.

Shared Human Rights Visions Across Borders The Hmong American political initiatives were motivated by a shared understanding of Hmong interests extending beyond US borders back to Laos and Thailand. The necessity of this vision across national borders is evident from their very recent refugee experience. The Hmong refugee families all left relatives behind after being displaced by war and political conflicts from their homeland. The sense of responsibility of family members to care for one another lies at the very center of Hmong culture and structure, which is based on the clan as the primary unit. According to the animist belief system, caring for relatives is not only a responsibility while they are living; families honor the spirits of ancestors by tending to graves and ceremonial artifacts in the ancestors’ original home village. On several occasions since settlement, moreover, the Hmong in America also felt a sense of political urgency to extend assistance to relatives in Laos and Thailand because they believed their physical security or right to freely practice Hmong religious rites had come under threat. As an indigenous ethnic minority, the Hmong in Thailand had few protections of their cultural rights and lacked political representation in institutions of governance. From their position as legal residents and citizens in the United States, some Hmong American families tried to assist family members abroad, hoping that their access to US government officials could increase their leverage in the international politics of human rights. Many had a stable source of income, and even if it was meager by the standards of most Americans, it was common for some families to send back some money to relatives in Laos or Thailand who were in greater need. But economic remittances, while helpful, have not proved sufficient to lift the Hmong of Southeast Asia from a status where fundamental human rights are denied. Because the Hmong refugees who left Laos to seek safe haven in Thailand have been unprotected by their country of origin as war refugees and at the same time, a people indigenous to Southeast and East Asia, they are vulnerable to the dehumanization rationalized by a marketized concept of

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human rights. As a consequence of this dehumanization, political leaders, intellectuals, and activists in the Hmong community have set out to construct a narrative of the Hmong American experience that emphasizes the right to dignity as human beings as the core to a political and civil rights agenda. In the course of defining the strategic goals and means to unify members of Hmong communities spread across the United States, it became evident to leaders that the centuries-long quest for recognition and freedom had to be expressed in a coherent political story understandable to members of the community and also to outsiders. In the politics of Hmong American identity, such a story publicly expresses how the Hmong view the ethical underpinnings of their constitution as a people, including why preservation of a culture and a tradition of freedom seeking is justified. From the work of an emerging generation of college-educated Hmong Americans, parts of this story began to find moving expression in literary and performing arts communities. The efforts of Hmong American political leaders to craft a coherent story expressing the commonality of aspirations for freedom of a people with families divided across the continents and American states require a joining of politics and cultural work that is still in progress. One difficulty faced by any Hmong leader who tries to construct such a narrative lies in the intersecting transnational and domestic political concerns of Hmong American. As reported in Chapter 5, the Hmong individuals who participated in the interviews all deeply value American citizenship, which is embedded in a nation-centered system of citizenship laws governing the relations between nation-states in the international system. But the Hmong Americans yearn for freedom not only for the Hmong living in the United States but also for Hmong people in their countries of origin. Hmong Americans have sought to construct an identity narrative that emphasizes their right to human dignity above all. This analysis focuses on a specific human rights violation that occurred in Thailand in 2005, when Hmong American families in several US cities learned that several hundred Hmong graves had been exhumed on the grounds of a Buddhist monastery that had formerly been used as a refugee camp. No advance notice of the exhumations was given to the families; in some cases, the corpses were desecrated. The exhumations violated the religious beliefs of many Hmong families, causing physical and emotional trauma. According to eyewitness accounts, the Thai government assisted in this exhumation. Leaders of the

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Hmong community immediately began efforts to recover control of their relatives’ remains, obtain legal remedies, and receive a promise from the Thai government that exhumation of Hmong graves would not take place again. The human rights case generated by the exhumations sheds light on the nature of a transnational politics that aims to protect the cultural rights and religious freedom of refugee groups with indigenous cultural traditions in Southeast Asia. The response of governmental authorities in Thailand illustrates the limitations of a marketized concept of citizenship, which is reduced to cost-benefit logic and as a result constrains the ability of social actors to press a human rights claim.11 When confronted with a request by the Hmong in America to preserve the integrity of burial grounds for their relatives in Thailand in the future, the Thai government concluded that the cost of denying the request was negligible in political terms; in contrast, enjoining the actions of the private parties who had exhumed the Hmong graves would have greater costs. The Thai government had never recognized the refugee status of the Hmong who had fled from Laos to Thailand for fear of persecution; from the stance of the Thai government, the Hmong were “illegal migrants.” The Thai government’s withholding of political and civil rights from the Hmong refugees can be explained by its calculation of the relative costs and benefits that the Thai state would receive by recognizing their human rights claims. If the Thai government were to recognize the refugee status of the Hmong and provide them safe haven, it is likely that more refugees from war-torn neighboring countries, including Laos and Burma, would learn of this humanitarian policy and cross into Thailand. When the Hmong were housed in refugee camps after the Vietnam War, in fact, the Thai government never officially acknowledged their refugee status, nor did it ever take steps to recognize their civil rights in Thailand. The Hmong were responsible for “governing” their own affairs in the camps, electing their own leaders and regulating civil affairs through an internal system of courts, while the Thai military policed the border separating the camps from Thai society. Whether the Hmong refugees would be afforded membership in a polity was not so much a matter for ethical consideration as one in which the value of granting rights was compared to the costs to the state. The logic of quid pro quo exchange extends beyond the realm of international relations and refugee matters, however. As an indigenous people residing in Thailand, the Hmong practice a religion that differs from that

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of the Buddhist majority. When groups representing different religious traditions compete for resources, political leaders prospectively incur “costs,” such as a loss of support or favors, by accommodating a small ethnic minority that has virtually no political representation in the government, such as the Thai Hmong who did not cross the Laos-Thailand border as refugees but lived in Thailand before the outbreak of the Vietnam War. Where the protection of the rights of the indigenous Thai Hmong and of Lao Hmong refugees is politically costly, authorities may even go so far as to cheaply value human lives, as when governments weigh the “costs” and “benefits” of failing to protect whole communities of people. As formal communications from the Thai government stated, the legal prerogative of the abbot of Tham Krabok, owner of the monastery, to control the use of the land on which the Hmong were buried outweighed any claim by the Hmong families; furthermore, the government claimed that the practice of burying the dead on “hillsides and high ground . . . posed an environmental risk to local populations, including the Hmong themselves.”12

Grave Desecration in Thailand The Thai Buddhist monastery Wat Tham Krabok was the burial site for about two thousand Hmong refugees from Thailand. According to reports given to UN human rights officials, 691 bodies were exhumed. All of these were cremated, except for 211 corpses still being stored at a cemetery. At the time of the exhumations in 2005, several hundred Hmong refugees still were sheltered temporarily at the monastery.13 Officials of the monastery offered as the reason for the exhumation their belief that the graves were contaminating the water supply of the monastery, although no report was submitted of these environmental effects when requested. The graves of ethnic Chinese in the same vicinity were not disturbed. In responding to the protest of relatives of the deceased, the Thai government claimed that the Tham Krabok Foundation had initiated a project to convert the area on which the Hmong were buried into a site for religious activities, a public park, and a museum, which required relocation of the graves.14 The exhumations were conducted by two private Buddhist foundations without prior notice to the Hmong relatives. The manner in which the

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exhumations took place was particularly offensive to the relatives of the deceased because the bones of the corpses were removed from the flesh and cremated according to Buddhist traditions. Cremation is contrary to the Hmong animist belief system. According to a common animist belief of the Hmong, each individual has three souls. The Hmong religion states that one of the souls acts as a guardian for the family residing in the home of its descendants. Symonds also has stated that this soul “stays in the land of darkness as part of the ancestral mass. . . . [I]t is the part of a person that is ritually fed and cared for by the descendants.”15 The second soul is sent to heaven and is later reincarnated into a living object. The soul’s route to reincarnation depends on how the person lived his or her life. It is also the same soul that is released at the tso plig ceremony. Last, the third soul must stay with the body at the grave.16 This soul remains at the grave because it is forever connected to the body as a reminder to the spirit that its home is now the grave and not the home of its descendants.17 Usually lasting from four to thirteen days, the ceremonies require the performance of rituals that are remembered and reenacted through successive generations of the clan. It is the responsibility of living relatives to guide the spirit of the deceased to the ancestor’s village through the performance of a funeral song. In addition, family members sacrifice animals, such as water buffalo, cows, and pigs. They clothe the body of the deceased in funeral clothing for the journey of the spirit. If the grave is disturbed after burial, the surviving relatives will suffer physical and emotional harm. Some Hmong refugees at the site recorded some of the exhumations on videotaped film and sent it back to relatives in the United States. In fact, the film confirms reports that the bodies were removed from graves, dismembered, and defleshed. After witnessing the film, the relatives of some of the deceased immediately sent their written protest, requesting that the US Department of State investigate the situation through diplomatic channels.18 After news about the grave desecration reached Hmong communities outside Thailand, community leaders in the United States, France, and Canada held meetings to hear and give voice to family members’ grievances at the United Nations and to Thai officials, the US State Department, and American state and local governing bodies. In September 2007, two delegations traveled to Thailand, coordinating efforts to establish a working relationship with the Thai government and seek a resolution of the grave

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desecration issue. The delegation of the National Hmong Graves Desecration Committee included Hmong American community leaders from thirteen states, Senator Norm Coleman, and Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers. The city of St. Paul sent a four-person delegation, including Minnesota state senators Mee Moua and Lawrence Pogemiller, community activist Yee Chang, and a representative of the mayor of St. Paul. These advocacy efforts were important not only because many relatives of the grave desecration victims live in the United States. The Hmong refugees who left Laos and live in Thailand are not guaranteed protection under UN refugee conventions because Thailand does not recognize those international laws. The Hmong American citizens of the United States hoped that their voice, when joined by elected government officials in the United States, including US senators and mayors, would exert sufficient pressure on the Thai government to win guarantees that the desecration of Hmong graves would not reoccur in the future, and some settlement could be reached about the remains that would help bring spiritual peace to family members. No such guarantees or redress of the grievances were offered by the Thai government. The written record of communications between relatives of the deceased Hmong, UN human rights officials, and the Thai government reflect conflicting accounts of exactly what occurred during the exhumations. One report was submitted to the UN Human Rights Council by James Anaya, appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to the mandate as special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples. In Anaya’s report published by the Human Rights Council, he noted that “in its response, the Government has stated that the human remains were handled and treated respectfully and ceremoniously. However, according to the information received, in a number of cases bodies were mishandled and even desecrated. Allegedly, the heads were chopped off and thrown in boiling water, and internal organs were removed from the bodies and tossed on the ground, where dogs would sometimes pick them up and take them back to the camp.”19 According to reports by Hmong refugees at the site, the Thai military assisted in the exhumations by stationing 170 soldiers and 42 Thai government officials there. When some Hmong family members tried to stop the exhumations, Thai soldiers intervened, often forcing the family members at gunpoint to allow the digging to continue. The Thai government has not acknowledged any such role in the exhumation.

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In addition, Hmong relatives of the deceased claimed that the seven hundred Hmong refugees who continued to stay at the monastery as late as 2005 did so mainly because of their medical conditions. Poor health may have prevented some of them from protesting the exhumations. But in addition, some alleged that there was not stronger protest when the exhumations occurred because refugees feared any protest would jeopardize their chances to resettle to the United States. These refugees believed that the Thai government supported the exhumations because they found the signature of a Thai government official on an informational flyer posted after the start of the exhumations. What is clear, however, is that the Thai government viewed the matter to have come to a close in July 2008, after continuing allegations that the Hmong relatives were suffering ongoing harm, which warranted provision of some remedy on the part of the Thai government. As the special rapporteur noted, “The Thai Government stated that the ‘allegations have already been overtaken by events.’”20 Most important, by taking the stance that the Hmong refugees were illegal migrants and by not recognizing UN refugee conventions, the Thai government removed itself from any responsibility to remedy the harm suffered by the Hmong families.21 As a consequence, leaders in the Hmong community and their allies sought to construct a legal argument based on international human rights conventions, which could be used to pressure the Thai government to take some accountability for the exhumations. In the course of deliberations over the contours and details of this argument, important themes of a Hmong American narrative of their own history and aspirations took shape. Cultural Rights as Human Rights

Faced with the dominance of a market-based framework for conceptualizing their human rights claims, Hmong American leaders have sought to construct a narrative expressing their own concept of freedom. Political activists among the generation of Hmong Americans educated in the United States have set their sights on constructing a story that can serve as a cultural resource for Hmong of different generations, which poses special challenges. How can the cultural beliefs rooted in ancient societies remain meaningful to a new generation of US-born Hmong? How can the right to

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practice traditional spiritual beliefs be understood as a fundamental human right by members of the broader American public, as well as by an international audience? For the Hmong, who historically lived as ethnic minorities in territories controlled by dominant ethnic groups in China and Southeast Asia, religious freedom is a core aspiration motivating the collective struggle for survival as a group. Experiences of religious suppression and humiliation are deeply etched in historical memory. In fact, Hmong scholars have described the Hmong exhumations as one of the most feared forms of religious and ethnic persecution since ancient times in China.22 The memory of destruction of Hmong grave sites in China weighed on Hmong Americans living in the United States when they heard news of the exhumations at Wat Tham Krabok, which is owned by Buddhists who are ethnic Chinese, and that graves of deceased Chinese persons were left intact. This history of hostility directed by ethnic Hmong set the stage for legal advocates to place the indigenous status of the Hmong in Asia at the forefront of the human rights claim, but civil and political rights were also at stake in this case. Although Thailand has not signed on to any UN refugee conventions, it is party to international human rights agreements. These, however, lack the force to bind states’ compliance, representing only a standard to which state and civil society actors can hold governments accountable in the court of public opinion. Thailand is party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which declares that states have an obligation both to guard against acts by private parties when these acts infringe on human rights and to provide remedies for infringements. The rights specified include the right to religious freedom, culture, privacy, family, and equal protection under the law. According to article 27 of this covenant: “In those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities exist, persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language.”23 A state’s obligation to protect the rights conferred under article 27 extends to all individuals within a state’s jurisdiction, not merely to citizens. In addition, Thailand voted in favor of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007 by the UN General Assembly. In adopting the declaration, 143 countries voted in favor, 4 countries against (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United States), and 11 abstained

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(Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burundi, Colombia, Georgia, Kenya, Nigeria, Russian Federation, Samoa, and Ukraine).24 To clarify the classification of the Hmong people in Thailand under the terms of these international conventions, the special rapporteur stated that the Hmong are “undoubtedly indigenous to parts of Southeast Asia and have found themselves in conditions similar to those of others around the world who are identified, and self-identify, as indigenous.” The special rapporteur also noted “that he was sure that the Government would agree that, in any event, the Hmong’s refugee status does not alter their entitlement to the enjoyment of fundamental human rights,” including those incorporated in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.25 Article 11 of the declaration states the following: 1. Indigenous peoples have the right to practice and revitalize their cultural traditions and customs. This includes the right to maintain, protect and develop the past, present and future manifestations of their cultures, such as archaeological and historical sites, artifacts, designs, ceremonies, technologies and visual and performing arts and literature. 2. States shall provide redress through effective mechanisms, which may include restitution, developed in conjunction with indigenous peoples, with respect to their cultural, intellectual, religious and spiritual property taken without their free, prior and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions and customs. The nonbinding status of these agreements explains the nonresponsiveness of Thailand when the special rapporteur urged the country to affirm its “duties to secure the enjoyment of the human rights of the Hmong people who have lived under its jurisdiction and to provide remedies for any violation of those human rights” and “to take as appropriate the steps necessary to provide redress for the Hmong families who may have suffered or continue to suffer harm from the exhumation of their relatives’ graves.”26 Testimony of Relatives in the United States

Perhaps the most important outcome of attempts at public reconciliation, however, would be the recognition of protections of Hmong burial rights in international law. Barbara Frey, director of the Human Rights Program

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at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, and Mee Moua, Minnesota state senator, worked together to craft a legal argument claiming that the grave exhumation was a violation of the universal human right of minorities to freely practice their religion. At a town hall meeting held in St. Paul on March 2, 2006, they collected information from 211 relatives of the deceased about the burial and exhumations. Barbara Frey and Senator Moua presented the legal argument on several occasions to the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights, as well as the Thai government and the US State Department. In March 2008, Barbara Frey and Mee Moua asked the author to assist their efforts by finding several bilingual Hmong students from Carleton College to gather testimony from 211 relatives in preparation for a public consultation on the case before the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people. Two students prepared for their work in the field by investigating the cultural meaning of Hmong burial rites in the anthropological literature. During the summer of 2008, two enrolled students and two recent graduates of Carleton collected testimony from the relatives of nine deceased persons whose graves had been exhumed in Thailand. The methodology is described in the section “Notes on Method” at the end of this chapter.27 It was important to find a way to allow the victims to tell their stories in their own words. Collecting their testimony not only created an oral history but also enabled young Hmong Americans to participate in a narrativebuilding project. They served as recorders and interpreters of the family’s narrative, thereby assisting Hmong elders in the telling of their story in a way understandable to a multiethnic audience that was not familiar with ancient Hmong belief systems and to officials in various international agencies and governments. At the consultative hearing, Vang Xiong X. Toyed, chairman of the National Hmong Grave Desecration Committee, recounted the history of its advocacy for a just resolution of the grave desecration incident. Two shamans recognized as experts in cultural practices spoke, explaining the Hmong cosmological view of burial rites. According to their animist belief system, the spirit world and the physical world are intertwined.28 At a Hmong funeral, it is necessary to reconcile the spirit of the deceased and its relationship to the living relatives, which is accomplished through specific burial practices.

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The relatives of the deceased described several other features of the burial rites that had been performed. If the deceased held a high status in the family, the surviving family members conducted a relatively elaborate ceremony, depending on what they could afford to spend. If the funeral is for a grandfather, for example, the funeral is typically longer and gathers together more mourners than a funeral for a small child. The cost and number of animals sacrificed and the type of burial clothing and other items left with the body also reflected the status of the deceased in the family and clan. During the funeral, the number of animals that are slaughtered and the amount of items provided for the deceased also depend on the status of the deceased. The immediate relatives of the deceased carry on a relationship with the spirits of the deceased person long after the funeral. Surviving members of the family carry on postfuneral ceremonies, believing that harm will come to the descendants of the deceased if these are not performed properly.29 In meetings of the victims in Fresno, St. Paul, and other cities where relatives of the deceased lived, community leaders asked them what actions would help bring peace, if not full healing. Some families desired reburial; others wanted a memorial to be constructed for all the victims in Thailand at the burial site; others wanted remains brought to America or monetary compensation. With the guidance of Mee Moua, the Minnesota state senator who had been working in St. Paul to advocate for the families of the deceased, the research team wrote questions that would take measure of harm in both qualitative and quantitative terms. Asked to describe the funeral ceremonies that took place prior to and at the time of the burial of their relatives at Wat Tham Krabok, family members provided details to the best of their memory about the possible cooperation of the monastery’s abbot in giving permission to bury their relative; an estimate of the material costs originally incurred by the family in sacrificing animals for the death rituals, purchasing ceremonial clothing for the deceased person, and purchasing land and coffin for burial; a description of the emotional effects of the grave desecration on living relatives; and the cost of arranging for spiritual healing ceremonies in the aftermath of the exhumations. The testimony of relatives of victims of the grave desecration was summarized by a member of the interviewer team in a report presented at a consultative hearing before the UN special rapporteur James Anaya. The

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interviewees were all residents of St. Paul and part of a group of more than a hundred family members whose relatives’ graves had been exhumed. In an organized effort to put an end to ongoing grave desecration and gain reparations and recognition of protected burial grounds and rites in international law, Hmong leaders brought the matter before the United Nations, as well as the Thai and US governments. These leaders began crafting a narrative of the suppression of Hmong cultural rights by soliciting the views of affected members of the community. In the responses of elders and members of the younger generation to the grave desecration case, it is clear that certain fundamental Hmong cultural practices and belief systems were violated. The action sparked the retelling of a particularistic story of rituals and values that were little understood outside the Hmong community but needed to be better understood so they could be protected. A younger generation of Hmong Americans found their own voice in helping tell the particular story in a way that placed it within a tradition of human rights advocacy for indigenous religions. The younger Hmong Americans were persuaded by community leaders that telling the story in this way would not only gain recognition and respect for cultural rights but also help overcome the misunderstanding and isolation of Hmong families in societies where Western cultural traditions predominate. In the Hmong American community, moreover, meaningful talk about the identity story occurs not only in public forums but also in private spaces, such as in household family discussions and through artistic forms of expression. It is particularly important to try to capture the stories told orally in a variety of settings because most of the first generation of Hmong refugees came from a preliterate society, where traditions were passed down from one generation to the next through a complex oral literature consisting of myths, songs, poetry, and epic narratives. The interviewing project prepared the relatives of grave desecration victims for telling their own story in public testimony. It thus entailed weaving together a narrative of one part of the transnational experience of the Hmong through a collaborative process. As Melissa Harris-Lacewell has shown in her book Barbershops, Bibles, and BET, ideological strands of thinking among people in marginalized communities are not constructed just by elites; they are conceived and woven together through the everyday talk of ordinary people.30 For the Hmong in America, it is certainly true that leaders play a large role in telling an updated narrative about what

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membership in Hmong communities means for Hmong who are US citizens. But it is being created at least in part through discourse between leaders and ordinary people in the community, including adults and youth, who may or may not consider themselves followers of one or another set of leaders. Selected portions of narrative told by seven relatives of the victims of the grave desecration are quoted here.31 The story told by some of the relatives reflect the reality that the Hmong of Thailand have no political power or legal standing to challenge systematic abuse as long as the Hmong from Laos live without recognition as immigrants in Thailand. The memory of humiliations experienced by the Hmong at the hands of warlords and ethnic adversaries in ancient China is carried forth to the present day, as recounted by several relatives of the deceased Hmong whose graves were exhumed. Pa Ze Xiong, who was born in Laos in 1940, testified that the graves of his mother, father, and son were desecrated. He spoke about the history of desecration of Hmong graves: Our place of worship is the graves of our parents. Once those places of worship are destroyed, we will inevitably struggle and suffer as a people. When our people lived in China, our graves were desecrated. Because of that, half of our graves today have to disguise their looks to resemble Chinese graves just so they won’t run the risk of being desecrated. As refugees in Thailand, our graves in Refugee Camp Nong Khai were desecrated and removed. Our graves in Refugee Camp Ban Vinai were desecrated and removed. Our graves in Refugee Camp in Chiang Kham were desecrated and removed. And now at Wat Tham Krabok. Now, I want to request that the United Nations ask the same question. Not only ask, but provide the standard for what is just among all peoples. Is there a standard for desecrating one people’s grave yet saving others, like at Wat Tham Krabok where the Chinese graves were left untouched? Have the Hmong people done wrong to anyone to deserve this? What does the United Nations hold as the standard for the treatment of Hmong people? We’re not here to ask for a sum of money. We’re here to ask the international community to secure our right as a people to never be violated in this way ever again.32

The prevailing government practice of labeling Hmong refugees in Thailand as “illegal” persons magnified the feeling of injustice of the desecration of relatives’ graves. Lee Thao, who came with his family to the United States in 2004, was not able to find the remains of his son, who had died at the

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age of two in 1997, in his burial place. Thao began his testimony by insisting that he would not accept the label “illegal person,” a status that denies rights and dignity to immigrants: I want to put on the record that after I entered Thailand, I did not live in Wat Tham Krabok as an illegal person. The people at the monastery along with the Thai government came to all the Hmong people residing at Wat Tham Krabok and registered each one of us under their residency system. I have the documents to prove that every person in my family lived in Thailand as registered people and we were not living in Wat Tham Krabok illegally. . . . My family was given the opportunity to come to United States in 2004 with other Hmong refugees from Wat Tham Krabok. Not only did I have to leave the place that I have come to know as home, I also have [sic] leave my child Cha Pao Thao behind in his grave at Wat Tham Krabok. Now, he is no longer there where I left him and I am clueless to where he is and what the Thai Government has done with his body.33

Several of the relatives of the victims offered their thoughts on what types of restorative action might be desirable. It was clear from many victims’ statements that the desecration of a relative’s grave cannot be repaired so as to restore peace to the relative’s spirit, according to the animist religious belief system. As members of the team of interviewers acknowledged this irreparability, they asked the victims what they thought could be done to bring some measure of peace, if not a full resolution. In their answers, the relatives of the deceased expressed not only concerns about restoring the emotional and spiritual health of their immediate families but also a desire for formal acknowledgment of the injustice of this case and some assurance that repeated humiliations of this sort would not occur in the future. Born in 1977, Lee Yang came to the United States in 2005. Lee Yang had five relatives whose graves were exhumed at Wat Tham Krabok: his mother, father, two older brothers, and sister. This was the third incident of desecration of Hmong graves in Thailand, as Yang recounts: Our Hmong graves have been exhumed three times now: once in Xiangkhouang Province of Laos, a second time in Ban Vinai and this incident marks the third time. I do not want this to happen anymore. If only they can fix this situation by giving us our loved ones back but they can’t. What I do want is some form of retribution to help us financially so that we can perform spiritual ceremonies as remedy to help lessen the situation. We

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have lost a lot of money just for the funeral and now we have to perform remedy ceremonies for a crime we did not commit. I also want the world to understand the great tragedy and distress that exhuming Hmong graves can cause for the family members who are still alive.34

Kao Xiong, who came to the United States in 2004, underscored the importance of giving respect to religious practices by a minority cultural group. The grave of Xiong’s brother-in-law was exhumed in Wat Tham Krabok: I want the Thai Government to respect our religion. I know that Buddhists are offended when someone who had not fully become a monk wears the Buddhist robe so they should know our feeling of being offended as well. I think that it would be fitting to have a memorial dedicated to those whom were exhumed because it needs to be officially recognized by the international community that there had been great harm done to the Hmong people by the Thai Government. Also, this will be a reminder to our children that they must strive to be the best they can be so that the Hmong people will be respected in the world and never disrespected again. All these things are good options for some sort of closure but my family will always feel empty because my brother-in-law has been destroyed forever. I urge the international community to stop any form of grave desecration, especially the desecration of indigenous people’s graves,35

Lee Thao added that it would hard it was to propose a solution that would bring him a sense of peace because of Hmong customs and belief systems about burial: As a parent who is struggling with this situation, I cannot explain exactly what I need so I can be at peace. In Hmong culture, it is not acceptable to re-bury the deceased so I am not sure if I would like for this to happen. What I do want to see is justice. I want this case to be investigated and if the fault lies within the Thai Government, I want them to take responsibility and I want them to fix their mistake. What I want more than anything is an acknowledgement of fault from the people who committed this crime.36

To help relatives prepare to give their statements at the consultative hearing, the team of interviewers asked relatives of the grave desecration victims to give some estimate in quantitative terms of the expenses incurred for

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the funerals of their relatives before burial. In their statements, the relatives described their efforts to provide for a funeral that fittingly honored the deceased according to cultural traditions. The availability of economic resources in each family varied, but it was common to mention the number of guests who attended the funeral and the number and type of animals slaughtered for communal meals, which traditionally are served to many guests from a village during funerals which last several days. In addition, the relatives took care to provide for special burial clothes and other provisions for the journey of the deceased after death. Lia Thao, who was born in Laos in 1954 and resettled in the United States in 2004, spoke about the funeral for her husband, who was among five relatives who had been buried and were victims of the grave desecration. Though her family had more modest means than some others, the burial expenditure was nonetheless sizable: Only the close relatives of a deceased relative know the actual cost of a person’s funeral such as the quantity of animals slaughtered for a funeral. Today, I will only speak about my husband’s funeral because I know the most about it and I also tried my best to give him a deserving Hmong funeral by providing him all the necessary items for his afterlife. In total I spent about $5,000–$6,000 dollars on my husband’s funeral. Because I was poor, my brothers who were already living in the United States of America helped out with most of the finances. We slaughtered 4 buffalos, 4 pigs, and 3 chickens. We also used a lot of paper money in the funeral. But I did not prepare burial clothes for my husband because my daughter who resides in California wanted to prepare these items for her father. She hand-sewed three burial outfits for him and even bought him a Western suit. We also had one pair of Hmong shoes for him and included two pairs of leather shoes in the coffin. As for the coffin, we purchased the heaviest and thickest coffin we found but they dug it up anyways.37

Lee Thao further explained why he spent a sizable amount of family resources on the funeral for his son: As a father, I wanted to give my son the best funeral even if he was still just a child when he past [sic]. The funeral of my son was extremely important to me so I spent 25,000 Baht to buy all the necessary items. I cannot remember exactly all the details but this was the total amount that included all the slaughtered animals, the coffin, and everything else.

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The funeral was held for 3 days and there were about 200 to 300 people that came to the funeral of my son. There are also many religious representatives who helped execute the funeral that can contest to the funeral and the burial of my son.38

Chue Thao was born in Laos in 1975. He went to Thailand in 1979, where he grew up and lived until 2004, when he went to Minnesota with his family. To his knowledge, Thao’s father’s grave had not been desecrated. Thao did not want to give the location of the grave site for fear that it might be exhumed subsequently. He aimed to help all of the victims gain a public hearing. Thao’s description of the funeral for his own father, who was a leader and cultural expert at Wat Tham Krabok, is informative because the higher social status of the deceased and resources of the family enabled purchase of a rosewood coffin and a private burial plot on the land of a private Thai landowner and outside temple grounds, where the graves had been desecrated. At the same time, Thao spoke of other costs in this way: During the funeral, we slaughtered 7 water buffalos, 14 pigs, and 10 chickens altogether. The buffalos cost B140,000 [Thai baht, exchange rate at the time was $1 = 39 baht], the pigs were B56,000, and chickens were B500. The total cost of materials used for funeral rites, which includes paper money, incense sticks, ceremonial drinks, stipends for special funeral blessings were B20,000. . . . A traditional Hmong funeral also involves the family members making sure that our dead have proper clothing and belongings for the long journey to the land of the ancestors. We provided my father with four sets of burial clothes, each set given by his four sons and daughters-in-law. As is customary in the Green Hmong tradition, we also gave 30 specially designed pillow cases from my father’s daughters and sons-in-law and cousins and other immediate family members.39

Another indicator of the burden experienced by family members of the victims is the amount of money spent for healing ceremonies to restore the family’s spiritual and emotional health after the grave desecration. Pa Ze Xiong’s described the cost in this way: In the past several years, I have sent money to my relatives in Thailand to perform special ceremonies to make sure that the spirits of my son and my mother could find a place to rest, to be fed, and not to cause any harm on us who are the living. The ceremonies were also to heal and bless the

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f­ amily members who are suffering as a direct result of the desecration of those graves.40

Lee Thao finally described the suffering he experienced and a healing ceremony conducted by a shaman for his family in Minnesota: Since the exhumation, I have had bad dreams at least once every 2 weeks. Although I have not experienced any physical illness, I do suffer from spiritual, emotional, and psychological distress. My son’s spirit has not made me sick but he often come[s] to his younger siblings and make[s] them sick. My children often suffer from illnesses because their brother wants them to fix his house for him. Because of this, my family and I had partaken in a religious ceremony of ua neeg. This ceremony was performed by a shaman to try to spiritually fix my son’s grave so his spirit can be at ease. We spent a total of $500 dollars on this ceremony.41

After hearing the testimony of relatives of the grave desecration victims and considering previous communications on the case, the special rapporteur conveyed the belief of the deceased persons’ relatives that the desecration of graves caused such grave harm that “it would be very difficult if not impossible to repair the damage.” However, he summarized the agreement expressed by the families who attended the consultative hearing that an appropriate remedy, which would provide them satisfaction and allow for them to begin to overcome the harm they allegedly have suffered, would constitute the following elements: “1) Acknowledgement by the Thai government of the harm, and a commitment to not allow similar exhumations of Hmong graves in the future; 2) an apology from the abbot at Wat Tham Krabok for the past desecrations; and 3) re-burial at Wat Tham Krabok of the 211 bodies of Hmong people that are now at Hulin cemetery.”42 Reflections of College Students

The college students’ experience in gathering the testimony and helping to write the English version of the narrative presented at the consultative hearing was a central part of the process of constructing a Hmong American story. Although somewhat familiar with the burial practices and traditional belief systems, these students were educated in American schools from an early age. Learning more fully about ancient pathways to spirituality as understood by their parents and other close relatives helped them u ­ nderstand

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their cultural traditions, affirm their heritage, and gain confidence in explaining the concepts of Hmong culture to a broad American audience. After the college-age students and recent graduates on the investigative team gathered the testimony, they reflected on what they had learned and on the meaning of the experience for them. PaChia Yang wrote in her report summarizing and interpreting the testimony: The importance of life after death is strongly emphasized in Hmong religion. Such disruptions as the grave desecrations will cause the soul at the grave to be lost and wander back to the homes of its family and/or even cause harm to the lives of its descendants because the soul has no place to go and is trapped. It is important to understand that in Hmong religious practices, one cannot separate the actions of the living from the responses of the dead. Active caring and respect for the dead is necessary in Hmong religion so that the descendants can live in peace.43

Chai Lee, who also participated in the gathering of testimony, wrote a foreword to the report, which included these reflections: For us, indigenous people, driven out of our land without the muscle of a sovereign government, and military hardware, that is a reality we are reminded of, our physical vulnerability, in life and in death. But is that even right? Just because we have no country, no sovereign territory, does not mean that other people can have the right to disturb our souls and force them to find no rest in Heaven and on Earth? We must find justice so that our people and other people have the right to practice their own cultural funerals and manifest their religious beliefs in their own ways. Otherwise, how many times will our people and your people have to change the way we bury our dead just to save our loved ones from being disturbed, even in death? We must seek to ensure that the wholesale desecration of other indigenous people’s graves no longer occur so that we may all live in peace, in life, and in death. To ask for this much respect isn’t asking for too much. We deserve to bury our dead just as anyone else does.44

Chai Lee’s comments illustrate how the process of identity formation is unfolding among immigrant political activists of his age. As Lisa Bedolla has argued, when a minority cultural heritage is afforded respect in public forums or schools, this reduces the stigma young people often find associated with their cultural heritage. This helps young people acquire a stronger

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sense of personhood and efficacy in public life.45 If accomplished on a larger scale over time, the recognition of cultural rights on the part of youth may even change the character of social relationships between young people and elders in the community at large, enlisting the cooperation of both in constructing an ethically constitutive story. The Thai government’s unresponsiveness to repeated entreaties by UN officials and Hmong in both Thailand and the United States confirms Hannah Arendt’s proposition that political membership is a prerequisite to a “right to have rights.”46 Relegated to status as illegal migrants in Thailand, which considers the Hmong refugees to be illegal migrants, and lacking recognition of their culture and political rights as an indigenous minority, the Hmong failed in their pursuit to secure safeguards for sacred burial sites because, in the barest sense, their humanity is not recognized. Public hearings such as those held at the University of Minnesota aimed to give refugee and indigenous people a voice in a human rights discourse, to help ordinary members of the Hmong community articulate their story. These represent important steps toward the creation of a public deliberation about the meaning of citizenship and belonging that challenges the preeminence of market-based concepts of citizenship and rights. There is no legal precedent for framing Hmong demands for religious freedom in terms of indigenous rights as understood in UN conventions. The concept of indigeneity is relatively new to the emerging set of themes and social terminology that Hmong Americans are employing in narratives of the Hmong experience. How the category of indigenous rights will come to be understood and how widely it will be accepted by the Hmong in America remains to be seen. But as the special rapporteur on indigenous rights wrote, there is no question that the culture of the Hmong is indigenous to China and Southeast Asia. Insofar as the concept of indigenous people’s rights undercuts the presumption of the cultural superiority of ethnic majorities, it may well capture the truth that the “taking of liberties,” to borrow Honig’s phrase, pushes outward the boundaries of democracy while, in clear and simple terms, affirming the humanity of people whose cultures predate the forcible acquisition of land and political power by intruders whose cultural ways are now considered the norm.47 As the relatives’ testimony made clear, no amount of money or action can repair the spiritual harm of a disrupted grave. In a study of contemporary claims for land rights made by Native Americans, Espeland describes

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the difficulty encountered when policy analysts try to evaluate the loss according to the rationality of Western legal frameworks.48 Her study demonstrated the incommensurability of claims made by Native Americans, who considered ancestral lands sacred, and developers who wanted to force the indigenous tribes to sell the land for development. The value of the land to the tribes could not be monetized according to the procedures government agencies used to measure costs and benefits of policy alternatives. Native American tribes stated that no amount of money could compensate for the loss of ancestral lands, because such a loss would destroy the source of their sense of wholeness as human beings and sever relationships with what they revere as sacred in their lives.

Conclusion In the consultative hearing on grave desecration in Thailand, the human rights framework adopted by Hmong Americans and their allies emphasized the common humanity of all who seek simply to practice their customs and mourn the death of loved ones. From the stance of international human rights, young people were able to grasp and express the common desire for freedom of religion and of cultural expression felt by those who practice ancient rites, such as those held dear by their parents’ generation, as well as others who may express their thoughts and sentiments in more contemporary ways. The human rights framework helped bridge gaps in understanding between older and younger Hmong Americans. This experience points to approaches that potentially increase confidence of people across generations in expressing the ideas at the core of their culture in a contemporary key and in a way that can resonate with people of diverse cultural and economic backgrounds.

Some Notes on Method Nine semistructured interviews were conducted between June 2008 and September 2008. The research participants were close relatives of the deceased Hmong persons whose graves were exhumed in Wat Tham Krabok between October 2005 and December 2005. Each interview was conducted

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by a single bilingual interviewer in Hmong and/or English, following the preference of the interviewee. A list of 211 prospective interviewees was provided by Minnesota state senator Mee Moua and Barbara Frey, professor in the University of Minnesota’s Human Rights Program. At a town hall meeting, which both conducted on March 2, 2006, 211 individuals who had deceased relatives among those whose bodies were exhumed at Wat Tham Krabok provided information such as their names, addresses, phone numbers, and the name of their deceased relatives. The research team called all of the phone numbers; however, many were disconnected. All persons who were contacted and agreed to participate were interviewed. The interviews were semistructured. Participants could depart from the question format. Each interview ranged from thirteen minutes to forty-five minutes. After conducting all the interviews, the researchers translated and transcribed the audio recording of the interview from Hmong into written English. All participants gave informed consent to publicly release their names and the interview text. The interviews of Lee Yang, Kao Xiong, Lee Thao, and Lia Thao are quoted in this chapter. As quoted in this chapter, the text of the interviews was edited for submission as testimony for the consultative hearing on December 10, 2008, at the University of Minnesota. The Human Rights Program of the University of Minnesota hosted the hearing and published additional testimony submitted by Chue Thao and Pa Ze Xiong, who are also quoted.

Six

Deepening Intergenerational Participation

By the end of the first decade of this century, the participation of Hmong Americans in elections had become a regular part of the landscape of local politics in a handful of cities in California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. The Hmong Americans are one of the smaller Asian American ethnic groups. Compared to larger groups with a longer history in the United States, the elders who came as refugees remain more socially and linguistically isolated than many other Asian Americans. While growing numbers of young people—the offspring of the refugee adults—are making advances in education, the professions, and occupations that provide a living wage, poverty persists in the community. To a large degree, members of the ethnic group still face language and cultural isolation. Thus, the story of Hmong Americans’ political participation is not well explained by theories that attribute voting to certain types of resources available to individuals, such as formal education and higher levels of income. The account in the preceding chapters has examined why Hmong American activists early on chose politics to take the first step toward full social inclusion. The argument has emphasized both the intrinsic motivational resources in communities and the work of local institutions. There is a belief that government can help Hmong Americans establish a stable economic livelihood. At the same time, local institutions of civic education effectively aid participation by recognizing the distinctive cultural and group-based resources available in the community. Social networks play a vital role in voter mobilization. Mobilizing these networks in the Hmong American 214

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community requires an intergenerational process of identity translation and adaptation, whereby traditional themes of freedom seeking and a quest for social inclusion are reconstructed by young people to fit the context of their present-day lives. Because the intergenerational transmission of identity stories occurs in communities and families across the globe, this account of a story’s activation in politics potentially sheds light on the process of immigrant inclusion more generally. In the case of Hmong Americans, persistent poverty and racial prejudice play a strong role in limiting opportunities for social advancement. Many have shown a keen interest in politics because of a recognition of the role that government can play in lowering barriers to educational attainment for the children of low-income families, particularly by improving schools, and in providing fair economic opportunities and equal rights for members of the ethnic community as a whole. One reservoir of motivational resources for political participation is found in the identity narratives of the Hmong of Laos and their ancestors in China. The oral literature recounts stories of a migratory people continually forced to struggle to preserve a way of life by outsiders seeking political domination and control of their land. As refugees fleeing the prospect of persecution in Laos after the end of the Vietnam War, a longing to “have a country” of their own translated into a quest for citizenship status in the United States. Once in America, gaining an expedited path to citizenship was an important factor in the fairly rapid emergence of Hmong voters in elections in several cities. When Hmong American veterans and their spouses successfully demanded the right to waive English-language requirements to qualify for citizenship because of their service in the Secret War in Laos, this afforded them political rights. Once qualified to vote, it was not long before Hmong Americans began to turn out at one of the highest rates among Asian Americans, as evidenced, for example, by their voter turnout rates in the 2012 presidential election. Sustained engagement in local politics in several cities in California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin also led to the election of a succession of Hmong American candidates to office. The voices of Hmong Americans recorded in our interviews bring to light strengths already present in the ethnic community and point to obstacles that stand in the way of developing those strengths as a political resource. One resource that is easy to overlook or dismiss is the shared

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c­ oncern about community welfare, which is familiar to people who immigrate to the United States from societies with collectivist norms. Participatory traditions brought to the United States by refugees or immigrants from remote rural settings were rooted in a form of village-based communalist values, and practices developed around a subsistence agricultural economy. For the Hmong refugees who lived in Laos before and during the Vietnam War the village was the center of an agriculturalist economic life and social organization based on kinship relations. Communalist values infused clan and village norms, as well as social relationships. Once displaced from the home village and forced to flee Laos, the intervening experience of living in a refugee camp before resettlement led to adaptations of village traditions to camp life even before arrival in the United States, the country of refugee settlement. Our field interviews illustrate how a compelling identity narrative for the Hmong in America may be created as an amalgam—or perhaps a weaving together—of relevant constructs from Hmong traditional culture, the concepts and legal language of human rights, modern civil rights activism, egalitarian and participatory democracy, concepts of morality and justice from different religious and humanist traditions, and others. To achieve a fully participatory citizenship, however, people representing all different ages, genders, and income groups need to be engaged. Because of their English-language skills and understanding of the US political system, the younger generation of Hmong American leaders is in a position to help speed the process of giving voice to the historical experience and concerns of the older generations. This includes a process of culturally translating the elders’ concerns about communal well-being for the ethnic group, especially as aging community members remain more socially isolated than their offspring because of limited English-language skills. Intergenerational participation will perhaps allow more varied forms of cultural translation in politics. Despite the challenge of transforming hierarchical decision making and thinking into more participatory forms, the intergenerational transmission of political knowledge and civic attitudes lays a critical foundation for sustained civic engagement. Immigrants from rural villages in the developing world often value community-level cooperation to solve common problems, and parents transmit these values to their children. Community-oriented norms are leveraged to enhance collective deliberation and action in local

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politics. As the children of immigrants enter into American public schools and acquire aspirations for a life different from their parents, however, it is not clear how firmly they will embrace their parents’ traditional political values. Taking part in elections is a crucial part of political engagement; for many Hmong Americans it has been the first step. At the same time, ordinary Hmong Americans need to learn to voice their concerns in public life and bring them to bear on policy making if they are to be successful in influencing policies that affect their daily lives. Policy advocacy and collective action are often most effective when supported by networks of volunteers and activists who are themselves embedded in wider social networks. One of the contributions community-based organizations working in the realm of citizenship education can make is to expand and deepen networks of informed members of the community who share policy concerns. In developing this motivation and capacity for fuller and deeper forms of participation, local institutions engaged in teaching citizenship skills play a vital role. In local communities, new immigrants can have a more meaningful part in public discourse on politics and advocacy campaigns only when schools and community organizations teach residents about the nature of community needs and problems. The most effective educational projects examine policies that are likely to reduce social harms to the community and individuals, and propose ways to carry out advocacy and collective action that can bring about policy change. This educational work is potentially empowering when the emotional force of identity stories, including dreams to “have a country,” are reinterpreted and leveraged to facilitate construction of a Hmong American identity in present-day circumstances. The vast majority of Hmong Americans are now citizens of the United States, and their quest for full inclusion takes place on a very different terrain from that which the elders remember from Laos and the refugee camps. Local institutions play a vital role in coupling the provision of resources that aid this form of identity reconstruction with practical education in civic and political skills. Immigrants from rural villages often bring an appreciation of the value of local cooperative effort to their new American communities of settlement, as shown by my interviews of Hmong refugees.1 Communalist norms prevalent in rural villages can serve as a democratic asset if they are creatively adapted to immigrants’ collective efforts to gain a voice in public

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affairs. A potential pitfall associated with traditional communalist norms, however, is that ethnic leaders may exploit them, insisting on in-group conformity to increase one leader’s personal standing at the expense of democratic decision making. Young Hmong American leaders need to learn to negotiate a difficult intracommunity terrain, recognizing the strengths of a community-oriented political culture while popularizing novel forms of participatory democracy. This process requires political training and deep cultural knowledge. Only with farsighted and skillful leadership can democratic ideals and practice gradually supplant authoritarian and paternalistic decision-making styles.2 As young people bring energy and organizing skills to the political life of the Hmong American community, they will bridge generations of the community not only by helping elders in the voting booth but also by facilitating their participation in conversations about policy in public settings. Younger, college-educated Hmong Americans are in the best position to imagine and realize policy reforms that will bridge community divides and make their voices heard in alliance with other people of all racial-ethnic backgrounds who have shared claims for economic justice and recognition. Local institutions engaged in citizen education can help prepare a new generation of Hmong community leaders and public-spirited artists—including spoken-word performers and writers, novelists, poets, and filmmakers—who can give expression to the Hmong’s aspirations for freedom in terms emphasizing the commonality of traditional Hmong ethics, along with broad humanistic values that cross racial-ethnic and national boundaries. In this endeavor, an emerging generation of US-educated Hmong American leaders, now in their twenties and late thirties, will play a critical role because they are able to construct and publicly disseminate an identity narrative that honors core ethical values of their parents’ generation, while also translating these into modern-day terms that are understandable to younger Hmong Americans brought up in the United States and to the society at large. Much of the social isolation experienced by the Hmong in America is a product of cultural misunderstanding and prejudice toward traditional animist practices, which appear strange and even frightening to Americans, especially those whose religious beliefs stand opposed to the animist belief systems of the Hmong. Hmong Americans are presently constructing identity narratives that give contemporary meaning to long-standing notions

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of freedom expressed in the traditional oral literature of their ethnic community. These identity narratives of the Hmong in America have sought to reconstruct bonds of understanding and solidity across generational divides in the community, divides that were exacerbated by the sudden transition of the elders’ life from villages in Laos to urban America. One study found that parents rely on English-speaking children to navigate an unfamiliar political system. Immigrant parents often bring up children to understand their social relationships in a transnational context.3 However, we know little about how parents transmit deep notions of civic values to children. Our interviews of political leaders and ordinary Hmong Americans suggest that two-way transmission potentially creates a synergistic relationship of mutual learning about democratic ideals and the value of participatory democracy. Communalist ethics prevalent in rural village life may be preserved and adapted if leaders appreciate this potential. The construction of a Hmong American identity is taking place in an environment where storytelling arts have seen a revival not only in small community or family settings but also in digital formats on the Internet. New technologies have expanded audiences and enabled blending of artistic genres with traditional storytelling. As identity construction takes new forms, these developments also pose questions about how democratic deliberation on community issues may be transformed and potentially advanced by technological change. In the transnational advocacy project to protest the desecration of Hmong graves in Thailand, the work of students from Carleton College illustrates the value of face-to-face conversations between students and older adult Hmong residents of St. Paul. The college students helped Senator Mee Moua and Professor Barbara Frey of the Human Rights Program at the University of Minnesota gather oral testimony from several Hmong adults for presentation at a public consultative hearing concerning the desecration of Hmong graves in Thailand. The hearing took place in December 2008, before the United Nations’ special rapporteur on indigenous people’s rights. By giving a public voice to the relatives of the deceased whose graves were violated, the college students took part in a process of storytelling that helped shape an intergenerational identity narrative while also constituting an act of claim making.4 In one urban farming project in St. Paul, where immigrant youth and elder farmers participate together, cross-generational conversations are

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t­ aking place about these multiple identities. For Hmong adult farmers, family farming remains a means to supplement family nutrition, and in many cases it is a source of secondary income from retail sales of produce. Some of the first Hmong refugees undertook cooperative projects with the help of refugee assistance groups in the 1980s, but these were not economically viable. More recently, in some public universities, sustainable agriculture science has matured and agricultural experts have reached out to the Hmong and other immigrant farmers to provide educational services for sustaining small farms, practicing agriculture in a healthful manner, finding new retail markets, and advocating for policies that protect farmers’ interests. In grassroots organizing, an immigrant-led sector of the community farming movement has established national networks. This is largely led by Latino farmers, but a small handful of Southeast Asian farmer advocates have established self-help groups and networks in California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. If projects such as those begun in St. Paul can realize some measure of “cultural citizenship,” in Rosaldo’s terms, with the intergenerational, faceto-face storytelling of Hmong farmers and youth, the Hmong may be able to demonstrate facets of a deeper form of citizenship that new Americans can bring to American towns and cities.5 There are untapped resources in the community of Hmong elders, including not only the Hmong farmers’ ingenuity but also their related traditions of shared responsibility for family members and villagers. These customs and ways of thinking can potentially contribute to community-building movements that have arisen alongside community farming projects. For example, cultural traditions of sharing labor among family members and seeing family gardening as an integral part of an ecological system are concepts familiar to ethnic groups that traditionally relied on subsistence agriculture and lived as indigenous minorities both in Asia and in North America. With an increased sense of political efficacy formed through electoral successes and the positive legacy of young political leaders like Mee Moua, some progressive-minded activists are yearning for a deeper political inclusion, in which citizenship is manifest not only in electoral participation and representation but also in cultural citizenship, which Rosaldo has described in his influential writings. A more inclusive political and social membership will be realized when the voices of the most marginalized members of the community are heard and their rights recognized. Those community members cast to the periphery of social life include elder refugees who remain socially isolated in urban and suburban neighborhoods, as well as

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Hmong farmers who bring their agricultural produce to outlets in regional marketplaces but still live in racially inhospitable environments, such as in certain rural parts of Wisconsin, which have been the site of racial violence between Hmong and white hunters in recent years. Political inclusion is won progressively by claiming rights and opening space for the voices of those who have been silenced. The work of local institutions in developing inclusive citizenship education projects is a critical component in building a sustainable participatory politics to engage Hmong Americans. The comparative analysis of institutional settings draws from studies of citizenship and participation, which point to a need for research centered not only on states and economies but also on the family, community, and associational life, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 3. This theoretical approach effectively grounds a comparative study of the interactions of politics and civil society in cities, towns, and neighborhoods. A comparison of Hmong American life between St. Paul, Minnesota, and Hickory, North Carolina, reveals the importance of a culture and institutions recognizing Hmong American culture and promoting cultural education to the Hmong and wider communities. If Hmong beliefs and practices rooted in ancient animist spirituality seem wholly foreign and unassimilable in a racially and culturally conservative city or town, it is important that parents continue to promote an appreciation of Hmong history in the home, as our interviews of high school students suggest. The successful campaigns of Hmong Americans demonstrate the mechanisms of social voting. Voters are mobilized through social networks in neighborhoods, schools, places of work, and local organizations or community projects. Blong Yang’s 2013 campaign to win a seat in the Minneapolis City Council illustrates existing political strengths in the Hmong American community. Responding to the interviewer’s question about how he won the election, Yang comments: In low turnout elections every vote matters. We made contact with every voter in the ward five to ten times. . . . We sent out three mailers, door knocked, and had three other pieces we dropped off, and we made phone calls. We overwhelmed people with lawn signs. It was a well-oiled machine. . . . We brought out new voters. . . . We always knew we had to lock down the Hmong votes, and we did. There were about 1,500 out there in the ward. Did we get that much? We were lucky if we got half. Maybe we didn’t get half. There were votes from others. We got Caucasians. We got

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African Americans. We got Somalis, East Africans. . . . The key issue for us was, we knew people spoke a different language, but we tried, we found people who could speak those languages and we got those folks to vote.6

Yang also emphasized that the people who showed up at campaign events tended to be young Hmong Americans. When others saw young people engaged, “it resonated with them, it became infectious. In that respect, the energy of the campaign . . . started with young Hmong people being very excited about the campaign and doing everything they could to help us win.” Yang’s campaign approach was noteworthy but not unique. In all the successful electoral campaigns waged by Hmong Americans in recent years, the candidates adopted a strategy of contacting and encouraging new voters of diverse racial-ethnic and immigrant backgrounds to turn out in local districts. It could not have been a viable strategy to target Hmong Americans alone, considering their typically small numbers in the voter base. More important, these candidates communicated a felt commonality of interest between Hmong Americans and other immigrant, racial-ethnic minority, and low-income communities, and their allies among white activists and voters. One of the remaining challenges facing Hmong American community activists is to adapt collectivist norms still present and influential in families to egalitarian thinking and practice. A shared concern for the community’s welfare has been a lever for voting together and for taking action to claim rights. Young writers and musical artists are exploring novel ways to integrate notions of community building with participatory projects that value the voices of residents of neighborhoods and community groups, crossing barriers of gender and status. As more young Hmong Americans enter a variety of occupations and residential neighborhoods, the diversity of their personal perspectives will create new opportunities to broaden the conversation about what a Hmong American identity is and how it will evolve. When voiced in an intergenerational key, the public expressions of an identity rooted in notions of freedom seeking and community building can potentially help guide development of more participatory forms of citizenship in the future.

Appendix A

Interview Questions for High School Students

1. Were you born in the United States or in another country? 2. Where were your parents born? Do you know where your grandparents were born? Note: If the child’s ancestry is in Laos or Thailand, use the choices related to “Hmong” and “Asian American” below. 3. When people ask you about your race and/or ethnicity how do you identify yourself? Hmong, or Hmong American, Laotian, or Laotian American, Asian, Asian American, African, African American, Latino/a, American, or another group? 4. Do you get along with other ethnic groups in your community? 5. When were you born? 6. What grade are you in school now? Where did you attend middle school? Elementary school? 7. Do you have brothers or sisters? How many? How old? 8. Have you taken a class mainly about government or civics? Did you like it? After taking it, were you more interested in politics in general? 9. Have you ever taken a class that discusses the history of the Hmong people or their life in this country in the present day? How about a class on the history of Asian people in the United States? 10. Do you take part in any clubs at school? Any Hmong (or other ethnic) clubs? Any Asian American or African American, immigrant, or international cultural groups? 11. Do you ever talk at home about the history of the Hmong people (or other ethnic group named in question 3)? 12. What language do you use mainly at home? Do you also speak (other language) at home?

225

226

Appendix A

13. What is your religion? Shamanism? Islam? Christian? Catholic? Protestant? Other? None? 14. Have you lived anywhere else besides St. Paul? 15. Where? City/country/state? 16. Did you ever stay in a refugee camp? If yes, do you remember how old you were? How long did you stay there? 17. If you weren’t born in the US, have you received American citizenship? 18. When did you become a citizen? 19. When I say the word politics what does it bring to mind? 20. Do you participate in politics at all? 21. Do you think participating in politics is important? 22. Would this help anyone or make a difference? 23. Do you plan to register to vote when you are eighteen? 24. Do you talk to friends about politics? 25. Do you talk to family members about politics? 26. Do you talk other people about politics? 27. Have you ever helped someone run for office? Worked on a campaign? Who was the candidate? What did you do? 28. Is it important that Hmong (or other ethnic group named in question 3) individuals run for public office? Have you ever contacted any elected public officials? 29. If yes, how did you contact them? By telephone? By letter? In-person meeting? What did you talk about? 30. Do you feel that you can trust the US government? 31. Do your parents talk to you about how to think about community leaders? 32. How to think about public officials in the government or civil service? What did you talk about? 33. Have you ever thought about being a government official as a career? Would you consider that as a career? 34. Have you ever attended a community meeting? If yes, what was the meeting about? Do you think this way of communicating is important and has benefits? 35. Have you ever volunteered in a community organization? 36. Do other members of your family participate in politics? 37. In your family, do you ever talk about politics? If yes, how often? What do you discuss? 38. Do you think Hmong (or other ethnic group interviewee named in reply to question 3) people face problems as a group? If yes, what do you think is the biggest problem facing the Hmong (or other ethnic group named in question 3) community in (city or town where student lives)?

Interview Questions for High School Students

227

39. Do you believe that Hmong (or other ethnic group named in question 3) people in the US share a common fate as a group? By a “common fate as a group” I mean, do you think what happens to one Hmong (or other ethnic group named in question 3) person is linked to what will happen to other Hmong (or other ethnic group named in question 3) people? 40. Have you ever experienced discrimination because you were Hmong (or other ethnic group named in question 3)? 41. Do you think that discrimination toward Hmong (or other ethnic group named in question 3) people in the US is a problem? If yes, is it a big ­problem? 42. Do you feel that Hmong people have things in common with other people of Asian descent? 43. Do you feel that Hmong (or other ethnic group named in question 3) people have things in common with other immigrants in the United States? 44. Do you think Hmong (or other ethnic group named in question 3) people and other races have disagreements? 45. Which other racial or ethnic group and Hmong (or other ethnic group named in question 3) people get along the most? 46. This is my last question: Is there anything you want to add? 47. Thank you once again for your time and for sharing your experiences and thoughts.

Appendix B

Interview Responses of High School Students

St. Paul–Minneapolis high schools

St. Paul community arts program

Fresno high Hickory and schools Morganton high schools

Number of participants

8

2

18

10

gender Male Female Missing data

1 1 6

2 0 0

2 16 0

5 3 2

birthplace Born in US Born in Laos Born in Thailand

6 0 2

2 0 0

11 2 5

9 0 1

year of birth Born in 1987 Born in 1988 Born in 1989 Born in 1990 Born in 1991 Born in 1992 Born in 1993 Born in 1994

0 0 0 0 4 4 0 0

0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0

1 0 1 3 11 2 0 0

0 0 1 6 0 1 0 2

identifies themselves as . . . Hmong Hmong American Asian Asian American American

4 4 0 0 0

2 0 0 0 0

16 2 0 0 0

9 0 0 0 0

citizenship US-born citizen Naturalized citizen Legal alien Missing data

6 2 0 0

2 0 0 0

11 2 4 1

9 1 0 0

activities and classes Taken government or civics Yes No

8 0

0 1

1 8

7 3

228

Interview Responses of High School Students

Ambiguous/unclear answer Other similar class Takes part in Hmong or   Asian clubs at school Yes No at home/within family Talks about history of   Hmong people at home Yes No Missing data Language Uses mainly Hmong at home Uses mainly English at home Use mixture of both Hmong and English Parents talk to them about how to think about community leaders Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Parents talk about how to think about public officials in government or civil service Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Thought about being a government official as a career Yes No Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Other family members participate in politics Yes No Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Do you ever talk about politics in your family? Yes No Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data participation in politics Participates in politics Yes No Ambiguous/unclear answer Thinks participating in politics is important Yes No Ambiguous/unclear answer

St. Paul–Minneapolis high schools

St. Paul community arts program

0 0

0 1

0 9

0 0

3 5

2 0

12 6

10 0

8 0 0

2 0 0

14 3 1

9 1 0

2 2

0 2

9 3

1 1

4

0

6

8

1 5 1 1

2 0 0 0

12 6 0 0

6 4 0 0

0 1 1 1 5

1 1 0 0 0

4 12 0 0 2

4 5 1 0 0

4 2 2 0

0 2 0 0

5 12 1 0

3 6 0 1

3 3 0 2

1 1 0 0

7 9 1 1

6 4 0 0

4 4 0 0

0 2 0 0

7 8 0 3

4 1 0 5

4 4 0

0 1 1

6 9 1

4 4 2

8 0 0

2 0 0

15 0 3

10 0 0

229

Fresno high Hickory and schools Morganton high schools

(continued)

230

Appendix B St. Paul–Minneapolis high schools

St. Paul community arts program

7 0 0 1 0

1 0 1 0 0

14 0 1 2 1

10 0 0 0 0

7 0 0 1 0

2 0 0 0 0

14 0 0 2 2

6 1 2 0 1

6 2 0 0

0 2 0 0

13 5 0 0

7 2 0 1

6 2 0 0

1 1 0 0

10 6 0 2

10 0 0 0

5 3 0

2 0 0

8 9 1

8 2 0

2 0 0 0

14 0 3 1

8 0 0 2

1 6 1 0

0 2 0 0

3 13 0 2

2 5 0 3

0 5 0 3

0 2 0 0

6 11 0 1

2 7 0 1

0 2 0 6

0 2 0 0

1 11 3 3

0 6 2 2

4 4 0

2 0 0

12 4 2

7 3 0

Thinks participating in politics will make a difference Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Plans to register to vote when 18 Yes No Already registered Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data talks to . . . Friends about politics Yes No Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Family about politics a Yes No Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Other people about politics Yesb No Missing data

is it important for hmong individuals to run for office? Yes 8 No 0 Ambiguous/unclear answer 0 Missing data 0 nonvoting forms of participation Has ever contacted an elected public official Yes No Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Has helped someone run for office Yes No Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Has worked on a campaign Yes No Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Has volunteered in a community organization Yes No Missing data

Fresno high Hickory and schools Morganton high schools

Interview Responses of High School Students

Has attended a community meeting Yes No Missing data within hmong community Thinks Hmong people face problems as a group Yes No Ambiguous/unclear answer Don’t know Missing data Believes Hmong people in US share a common fate as a group Yes No Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data discrimination Has personally experienced discrimination in US as a Hmong person Yes No Ambiguous/unclear answer Don’t know Thinks discrimination toward Hmong people in US is a problem Yes No Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data

St. Paul–Minneapolis high schools

St. Paul community arts program

3 4 1

1 1 0

6 12 0

5 5 0

4 2 0 1 1

2 0 0 0 0

10 0 4 2 2

10 0 0 0 0

6 1 1 0

2 0 0 0

9 6 2 1

7 3 0 0

1 6 1 0

2 0 0 0

11 5 2 1

8 1 1 0

8 0 0 0

2 0 0 0

6 7 3 2

8 1 0 1

231

Fresno high Hickory and schools Morganton high schools

Notes: The interviews took place in Fresno during the winter of 2008; in St. Paul during the summer, spring, and winter of 2008 and 2009; and in Hickory, during the winter of 2008. The table indicates the number of respondents for whom data is missing for specific questions. Where there is no row for “Missing data” the count is zero across the entire row. A person could give multiple answers to a single question, such as indicating more than one answer to “Qualities/personality of the candidate that help you decide” your vote. a For Fresno interviews, the wording for this question was, “Do you talk to your parents about politics?” b Most individuals said teachers.

Appendix C

Interview Questions for Adults

Thank you again for taking the time to participate in our study. Please tell me whether you’d prefer to talk in Hmong or in English. I’d like to start by asking you some questions about your personal history. 1. 2. 3. 4.

Where were you born and when? Are you married? How many children do you have? What kind of work do you do? Do you follow Shamanism tradition or are you a Christian (Protestant/ Catholic) or other religion? 5. Have you lived anywhere else before coming to the US? Where (city/country/ state)? 6. Do you remember when (i.e., what year) you went to country C from country B? To country B from country A? 7. Did you ever stay in a refugee camp? If yes, how long did you stay there? 8. If you stayed in a refugee camp, what did you do for a living in the country where you lived before you left it and went to the refugee camp? 9. Did you ever study in Laos? 10. Did you ever study here in the US? 11. Have you lived in other cities or states here in the US? 12. Are you a US citizen? • If you are, when did you receive your citizenship? • Why did you become a citizen? In our conversation I will be using the word politics—and I know the word means different things to different people. 13. When I say the word politics what does it bring to mind?

232

Interview Questions for Adults

233

14. Do you participate in politics at all? 15. Do you think participating in politics is important? • Would this help anyone or make a difference? 16. Have you ever voted here in the US? • In what years or elections? 17. Who did you vote for in this past presidential election in 2008 (Obama or McCain)? 18. Do you think your vote matters? 19. Why did you decide to vote for Obama or McCain? (if voted for either) 20. Are there some qualities/personality traits of the candidate that help you decide on whether to vote for the candidate? 21. Are there some ideas held by the general candidate that help you decide to vote for the candidate? 22. When voting, are there any important issues/problems that you keep in mind? 23. How did you hear or know about the running candidates? • Radio? Hmong or American? • Which stations? • Newspaper? Hmong or American? • TV? 24. Do you talk to family members about politics? Acquaintances in the community? Acquaintances at work? 25. Do you think you prefer a certain political party more than another? 26. Does the party of a candidate matter when you decide which candidate to vote for? For example, whether they are associated with the Democratic, Republican, or Independence Party, Green Party, or others. 27. Have you ever helped someone run for office? 28. Have you ever donated money to a candidate’s running campaign? 29. Is it important that Hmong individuals run for public office? 30. If a Hmong candidate were running against another candidate who is not Hmong, and the two candidates were equally qualified, would you vote for the Hmong candidate or the candidate who is not Hmong? 31. If a Hmong candidate were running against a candidate who is not Hmong, and the candidate who is *not* Hmong was more qualified, would you vote for the Hmong candidate? 32. In recent years, several Hmong persons have been elected into office. What do you think about their leadership or services? 33. A few ran for office and didn’t win. What do you think about them as candidate? 34. Have you ever contacted any elected public officials? • If yes, how did you contact them?

234

Appendix C

35. Do you feel that you can trust the US government? 36. Have you ever attended a community meeting? • Do you think this way of communicating is important and has benefits? 37. Have you ever volunteered in a community organization? 38. Do other members of your family participate in politics? 39. In your family, do you ever talk about politics? • If yes, how often? • What do you discuss? 40. What occupation would you like your children to have when they get older? 41. Would you hope for and encourage your own children to participate in ­politics? • Why or why not? 42. Would you hope for and encourage your own children to run for public office? • Why or why not? 43. What do you think is the biggest problem facing the Hmong community in (your city)? 44. Do you believe that Hmong people in the US share a common fate as a group? By a “common fate as a group” I mean, do you think what happens to one Hmong person is linked to what will happen to other Hmong people? 45. Have you ever experienced discrimination because you were Hmong? 46. Do you think that discrimination toward Hmong people in the US is a ­problem? • If yes, is it a big problem? 47. Do you feel that Hmong people have things in common with other people of Asian descent? 48. Do you feel that Hmong people have things in common with other immigrants in the United States? 49. When people ask you about your race and/or ethnicity how do you identify yourself? Hmong, or Hmong American, or Laotian or Laotian American, [or] Asian, Asian American, or as American? 50. Do you talk to other people who aren’t Hmong? 51. Do you get along with other non-Hmong communities? 52. Do you think Hmong people and other races have disagreements? 53. Which other race and Hmong people get along the most? 54. Do you sense that there are any big disagreements within the Hmong community in the United States regarding politics? 55. If there are big disagreements, how do these affect the Hmong community in the US?

Interview Questions for Adults

235

56. Now I’d like to talk about politics back in country A (e.g., Laos). 57. In country A did you ever participate in politics? 58. Did you live in a country after you left Laos but before you came to the US? Where you able to vote/participate in politics in that country? 59. What is your opinion on the Laos government? 60. In your opinion and experience, how has the Laos government treated Hmong people? 61. Do Hmong people have the right to participate in Laos politics? 62. Do you feel free to express your opinions about candidates in Laos? 63. Do you feel that human rights are well protected or not well protected in Laos? 64. What are your general feelings about the political system in the United States? Compared to the political system in country A? 65. Did your parents talk to you about how to think about community leaders when you were a child? 66. How to think about public officials in the government or civil service? 67. Did your parents talk about politics when you were a child? • Very often? • What subjects? Finally, I’d like to get your opinion on just a few more things. 68. Are you happy in the United States? 69. Has the Hmong community in (your city) changed much since the first refugees came in large numbers after the end of the war? • If so, how? 70. Do you feel that Hmong participation will change after several years from now? Will they participate more actively in US politics perhaps, or less, or differently in the future? Or will their participation not change much, or become less active? What is the biggest problem facing (city name where interviewee lives) as a city? [And] (state name) as a state? The United States as a nation? 71. This is my last question: Is there anything you want to add?

Appendix D

Interview Responses of Adult Grassroots Participants

Number of participants

St. Paul, MN

Fresno, CA

Hickory, NC

14

20

5

gender Male Female

6 8

5 15

3 2

birthplace Born in US Born in Laos Born in Thailand Respondent did not know birthplace

0 11 2 0

0 16 2 2

0 5 0 0

age Under 30 years old From 30 up to 50 years old Over 50 years old Missing data

2 7 4 1

2 7 6 6

0 3 2 0

marital status Married Single Divorced Widowed Missing data

11 1 1 0 1

13 5 1 0 1

5 0 0 0 0

years in us Resided in US less than 3 years Resided in US between 3 and 10 years Resided in US more than 10 years Resided in US more than 20 years

0 8 0 5

1 5 7 6

0 0 0 5

identifies themselves as . . . Hmong Hmong American Hmong Lao Hmong Thai Asian Asian American Other Ambiguous Missing data

6 3 3 1 0 1 0 0 0

7 4 3 0 1 0 2 2 1

2 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

236

Interview Responses of Adult Grassroots Participants

237

St. Paul, MN

Fresno, CA

Hickory, NC

3 9 1 1

5 14 0 0

4 0 1 0

have you ever stayed in a refugee camp? Yes No Missing data

12 1 1

19 0 1

5 0 0

citizenship status US-born citizen Naturalized citizen Legal alien Missing data

0 3 10 1

0 7 14 0

0 5 0 0

1 0

1 1

3 0

1

2

0

0 1 0

2 0 6

1 0 1

2 1

3 1

0 0

3 0 2 1

3 0 0 4

0 0 0 0

2 11 0 1 0

3 15 0 1 1

2 3 0 0 0

9 1 1 0 2

14 0 2 3 0

5 0 0 0 0

3 1 1 1 8

9 0 5 2 4

3 0 0 2 0

4 10

4 14

5 0

employment status Employed Unemployed Going to schoola Missing data

why did you become a citizen? This is our country now/we live in America now so we must become Americans/citizens. Wanted to vote and participate in politics. Being a citizen is a great thing/important/things are easier. Being a citizen will benefit my children. To get better assistance and do things without limits. Easier to travel. Missing data why do you want to become a citizen? This is our country now/we live in America now so we must become Americans/citizens. Wanted to vote and participate in politics. Being a citizen is a great thing/important. Being a citizen will benefit my children. To get better assistance. Easier to travel. Missing data participation in politics Participates in politics Yes No Don’t know/unsure Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Thinks participating in politics is important Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Thinks participating in politics will help anyone/ make a difference Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data voting Has ever voted Yes No

(continued)

238

Appendix D

Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data A citizen but has never voted in regard to voting for the candidate Any important issues/ideas held by the general candidate that you keep in mind? Must respect the poor and illiterate, etc. Help country grow Someone who is smart Must love and be honest toward all people Ideas/issues must line up with individual’s Don’t know Ambiguous answer Missing data or respondent did not know Qualities/personality of the candidate that help you decide Charismatic/liked by the majority Persevering Someone who has “heart”/will love all people Must be fair and just/transparent/ethical and moral Has good ideas/knows what issues are important/need to be dealt with Open-minded Speaks well and respectfully Reaches out to broader community Good leader Don’t know Ambiguous answer Missing data party Party preference Prefers Republican Party Prefers Democratic Party No preference Doesn’t know about parties/not too familiar about parties Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Is party a factor (in vote choice)? Yes No Respondent doesn’t know/is not sure Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data nonvoting forms of participation Has ever contacted any elected public officials? Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Has helped someone run for office Yes No Ambiguous/unclear answer Has donated money to candidate’s running campaign Yes

St. Paul, MN

Fresno, CA

Hickory, NC

0 0 0 0

0 0 0 2

0 0 0 0

4 3 1 3 0 0 0 3

4 1 1 5 1 4 4 0

1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1

0 0 9

1 0 8

0 0 1

1

1

4

2 0 1 1 0 0 0 2

2 1 0 0 2 2 4 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

0 0 1

1 2 1

2 0 3

9 3 0

2 1 13

0 0 0

1 6 4 0 3

0 6 11 2 1

1 2 0 2 0

1 11 0 0 2

0 20 0 0 0

2 3 0 0 0

1 13 0

2 18 0

1 4 0

0

7

2

Interview Responses of Adult Grassroots Participants

No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Has volunteered in a community organization Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Has ever attended a community meeting Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data

St. Paul, MN

Fresno, CA

Hickory, NC

14 0 0

13 0 0

3 0 0

1 12 0 0 1

4 16 0 0 0

4 1 0 0 0

4 8 0 0 2

4 12 0 0 4

3 1 0 1 0

16 1 1 2

5 0 0 0

6

3

0

5 0 3 0

5 2 6 4

3 0 2 0

5 9 0 0 0

3 12 0 1 4

3 1 0 0 1

3 11 0 0 0

5 13 0 1 1

2 3 0 0 0

2 9 0 3 0

2 14 1 1 2

2 3 0 0 0

1 8 1 3 1

3 10 0 0 7

1 4 0 0 0

1 12

0 8

0 2

is it important for hmong individuals to run for office? Yes 12 No 0 Don’t know 0 Ambiguous/unclear answer 2 preference for a hmong candidate Would vote for Hmong candidate even if less qualified Would not vote for Hmong candidate if less qualified Don’t know Stated other criteria for vote choice Missing data within family . . . Talks about politics in their family Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Other members participate in politics Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Parents ever talk to you about how to think about community leaders when you were a child? Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data About how to think about public officials in government or civil service? Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Parents ever talk to you about politics when you were a child? Yes No

239

(continued)

240

Appendix D

Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data political aspirations for childrenb Hopes children will participate in politics Hopes children will run for office Will support children if they want to become politically activec Missing data discrimination Has personally experienced discrimination in US as a Hmong person Yes No Don’t know/unsure Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Thinks discrimination toward Hmong people is a problem Yes No Don’t know/unsure Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data

St. Paul, MN

Fresno, CA

Hickory, NC

0 0 1

0 0 12

0 0 3

6 5

18 15

3 2

2 1

0 0

1 0

2 8 1 1 2

3 16 0 1 0

1 2 0 2 0

10 1 1 1 1

9 3 3 3 2

2 3 0 0 0

Notes: The interviews took place in Fresno during the summers of 2007, 2008, and 2009; in St. Paul, during the summer, fall, and spring of 2007, 2008, and 2009; and in Hickory, during the winter of 2008. Participants were recruited by door-to-door canvassing, in public places, in English classes at community agencies, and from the membership or client base of community organizations. The table indicates the number of respondents for whom data is missing for specific questions. Where there is no “Missing data” row, the count is zero across the entire row. A person could give multiple answers to a single question, such as indicating more than one answer to “Qualities/personality of the candidate that help you decide” your vote. a If respondent fell into the employed or unemployed category and was going to school, they were counted in the “Going to school” category and their employment status noted. b These counts include answers from respondents who said their children already participate in politics, are politically active, and have run or are running for office. c “Politically active” here refers to being involved in politics at any level, including running for office.

Appendix E

Interview Responses of Adult Business and Service Professional Individuals Recruited from Phone and Online Directories

Fresno, CA

MinneapolisSt. Paul-Brooklyn Park, MN

Number of participants

5

8

gender Male Female

5 0

2 6

birthplace Born in US Born in Laos Born in Thailand Missing data on birthplace

0 0 0 5

1 6 0 1

age Under 30 years old From 30 up to 50 years old Over 50 years old Missing data on age

2 2 0 1

3 4 1 0

marital status Single Married Divorced Widowed Resided in US less than 3 years Resided in US between 3 and 10 years Resided in US more than 10 years Resided in US more than 20 years

3 2 0 0 0 0 1 4

0 8 0 0 0 0 1 7

occupation Chiropractor Minister Licensed marriage therapist Home health care business Educator Artist President of a corporation Program director Insurance agent

1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 2

1 1 1 1 2 0 0 0 2 (continued)

241

242

Appendix E

Fresno, CA

MinneapolisSt. Paul-Brooklyn Park, MN

identifies themselves as . . . Hmong Hmong American Hmong Lao Hmong Thai Asian Asian American American Other Missing data

3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2

4 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 3

have you ever stayed in a refugee camp? Yes No

4 1

7 1

citizenship status US-born citizen Naturalized citizen Legal alien

1 4 0

1 6 1

why did you become a citizen? This is our country now. We must become Americans. Wanted to vote and reap all the benefits of being a citizen Easier to travel Felt it was the right thing to do Wanted to get all the benefits of being a citizen Not applicable/US-born citizen Ambiguous Missing data

0 0 1 0 2 1 1 0

1 0 2 1 0 1 1 2

0 3 0 1 1

2 3 0 2 1

2 1 0 1 1

7 0 0 0 1

0 0 0 0 5

1 0 0 1 6

voting Has ever voted Yes No Don’t know A citizen but has never voted

3 0 0 2

6 1 0 1

in regard to voting for the candidate Any important issues/ideas held by the general candidate that you keep in mind? Must respect the poor and illiterate, etc. Good relationships with their own family

1 0

1 1

participation in politics Participates in politics Yes No Don’t know/unsure Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Thinks participating in politics is important Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Thinks participating in politics will help anyone/make a difference Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data

Interview Responses of Adult Business and Service Professionals

Someone who’ll help the country grow Focus and goals Ideas/issues must line up with individual’s Did not elaborate (yes-no answer) Ambiguous answer Missing data Qualities/personality of the candidate that help you decide Charismatic Representative Persevering Someone who has “heart”/will love all people Someone who is smart Must be fair and just/transparent/ethical and moral Has good ideas/knows what issues are important/need to be   dealt with Good leader Ambiguous answer Missing data party Party preference Prefers Republican Party Prefers Democratic Party No preference Doesn’t know about party system Ambiguous Missing data Is party a factor? (what decides vote) Yes No Ambiguous Missing data nonvoting forms of participation Has ever contacted any elected public officials Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Has helped someone run for office Yes No No answer Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Has donated money to candidate’s running campaign Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Has volunteered in a community organization Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data

243

Fresno, CA

MinneapolisSt. Paul-Brooklyn Park, MN

0 1 0 0 2 1

2 0 0 1 0 3

1 0 1 1 1 0

2 1 0 2 0 0

0 1 0 0

1 0 0 2

1 1 3 0 0 0

0 3 1 0 1 3

0 4 0 1

2 4 2 0

0 4 0 0 1

0 1 0 0 7

1 4 0 0 0 0

2 4 1 0 0 1

2 2 0 0 1

4 2 0 1 1

1 2 0 0 2

6 0 0 0 2 (continued)

244

Appendix E

Fresno, CA

MinneapolisSt. Paul-Brooklyn Park, MN

Has ever attended a community meeting Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data

0 4 0 0 1

1 1 0 0 6

is it important for hmong individuals to run for office? Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data

3 0 0 0 2

6 0 0 2 0

preference for a hmong candidate Would vote for Hmong candidate even if less qualified Would not vote for Hmong candidate if less qualified Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data

2 3 0 0 0

0 3 0 4 1

0 2 0 1 2

4 2 0 0 2

0 2 0 2 1

2 5 0 0 1

2 1 0 1 1

1 4 0 0 3

1 1 0 3 1

1 1 0 1 5

1 2 0 0 2

1 2 0 0 5

3 1 3

6 2 3

within family . . . Talks about politics in their family Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Other members participate in politics Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Parents ever talk to you about how to think about community leaders when you were a child? Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Parents ever talk to you about how to think about public officials in government or civil service? Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Parents ever talk to you about politics when you were a child? Yes No Don’t know Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data political aspirations for childrena Hopes for and encourages children to participate in politics Hopes for and encourages children to run for office Will support children if they want to run for officeb

Interview Responses of Adult Business and Service Professionals

discrimination Has personally experienced discrimination in US as a Hmong person Yes No Don’t know/unsure Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data Thinks discrimination toward Hmong people is a problem Yes No Don’t know/unsure Ambiguous/unclear answer Missing data

245

Fresno, CA

MinneapolisSt. Paul-Brooklyn Park, MN

2 1 0 0 2

2 0 0 0 6

1 1 1 0 2

1 0 0 0 7

Notes: The interviews took place in Fresno during the summers of 2007, 2008, and 2009; in St. Paul, during the summer, fall, and spring of 2007, 2008, and 2009; and in Hickory, during the winter of 2008. The table indicates the number of respondents for whom data is missing for specific questions. When there is no “Missing data” row the count of missing data is zero across the entire row. A person could give multiple answers to a single question, such as indicating more than one answer to “Qualities/personality of the candidate that help you decide” your vote. a These counts include answers from respondents who said their children already participate in politics, are politically active, and have run or are running for office. b “Politically active” refers to being involved in politics at any level as well as running for office.

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Notes

Pr e fa c e

1.  Somini Sengupta, “60 Million People Fleeing Chaotic Lands, U.N. Says,” New York Times, June 18, 2015. 2. Nancy Fraser, Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical Exchange (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2004). 3. Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC), Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote, and National Asian American Survey, 2012 Asian American and Pacific Islander Post-Election Survey (2012 AAPI PES). On this survey, see the report in “Behind the Numbers: Post-Election Survey of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in 2012,” April 2013, http://www.naasurvey.com/reports/aapipes-2012 .html. 4.  Pew Research Center, Social and Demographic Trends, “The Rise of Asian Americans,” 2012, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/asianamericans/. 5.  Yang Dao, “The Hmong: Enduring Traditions,” in Minority Cultures of Laos: Kammu, Lua’, Lahu, Hmong and Mien, ed. Judy Lewis (Rancho Cordova, CA: Southeast Asian Community Resource Center, 1992). 6.  Vincent Her generously assisted me in identifying the qhuab kom type of funeral song and clarifying its meaning, as its interpretation is often open-ended. 7.  Randy Snook, Many Ideas Open the Way: A Collection of Hmong Proverbs (Walnut Creek, CA: Shens Books, 2003). 8.  I am grateful to Kou Yang and Gary Yia Lee for offering suggestions about how traditions of Hmong political leadership in Laos influenced contemporary thinking and career aspirations of Hmong Americans concerning politics. Gary Yia Lee commented that Confucian thinking about the high status of government officials in ancient China may still influence the way some Hmong Americans regard public office holding as a well-respected career choice.

247

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Notes to Preface and Chapter 1

9.  See Yang Dao, “Hmong at the Turning Point,” in Hmong at the Turning Point, ed. Jean L. Blake (Minneapolis: WorldBridge Associates, 1993), 29. 10. Ibid. Chapter 1

1.  In this book the term Vietnam War refers to the Second Indochina War. 2.  Timothy N. Castle, At War in the Shadow of Vietnam: U.S. Military Aid to the Royal Lao Government, 1955–1975 (New York: Columbia University Press), 12. 3.  The Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference on the Problem of Restoring Peace in Indo-China, of July 21, 1954, stated that the representatives of Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, France, Laos, the People’s Republic of China, the State of Vietnam, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America took part. http://search.archives.un.org/uploads/r/ united-nations-archives/b/b/2/bb2033c43fc31193cc3cfd3a805b91eea8f0cd29f8aa1ad b05f9033f145fd666/S-0901-0001-01-00001.pdf. 4.  Sean Sutton and Heaton Moore, Laos: Legacy of a Secret (Stockport, UK: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2011). 5. Castle, At War, 110. 6.  Ibid., 125, 134. 7.  Ibid., 3–4. 8.  Hmong National Development (HND), The State of the Hmong American Community, 2013 (2010 US Census Report) (Washington, DC: Hmong National Development), http://www.hndinc.org/cmsAdmin/uploads/dlc/HND-­Census -Report-2013.pdf. 9.  Hmong refugees came to the United States legally, but a small number of undocumented Hmong immigrants live in the United States, including those who came from Europe or Asia and who overstayed the duration of their visas. See, for example, Kou Yang, “The Migration of Hmong Americans (美国苗族的移民),” in Hmong/Miao Research (Guizhou, China: Guizhou Miao Studies Association Press, 2009). 10.  As Hein notes, the term refugee is not always a term imposed upon the Hmong. In the Hmong language, thoj nam means “refugee people,” and one of Hein’s community informants pointed out that it means that a people have “no place to stay.” Hein points out that the Hmong are different from other Southeast Asians who came from established nation-states, including the Cambodians and Vietnamese; however, the identities of the Hmong, Cambodians, and Vietnamese were all shaped in recent times by the violent deaths of scores of compatriots from civil wars of the 1960s and 1970s. See Jeremy Hein, “Homeland Narratives and Hmong Americans,” in Hmong and American: From Refugees to Citizens,

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ed. Vincent K. Her and Mary Louise Vuley-Meissner (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press), 47–58 (55). 11.  Moua is quoted in “The Soul of a New Political Machine Is Hmong,” New York Times, February 2, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/02/us/the-soul -of-a-new-political-machine-is-hmong.html. 12.  Author’s interview with Mee Moua, July 21, 2010, St. Paul, MN. Taeko Yoshikawa published the first scholarly article on Mee Moua’s electoral victory: “From a Refugee Camp to the Minnesota State Senate: A Case Study of a Hmong American Woman’s Challenge,” Hmong Studies Journal 7 (2006): 1–23. 13.  Mai Na M. Lee, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom: The Quest for Legitimation in French Indochina, 1850–1960 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015) (see especially note 11 in that book’s preface). 14.  See the text of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and of the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees at the UNHCR website: http://www.unhcr.org/3b66c2aa10.html. The 1951 convention was adopted on July 28, 1951, by the UN Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Status of Refugees and Persons convened under General Assembly Resolution 429 (V) of December 14, 1950. It entered into force April 22, 1954, in accordance with article 43. 15.  Margaret R. Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 7. 16. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), 7. 17. Christian Culas and Jean Michaud, “A Contribution to the Study of Hmong (Miao) Migrations and History,” in Hmong/Miao in Asia, ed. Nicholas Tapp et al. (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2004), 61–96, 63. 18.  Ibid., 71. 19.  Ibid., 66–67. 20. Lee, Dreams, 65. 21.  From the song “Aiv Mim Muas,” or “Many Mountains,” as transcribed by Patricia Veronica Symonds in “Cosmology and the Cycle of Life: Hmong Views of Birth, Death and Gender in a Mountain Village in Northern Thailand” (PhD diss., Brown University, 1991), xvii–xviii. Franklin Ng quotes this passage from “Many Mountains” in his article “Towards a Second Generation Hmong History,” Amerasia Journal 19, no. 3 (1993): 51–69. 22. Lee, Dreams, 38. Traditionally in Laos, the clans followed exogamous rules concerning marriage, which do not permit a Hmong person to marry within his or her clan, but he or she can find a spouse from another clan. Thus, in traditional society it is permissible for a son or daughter to marry a cousin from the mother’s side of the family, for example.

250

Notes to Chapter 1

23.  Ibid., 39. 24. Ibid. 25.  Yang Sao Xiong, “An Analysis of Poverty in Hmong American Communities,” in Diversity in Diaspora: Hmong-Americans in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Mark Edward Pfeifer, Monica Chiu, and Kou Yang (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013), 66–105, 86. 26.  For example, one of our informants from a mutual assistance association in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, described how the association uses a newer title of “group” leader rather than the traditional definition of “clan” leader. In some contexts this allows for the inclusion of in-laws in the group when they would otherwise be excluded. 27.  Interview with Blong Yang by Chai Lee, October 30, 2014, Minneapolis. 28.  Henry E. Brady, Sidney Verba, and Kay Lehman Schlozman, “SES: A Resource Model of Political Participation,” American Political Science Review 89, no. 2 (June 1995): 271–294. 29.  Steven J. Rosenstone and John Mark Hansen, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America (New York: Macmillan, 1993). 30. See the 2012 Asian American and Pacific Islander Post-Election Survey (2012 AAPI PES), Behind the Numbers: Post-Election Survey of Asian American and Pacific Islander Voters in 2012, 13 (preface, n. 3), http://www.advancingequal ity.org/sites/aajc/files/Behind_the_Numbers-2012_AAPI_Post-Election_Survey _­Results.pdf. In the appendix, the authors describe the sampling methodology: This report is based on data collected from 6,609 telephone interviews of adults in the United States who identify themselves as Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, or of any ethnicity or national origin recognized in the Asian and Pacific Islander race categories by the US Census Bureau. Interviews were conducted by telephone from November 7, 2012[,] through December 26, 2012. Respondents were offered a choice of language to be interviewed in English, Spanish, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Hindi, Hmong, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Laotian, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. The margin of error based on sample size is 1.5 percent for Asian Americans and 5 percent for Pacific Islanders. By ethnicity, sample sizes and margins of error are as follows: Cambodian (395, 5 percent), Chinese (1151, 2.9 percent), Filipino (957, 3.2 percent), Hmong (290, 5.8 percent), Indian (898, 3.3 percent), Japanese (534, 4.2 percent), Korean (670, 3.8 percent), Laotian (288, 5.8 percent), Vietnamese (956, 3.2 percent), Native Hawaiian (314, 6 percent), and Samoan (156, 8 percent). Sampling error from the size of our sample is only one type of error possible in surveys like the 2012 AAPI PES. (16)

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31. Meredith Rolfe. Voter Turnout: A Social Theory of Political Participation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 32. In Voter Turnout, 6 (see 203n10), Rolfe is citing Betsy Sinclair, Margaret McConnell, Melissa R. Michelson, and Lisa García Bedolla, “Strangers vs. Neighbors: The Efficacy of Grassroots Voter Mobilization” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, August 30–September 2, 2007). 33.  Betsy Sinclair, The Social Citizen: Peer Networks and Political Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 2. 34.  Kou Yang, “The American Experience of the Hmong: A Historical Review,” Diversity in Diaspora: Hmong-Americans in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Mark ­Edward Pfeifer, Monica Chiu, and Kou Yang (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013), 3–53, 10. 35.  Ibid., 9. 36.  See the description of this type of work of the Association for the Advancement of Hmong Women in Minnesota in “Ties That Bind: AAHWM Connects Hmong Families and Generations,” at the website of the National Gender and Equity Campaign, http://www.genderandequity.org/partners-aahwm. 37.  The necessity to rethink notions of leadership in Hmong communities in the United States is discussed in various essays by Hmong Americans. See, for example, Mai Moua, “Leadership Development: A Critical Component to Advancing Hmong Society in the United States,” in The Impact of Globalization and Trans-Nationalism on the Hmong: Selected Presentations from the First International Conference on Hmong Studies, ed. Gary Yia Lee (St. Paul, Minnesota: Center for Hmong Studies, Concordia University, 2009), 41–51. 38.  For a discussion of likely undercounting of the Hmong in the census, see Mark E. Pfeifer, John Sullivan, Kou Yang, and Wayne Yang, “Hmong Population and Demographic Trends in the 2010 Census and 2010 American Community Survey,” Hmong Studies Journal 13, no. 2 (2012): 1–31. 39. Website Map 1.1, “Distribution of Hmong Population by Counties in the United States in 2010,” and Website Map 1.2, “Percentage of Hmong in Asian Populations, County Level, 2010,” are available at the author’s website, www.carolynwong.site. 40. In 2010, the private voluntary agencies undertaking refugee resettlement assistance were the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, Church World Service, Episcopal Migration Ministries, Ethiopian Community Development Council, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, International Rescue Committee, Kurdish Human Rights Watch, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, US Catholic Conference, and World Relief Corporation. “Voluntary Agencies,”

252

Notes to Chapter 1

Office of Refugee Resettlement, http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/orr/partners/ voluntary_agencies.htm. 41.  Pakou Hang’s survey is described in an article by Marisa Helms, “Survey of Hmong Voters Shows Strong Democratic Support, Shifting Demographics,” Minnpost, November 3, 2008, https://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2008/11/ survey-hmong-voters-shows-strong-democratic-support-shifting-demographics. 42. Nao Xiong, “Households and Marital Status of Hmong in the United States, 2008–2010,” in The State of the Hmong American Community, 2013 (Washington, DC: Hmong National Development, 2013), 35–41, 37. 43.  Asian American Legal Center (AALC) and Asian American Justice Center (AAJC), Community of Contrasts: Asian Americans in the United States: 2011 (Washington, DC: Asian Americans Advancing Justice, 2012), 40, http://napca.org/wp -content/uploads/2012/11/AAJC-Community-of-Contrast.pdf. 44.  It is sometimes abbreviated as the three-year 2013 ACS. 45.  The three-year estimates are based on thirty-six months of collected data; the five-year estimates are based on sixty months of collected data. The threeyear 2011–2013 ACS, for example, uses data collected between January 1, 2011, and December 31, 2013. In Chapters 1 and 3, data shown in tables or figures are drawn from releases of the American Community Survey as identified. The releases are not always the same because comparisons of population statistics for racial-­ethnic groups or cities were available in one release but not another. Where data are drawn from secondary sources, the release used in that source is noted. 46.  Pfeifer et al., “Hmong Population and Demographic Trends,” 13. 47.  For 2007–2009 estimates, see AALC and AAJC, Community of Contrasts, 31. 48.  Yang Sao Xiong, “Recent Changes and Remaining Challenges in Hmong Americans’ Educational Attainment,” in The State of the Hmong American Community 2013 (Washington, DC: Hmong National Development), 29–34, 30. 49.  Xiong, “Analysis of Poverty,” 66–105. 50.  Xiong, “Recent Changes.” 51.  Tim Weiner, “Many Laotians in U.S. Find Their Hopes Betrayed,” New York Times, December 27, 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/27/world/­ many-laotians-in-us-find-their-hopes-betrayed.html. 52.  AALC and AAJC, Community of Contrasts, 40. 53.  Ibid., 44. 54.  Ibid., 29. 55.  Xiong, “Recent Changes,” 29. 56.  The survey question reads: “Here are some issues other people have mentioned as challenges they face. Please tell me how serious of a problem each is for you and your family. Not at all serious, not very serious, fairly serious, or

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very serious: Getting Bullied in School.” Karthick Ramakrishnan and Farah Z. Ahmed, State of Asian Americans and Pacific Islander Series (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, 2014), 56–57. 57.  Kevin Pottie, Govinda Dahal, Katholiki Georgiades, Kamila Premji, and Ghayda Hassan, “Do First Generation Immigrant Adolescents Face Higher Rates of Bullying, Violence and Suicidal Behaviours Than Do Third Generation and Native Born?” Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health 17, no. 5 (2015): 1557–1566. 58. For a discussion of advantages and limitations of the list method, see Karthick Ramakrishnan, “What 2014 Does—and Does Not—Tell Us About Asian Americans’ Voting,” Monkey Cage (blog), November 13, 2004, http://www .washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/11/13/what-2014-does-and -does-not-tell-us-about-asian-americans-voting/. Ramakrishnan was a principal investigator for the 2012 Asian American and Pacific Islander Post-Election Survey: The researchers report the sampling margin of error is ±1.5 percent in the case of Asian Americans. 59. AAJC, Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote, and National Asian American Survey, Behind the Numbers. 60. Ibid. 61.  Author’s interview with leader of a Hmong American association in Fresno, California, July 2, 2009. 62.  Author’s interview with leader of a Minnesota Hmong American association, Minneapolis, September 23, 2009. 63. Ibid. 64. Author’s interview with leader of a Hmong American association in St. Paul, Minnesota, July 9, 2010. 65. Amelia Chang, “Wisconsin Hmong Leader Elected, WEAU 13 News, November 8, 2010. http://www.weau.com/home/headlines/Wisconsin_Hmong_ ­ leader_elected.html. 66.  See Gary Yia Lee, “The Spirit of Enterprise and the Emergence of Hmong and Hmong American Identities,” and Kou Yang, “Forging New Paths, Confronting New Challenges: Hmong Americans in the 21st Century,” both in Hmong and American: From Refugees to Citizens, ed. Vincent K. Her and Mary Louise ­Buley-Meissner (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2012), 81–97 and 161–177; and Chia Youyee Vang, Hmong America: Reconstructing Community in Diaspora (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 97–121. 67.  See the webpage of the Hmong American Farmers Association (HAFA) in St. Paul, at http://www.hmongfarmers.com/programs/787. 68.  Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

254

Notes to Chapters 1 and 2

69.  Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997); Kao Kalia Yang, The Latecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2008); and Hmong American Writers’ Circle, How Do I Begin?: A Hmong American Literary Anthology (Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2011). 70. Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship, 1–29. 71.  Jeffrey C. Alexander. The Civil Sphere (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4. 72.  Adeline Masquelier describes the controversy over use of the term refugee in “Why Katrina’s Victims Aren’t Refugees: Musings on a Dirty Word,” American Anthropologist 108, no. 4 (2006): 735–743. 73.  Erica Perez, “Provision of Patriot Act Treats Hmong as Terrorists: Many Barred from Immigrating, Work,” Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, March 31, 2007, http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/29493854.html. 74. Archon Fung, Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 31–44. 75.  Nancy Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition, and Participation,” in Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-­ Philosophical Exchange, ed. Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth (London: Verso, 2003), 12–13, 29. 76.  Ibid., 68. 77.  Interview of Blong Yang by Chai Lee (the author’s research assistant) in Minneapolis, MN, October 30, 2015. 78. Ibid. 79.  Excerpts from some of the interviews of community leaders are included in Chapters 1–4. Chapter 2

1.  Mai Der Vang, “Heirs of the ‘Secret War’ in Laos,” New York Times, May 27, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/28/opinion/heirs-of-the-secret-war-in-laos .html?_r=0. 2.  Franklin Ng, “Towards a Second Generation Hmong History,” Amerasia Journal 19, no. 3 (1993): 51–69; this passage is quoted from Amy Caitlin, “The Hmong and Their Music, A Critique of Pure Speech,” in Hmong Art: Tradition and Change (Sheboygan, WI: John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 1986), 14–15. 3.  Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 3. 4.  Gary Yia Lee suggests that Dr. Yang Dao was the first to write that the word “Hmong” means “free people.” See Lee’s “Cultural Identity in Post-Modern

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Society: Reflections on What Is a Hmong?” Hmong Studies Journal 1, no. 1 (Fall 1996): 1. 5.  Mai Na Lee, “The Thousand-Year Myth: Construction and Characterization of Hmong,” Hmong Studies Journal 2, no. 2 (1998): http://hmongstudies.com/ HSJ-v2n1_Lee.pdf. 6.  Nicholas Tapp, The Impossibility of Self: An Essay on the Hmong Diaspora (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2010), 60–61. 7.  Author’s transcription of interview of Foung Hawj (the name is also spelled Foung Heu) by Grace Kelley on July 27, 2010. The voice recording was posted via YouTube on the website of the Minnesota Progressive Project, at http://www.mn progressiveproject.com/diary/6736/foung-hawj-for-state-senator-east-side-st-paul. 8. Tapp, Impossibility of Self, 110. 9. Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET. 10.  Kao Kalia Yang, The Latecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2008), 205. 11.  W. E. B. DuBois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Gramercy Books, 1994), 2. 12.  See, for example, Cooper’s discussion of his recent experiments comparing the responses of black and white Americans to cognitive dissonance. Cooper draws connections between DuBois’s concept of double consciousness and the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance. Joel Cooper, Cognitive Dissonance: Fifty Years of a Classic Theory (London: Sage, 2007), 150. 13.  Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1. 14.  Judith R. Blau and Eric S. Brown, “Du Bois and Diasporic Identity: The Veil and the Unveiling Project,” Sociological Theory 19, no. 2 (2001), 219–233, 221. The authors cite DuBois’s “Double Consciousness, Veil, and Twoness,” in The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 2. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17.  Author’s interview of Mee Moua, St. Paul, MN, July 21, 2010. 18.  Lawrence Bobo and Mia Tuan, Prejudice in Politics: Group Position, Public Opinion, and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Aihwa Ong, Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Ong also shows that Cambodians have a part to play in their own “subjectification” stories. 19.  Bobo and Tuan, Prejudice in Politics, 32. 20. Ong, Buddha Is Hiding, 2003, 13.

256

Notes to Chapter 2

21.  See Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: ­Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–1299; and Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 2002). 22.  Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 23. Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 98–106. 24.  Paul Hillmer, A People’s History of the Hmong (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2010). 25.  The author transcribed Tanton’s remarks from a recording of the Moore Report: Farewell to Freedom: A Town Meeting, a WCCO-TV (Minneapolis, MN) broadcast in 1981 of a viewer call-in discussion of the documentary film Farewell to Freedom by Dave Moore and Gregg Pratt. The film, which tells the story of Lee Vang Neng and his relatives, is about the Hmong people from Laos. Panel participants included John Tanton, Diane Ahrens, Xang Vang, Arnold Williams, and Jane Kretzmann; moderated by TV anchors Pat Miles and Mike Walcher. The recording is held at the Rolvaag Library and transcribed with the library’s permission. 26.  Bee Vang, a Hmong American actor, played the teenage Hmong boy in this film. Vang has offered a similar critique of the film’s culturally biased portrayal of concepts of masculinity to public audiences. 27.  Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), as cited by Bonnie Honig (translated by Julie Rose), Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 100n71. 28. Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, 7–14, 98–106. 29.  Lee, “Cultural Identity in Post-Modern Society,” 13–14. 30.  See Cliff Zukin, A New Engagement: Political Participation, Civic Life, and the Changing American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Russell J. Dalton, The Good Citizen: How a Younger Generation Is Reshaping American Politics (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2008). 31. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 32–33. 32.  Author’s interview of Pakou Hang, St. Paul, MN, January 23, 2009. 33.  Author’s interviews of pastors of churches affiliated with the Hmong Alliance in Hickory, NC, on December 14, 2008, and in the Twin Cities, MN, on March 24, 2010. 34.  Chia Youyee Vang, Hmong America: Reconstructing Community in Diaspora (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 92.

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35.  Ibid., 92–96. 36.  See Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993); and Renato Rosaldo, “Cultural Citizenship, Equality, and Multiculturalism,” in Race, Identity, and Citizenship: A Reader, ed. Rodolfo Torres, Louis F. Miron, and Jonathan Xavier Inda (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), 253–296. 37.  Jennifer M. Brinkerhoff, Digital Diasporas: Identity and Transnational Engagement (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 2. 38.  Prasit Leepreecha, “The Role of Media Technology in Reproducing Hmong Identity,” in Living in a Globalized World: Ethnic Minorities in the Greater Mekong Subregion, ed. Don McCaskill, Prasit Leepreecha, and He Shaoying (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Mekong Press, 2008), 110. 39.  Louisa Schein, “Mapping Hmong Media in Diasporic Space,” in Media Worlds, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 241–242. 40.  See, for example, Kylie Morris, “Hmong Refugees Pleading to Stay,” BBC, July 28, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4724199.stm. 41.  The Time Is Right for Mee, produced by Foung Heu, directed by Noel Lee (San Francisco, CA: Center for Asian American Media, 2010), DVD. 42.  Tapp explores the complex mix of self-concepts and themes in Impossibility of Self. 43. Stephen Magagnini, “Hmong Worldwide Revere ‘The General,’” Sacramento (CA) Bee, July 19, 2009, A1. 44. Tim Nelson and Jason Hoppin, “11 Indicted in Alleged Laotian Plot,” St. Paul (MN) Pioneer Press, June 14, 2007. 45. Ibid. 46.  Monica Davey, “Leader’s Arrest Uncovers Divide in Hmong-Americans,” New York Times, July 14, 2007, A20. 47. Ibid. 48.  Author’s interview with leader of a Hmong association, Fresno, CA, July 3, 2008. 49.  Magagnini, “Hmong Worldwide,” A1. 50. Ibid. 51.  Tony Kennedy and Paul McEnroe, “The Covert War of Vang Pao,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, July 2, 2005, pt. 2. 52.  Author’s interview of Cy Thao, St. Paul, MN, August 4, 2010. 53.  WCCO-TV broadcast of town meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota (see note 25). 54. Pat Schneider, “Fight over Relief Agency Shows Hmong Friction,” The Capital Times (WI), March 4, 2010, http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/

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fight-over-relief-agency-shows-hmong-clan-friction/article_ef1b039c-36b1-11df -b452-001cc4c03286.html. 55.  Author’s interview of Cy Thao, St. Paul, MN, August 4, 2010. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58.  “Long Walk for Freedom,” EWorldWire, press release, http://www.eworld wire.com/pressreleases/10614. 59. Ibid. 60.  Author’s interview with former leader of Long Walk for Freedom, St. Paul, MN, June 15, 2010. 61. Ibid. 62. Partial lyrics of “30 Year Secret,” performed and written by Delicious Venom. This is one of sixteen songs compiled on the CD The H Project: Silence No More, produced by the H Project in 2005 (http://www.icelevation.org). 63.  Annie Baxter, “Trial Observers Question Court and Media ‘Biases’ in Vang Trial,” Minnesota Public Radio, November 3, 2005, http://news.minnesota.public radio.org/features/2005/11/03_baxtera_hmongcourtreax/. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66.  Author’s video recording of presentation by Tou Ger Xiong and Pakou Hang, Conference on Southeast Asian Americans, March 12, 2007, Carleton College, Northfield, MN. 67.  Louisa Schein and Va-Megn Thoj, “Occult Racism: The Masking of Race in the Hmong Hunter Incident—A Dialogue Between Anthropologist Louisa Schein and Filmmaker/Activist Va-Megn Thoj,” American Quarterly 59, no. 4 (2007): 1051–1095. 68. Associated Press, “Bumper Sticker Advocates Anti-Hmong Violence,” December 14, 2004, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/6709956/ns/us_news-life/t/­ bumper-sticker-advocates-anti-hmong-violence/#.VdSq0ZeQeFg. 69.  Bobo and Tuan, Prejudice and Politics. 70.  Bobo and Tuan take this quote from Herbert Blumer, “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” Pacific Sociological Review 1, no. 1 (1958): 3–7, 4. 71.  Bobo and Tuan take this quote from another work by Herbert Blumer: “Reflections on Theory of Race Relations in World Perspective,” in Race Relations in World Perspective, edited by A. W. Lind (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1955), 13. 72. William Wilcoxen, “Wisconsin Authorities Reveal Details of Hmong Hunter’s Death,” Minnesota Public Radio News, St. Paul, MN, January 17, 2007, http://www.mprnews.org/story/2007/01/16/huntercharged. 73.  Author’s interview of Cy Thao, St. Paul, MN, August 4, 2010.

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Chapter 3

1.  Chia Youyee Vang, in Hmong America: Reconstructing Community in Diaspora, 2010, 68–93, closely examines young Hmong Americans’ processes of adaptation and reinvention of social structures and traditions. 2. Fraser, Redistribution or Recognition?, 36. 3. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition,” New Left Review 3 (May– June 2000): 113. 4. Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner. 5.  Robert J. Sampson, Doug McAdam, Heather MacIndoe, and Simon Weffer-­ Elizondo, “Civil Society Reconsidered: The Durable Nature and Community Structure of Collective Civic Action,” American Journal of Sociology 111, no. 3 (2005): 673–714. 6. Robert J. Sampson, The Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 357. 7.  Jeremy Hein, “The Urban Ethnic Community and Collective Action: Politics, Protest, and Civic Engagement by Hmong Americans in Minneapolis-Saint Paul,” City & Community 13, no. 2 (2014): 119–139, 119. 8.  James Lai, Asian American Political Action: Suburban Transformations (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2011). This study identifies three factors in the rise of Asian American electoral activism and sustained office holding in the suburbs: the core populations, civic organizations, political leanings, and specific electoral challenges and successes. 9.  Ibid., 14. 10.  The eight counties are Fresno, Kern, Kings, Madera, Merced, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, and Tulare. 11.  Elias S. Lopez, “The California Central Valley versus Other States?” California Research Bureau, California State Library, May, 3, 1996, http://www.library .ca.gov/crb/cvrank/. To demonstrate this, the California Research Bureau of the California State Library provides comparative data, ranking economic and social indicators describing California’s regions alongside other states. 12.  “California: Welfare and Farm Jobs,” Rural Migration News 5, no. 4 (1999), http://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=398. 13.  Author’s interview with leader of a Hmong American association, Fresno, CA, July 2, 2009. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16.  Kou Yang, “Hmong Americans: A Review of Felt Needs, Problems, and Community Development,” Hmong Studies Journal 4 (2003): 1–23, 7. 17. Vang, Hmong America, 58. 18.  See Yang Lor, “Hmong Political Involvement in St. Paul, Minnesota and Fresno, California,” Hmong Studies Journal 10 (2009): 1–53. Lor was the first to

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compare the political engagement of Hmong Americans in Fresno and St. Paul, focusing his analysis on social-economic and cultural factors. See also Vang, Hmong America, 74–76. 19.  Author’s interview with leader of a Hmong American Partnership, St. Paul, MN, November 3, 2009. 20. Jenna Christian, Pa Sia Low Moua, and Ingolf Vogeler, “The Cultural Landscape of the Hmong in Eau Claire, Wisconsin,” Wisconsin Geographer 23 (2008–2009): 3–19, http://www.webcitation.org/6NkkocMv5. 21. Ibid. 22. Jeremy Hein, “Leadership Continuity and Change in Hmong Refugee Communities in the United States,” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 6, no. 2 (1997): 213–228. 23.  United Hmong Association, Inc., Hickory, North Carolina (http://www .wecaretoo.com/Organizations/NC/uhanc.html). 24.  Author’s interview with former leader of a Hmong American association, Hickory, NC, December 17, 2008. 25. Mark E. Pfeifer and Kou Yang, “Hmong Population and Demographic Trends in the 2010 Census and 2010 American Community Survey,” in State of the Hmong American Community, 2013 (report), edited by M. Pfeifer and B. K. Thao, 9–10. 26.  Chia Youyee Vang, “Hmong Socioeconomic Trends in the U.S.,” in State of the Hmong American Community, 2013 (report), 21–28. 27. In 2013, the American Community Survey included these counties in the Minneapolis–St. Paul–Bloomington MN-WI metropolitan statistical area: Anoka, Carver, Dakota, Hennepin, Ramsey, Scott, Washington, Chisago, Isanti, Le Sueur, Mille Lacs, Sherburne, Sibley, and Wright Counties in Minnesota; and Pierce and St. Croix Counties in Wisconsin. Previous to 2013 and at the time of the 2010 census and ACS—the data sources used in this chapter—Le Sueur, Mille Lacs, and Sibley Counties were not included. 28.  Standard errors and the difference between the two estimates are used to determine whether an estimate of these independent samples is significantly different at a confidence level of .90. 29.  Renato Rosaldo, “Cultural Citizenship and Educational Democracy,” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (1994): 402–441. 30.  Robert T. Teranishi, “Yellow and Brown: Emerging Asian American Immigrant Populations and Residential Segregation,” Equity & Excellence in Education 37, no. 3 (2004): 255–263. 31.  Author’s interview with Tony Vang, Fresno, CA, July 5, 2009. 32.  Deborah Rivas-Drake, Diane Hughes, and Niobe Way, “A Closer Look at Peer Discrimination, Ethnic Identity, and Psychological Well-Being Among

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Urban Chinese American Sixth Graders,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 37, no. 1 (2008): 12–21; see also Andrea Romero and Robert E. Roberts, “The Impact of Multiple Dimensions of Ethnic Identity on Discrimination and Adolescents’ SelfEsteem,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 33, no. 11 (2003): 2288–2305, http:// www.researchgate.net/profile/Andrea_Romero4/publication/229903572_The _Impact_of_Multiple_Dimensions_of_Ethnic_Identity_on_Discrimination _and_Adolescents_SelfEsteem/links/00b7d53501e883ae17000000.pdf. 33.  See Lisa García Bedolla, Fluid Borders: Latino Power, Identity, and Politics in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 34. Interviews of high school youth were not conducted in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. 35.  Michael C. Dawson, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 36. Tom Watkins, “Achievement of Hmong Students in Saint Paul Public Schools,” presentation at Hmong Youth Educational Services Banquet, June 2006, http://slideplayer.com/slide/3585040/. 37. Ibid. 38.  Author’s interview with former leader of a Hmong American association in Hickory, NC, December 17, 2008. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41.  On the author’s website, www.carolynwong.site, a subpage is dedicated to this book, Voting Together: Intergenerational Politics and Civic Engagement among Hmong Americans. 42.  Hein, “Urban Ethnic Community,” 132. 43. Fraser, Redistribution or Recognition?, 9. 44.  See the website for Take Action Minnesota at http://www.takeactionmin nesota.org/join/3. 45.  Author’s interview with Mee Moua, St. Paul, MN, July 21, 2010. 46.  Quoted in Eduardo Stanley, “Latinos Help Elect First Hmong City Council Member in California,” New America Media, November 28, 2006. 47.  Author’s interview of Blong Xiong, Fresno, CA, December 14, 2007. 48.  Author’s interview of Cy Thao, St. Paul, MN, August 4, 2010. 49. Ibid. 50. Jeremy Hein, Ethnic Origins: The Adaptation of Cambodian and Hmong Refugees in Four Cities (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), 95. 51. Lai, Asian American Political Action, 199–212. 52. Ibid. 53.  Author’s interview with Yong Kai Moua, Eau Claire, WI, August 12, 2009. 54. Ibid.

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55. Ibid. 56.  Christopher Terry, “Anonymous Postcard Sent to City Official,” Eau Claire Leader-Telegram, June 15, 1982. See Hein, Ethnic Origins, 267, n. 25. 57. In Ethnic Origins (83), Hein cites an article describing this survey by William Ruefle, William H. Ross, and Diane Mandell: “Attitudes Towards Southeast Asian Immigrants in a Wisconsin Community,” International Migration Review 26, no. 3 (1992): 877–898. Chapter 4

1.  Some of the interview excerpts in this chapter were previously included in the chapter “Civic Values and Political Engagement in Two Hmong American Communities,” written by the author, in Mark Edward Pfeifer, Monica Chiu, and Kou Yang, eds., Diversity and Diaspora: Hmong Americans in the Twenty-First Century (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013), 106–130. 2.  Nicholas Tapp, “Hmong Confucian Ethics and Constructions of the Past,” in Cultural Crisis and Social Memory: Modernity and Identity in Thailand and Laos, ed. Shigeharu Tanage and Charles F. Keys (London: Routledge Curzon, 2002), 95–110; author’s interview with Gary Yia Lee, St. Paul, MN, September, 2007. 3.  Author’s interview of Pakou Hang, St. Paul, MN, January 23, 2009. 4.  Author’s interview of Mee Moua, St. Paul, MN, July 21, 2010. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7.  Author’s interview of Cy Thao, St. Paul, MN, August 4, 2010. 8. Ibid. 9.  Author’s interview of Pakou Hang, St. Paul, MN, January 23, 2009. 10. Ibid. 11.  Pei-te Lien, “Homeland Origins and Political Identities Among Chinese in Southern California,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31, no. 8 (2008): 1381–1403. 12.  Author’s interview of Blong Xiong, Fresno, CA, December 13, 2007. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15.  Although Vang Pao was a major general in the Royal Army of Laos, many Hmong Americans call him “General Vang Pao.” 16.  Author’s second interview of Blong Xiong, Fresno, CA, July 1, 2009. 17. Ibid. 18.  Author’s interview with Noah Lor, Merced, CA, July 1, 2009. 19. Ibid. 20.  Author’s interview with leader of a Hmong American association in Sheboygan, WI, August 11, 2009.

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263

21.  Author’s interview with leader of a Hmong American association in Sheboygan, WI, August 11, 2009. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24.  Author’s interview with a Hmong American business owner in Sheboygan, WI, August 12, 2009. 25.  Author’s interviews with former leader of a Hmong American association in Hickory, NC, December 17, 2008. 26.  Author’s interview with second former leader of a Hmong American association in Hickory, NC, December 17, 2008. 27.  Author’s interview with leader of a Hmong American association in Detroit, July 20, 2009. 28.  Author’s interview with second leader of a Hmong American association in Detroit, July 20, 2009. 29.  The recruitment of interview participants among each community’s network of ethnic leaders used convenience sampling rather than a probability sampling method; the small number of participants in each does not permit statistical inference about differences across city contexts. Chapter 5

1.  S. James Anaya, Indigenous Peoples in International Law, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 62. 2.  UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, Study of the Problem of Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations, U.N. Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/1987/7 & Adds. 1–4 (1986) (Jose Martinez Cobo, special rapporteur). 3.  James F. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 4.  Ibid., 321–323. In general, Hmong Americans do not readily identify with indigeneity as a category describing the political or social status of Hmong in Asia. The term is not very familiar, and to those who do understand it, it is as a popular notion that indigenous peoples live in forms of social organization akin to tribes, which is not the form of social organization of the Hmong in Asia. Scott’s argument suggests a response to concerns that the term “indigeneity” is associated in the popular mind with cultural “backwardness” and therefore not appropriate for framing Hmong human rights issues. In the modern human rights context, indigeneity has been employed by international legal scholars and advocates and social activists in developing nations as an ideational framework for imagining social arrangements protective of human dignity and rights. In this regard, it is

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an ideational construct not unlike others that have been invoked to understand and articulate notions of freedom and equality—a “dreaming framework,” as are religion and socialism in varied historical and social circumstances. 5.  Marc Kaufman, “Hmong Activists Decry What They Say Is Forced Repatriation to Laos,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 27, 1994, A07. 6.  Marc Kaufman, “US Lawmakers Turn Up the Heat for Hmong Fighting Repatriation,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 3, 1994, A02. 7.  Marc Kaufman, “As Return to Laos Nears, Hmong Hopes Are Dashed,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 5, 1994, A03. 8.  Brian Bonner, “End Sought to Hmong Repatriation,” St. Paul (MN) Pioneer Press, March 2, 1995, 1A. 9. Ibid. 10.  The author interviewed Giuseppe De Vincentis, deputy regional representative, UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), Regional Office, Bangkok, Thailand, on January 14, 2010. De Vincentis described background events. In 2005, several thousand Hmong in Thailand were evicted from their homes and brought to the detention center in Petchabun. UNHCR insisted on screening these people to determine which were economic migrants and which were refugees deserving protection. The Thai government responded that they would do their own screening. The UNHCR had no access. In 2006 the Thai government started a repatriation process, which was declared to be voluntary and continued for about two years. After this, there remained a population of four thousand people in Petchabun, who were finally repatriated in December 2009. At Nong Khai, the situation developed differently. In 2004 and 2005, some number of Lao Hmong people, in the range of about thousand, approached UNHCR in the agency’s offices. Over a year’s time, UNHCR granted refugee status to some; for others the agency did not grant refugee status because it concluded they could safely go home. In November 2006, the Thai government raided and arrested many of these people in Bangkok and a nearby province with the intention of deporting them back to Laos. Those who were arrested were moved to Nong Khai, where they stayed in a detention center for three years. Among the 158 persons at Nong Khai at the time of the 2009 repatriation some were prominent individuals; some were connected to a resistance movement opposed to the Laotian government. The UNHCR was not present to observe the 2009 repatriations. 11.  Margaret Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship, 2008. 12. Excerpts from James Anaya, “Promotion and Protection of All Human Rights: Economic, Social, Civil and Political, Including the Rights to Development: Report by the Special Rapporteur on the situation and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people,” Human Rights Council, Office of the High Commissioner

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on Human Rights, A/HRC/12/34/Add.1, September 18, 2009, 84, http://www2 .ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/12session/A-HRC-12-34-Add1.pdf. 13.  Ibid., no. 406, p. 84. 14.  Ibid., no. 407, p. 84. The report of the special rapporteur James Anaya “Promotion and Protection of All Human Rights” stated: “In October 2005, the Tham Krabok Foundation initiated a project to convert the area into a destination for religious activities, a public park, and a museum. The Hmong community was informed that that the graves would need to be relocated. The Abbot of Tham Krabok or the Chair of the Tham Krabok foundation, which apparently owns the monastery, had previously prohibited any burial. As part of this process, some Hmongs reclaimed their relatives’ bodies for relocation. For the graves left unclaimed, the monastery arranged a public cremation ceremony, a service that many monasteries generally provide as charity for the deceased with no known relatives and whose bodies were unclaimed. Ashes of those cremated were placed at the Pothipowanasongkrau graveyard in Saraburi Province. The Government notes that all of these processes were carried out with respect for the deceased and consideration for their families.” 15.  Patricia V. Symonds, Calling in the Soul: Gender and the Cycle of Life in a Hmong Village (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 149. 16.  Bruce Thowpaou Bliatout, “Hmong Death Customs: Traditional and Acculturated,” in Ethnic Variations in Dying, Death, and Grief: Diversity in Universality, edited by D. Irish, K. Lundquist, and V. Nelsen (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1993), 79–84. 17.  Nicholas Tapp, “Hmong Religion,” Asian Folklore Studies 48 (1989): 59–94. 18.  Human Rights Council, http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/ docs/12session/A-HRC-12-34-Add1.pdf. September 18, 2009. The special rapporteur James Anaya noted in no. 418, p. 87: “Allegedly some employees of the IOM and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) were present when Hmong refugees met with the Abbot on 28 October 2005, two days after the exhumations began, to inform him that the diggings were against their traditions and to ask him not to proceed. According to the information received, the Abbot responded that there was no way for the Hmong to stop the exhumations completely, but that they could post signs at graves they did not want dug up and find other locations for these bodies. However, allegedly video footage shows that signs, which were subsequently placed at many graves, were ignored.” 19.  Ibid., no. 421, p. 87. 20.  Ibid., no. 415, p. 86. 21.  Ibid., no. 429, p. 89: “The Special Rapporteur regrets that there is no record of any response from the Government of Thailand to the letter of 10 March 2009

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at the time of the finalization of this report. He remains concerned that the Government has not taken measures to remedy the situation involving the exhumation of Hmong graves and the potential cultural and religious rights affected. The Special Rapporteur again urges the Government of Thailand to engage the Hmong community to resolve this situation and he expresses his willingness to aid in the resolution process to ensure compliance with international legal norms. He reiterates his call to the Government to take appropriate steps to remedy the situation, including: 1) acknowledging the harm the Hmong community has suffered, and expressing a commitment to not allow similar exhumations of Hmong graves in the future; 2) urging the Abbot of Wat Tham Krabok to issue an apology for past desecrations; and 3) ensuring the re-burial at Wat Tham Krabok of the 211 bodies of Hmong people still located at Hulin cemetery.” 22.  See Timothy T. Vang, “Coming a Full Circle: Historical Analysis of the Hmong Church Growth, 1950–1998” (DMin diss., Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA, 1998). 23.  International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, adopted and opened for signature, ratification, and accession by General Assembly resolution 2200A (XXI) of December 16, 1966, http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ ccpr.aspx. 24. Since the declaration was adopted, Australia changed its position and ­endorsed it. Colombia and Samoa also reversed their position and stated support for it. 25.  Human Rights Council, A/HRC/12/34/Add.1, September 18, 2009, no. 426, pp. 88–89. 26.  Ibid., no. 427. 27.  PaChia Yang, Mena Xiong, Chai Lee, and Fue Thao, former students at Carleton college, collected testimony from relatives of deceased persons whose graves were exhumed in Thailand. 28.  Tapp, “Hmong Religion.” 29. Ibid. 30.  Melissa Victoria Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 31. PaChia Yang provides an English translation of interviews used to prepare for the testimony of grave desecration victims, which she summarized at the December 10, 2008, consultative hearing in her paper “Burial Rites and Human Rights of the Hmong People” (report prepared for a consultation on the desecration of Hmong graves before the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous People, December 10, 2008, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities). The translations were subsequently edited by the Human Rights Program of the University of Minnesota.

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32.  Mr. Kao Xiong testimony, Hmong victim family member, December 10, 2008, consultation with the UN expert on the desecration of Hmong graves, http://hrp.cla.umn.edu/assets/pdf/Pa%20Ze%20Xiong%20Testimony_Consulta tion%20with%20UN%20Expert.pdf. 33. Mr. Lee Thao testimony, Hmong victim family member, December 10, 2008, consultation with the UN expert on the desecration of Hmong graves, http://hrp.cla.umn.edu/assets/pdf/Lee%20Thao%20Testimony_Consultation%20 with%20UN%20Expert.pdf. 34.  Mr. Lee Yang testimony, Hmong victim family member, December 10, 2008, consultation with the UN expert on the desecration of Hmong graves, http://hrp.cla.umn.edu/assets/pdf/Lee%20Yang%20Testimony_Consultation%20 with%20UN%20Expert.pdf. 35.  See Mr. Kao Xiong’s testimony. 36.  See Mr. Lee Thao’s testimony. 37.  Ms. Lia Thao testimony, December 10, 2008, consultation with the UN expert on the desecration of Hmong graves, http://hrp.cla.umn.edu/assets/pdf/ Lia%20Thao%20Testimony_Consultation%20with%20UN%20Expert.pdf. 38.  See Mr. Lee Thao’s testimony. 39.  Mr. Chue Thao testimony, December 10, 2008, consultation with the UN expert on the desecration of Hmong graves, http://hrp.cla.umn.edu/assets/pdf/ Chue%20Thao%20Testimony_Consultation%20with%20UN%20Expert.pdf. 40.  Mr. Pa Ze Xiong testimony, December 10, 2008, consultation with the UN expert on the desecration of Hmong graves, http://hrp.cla.umn.edu/assets/pdf/ Pa%20Ze%20Xiong%20Testimony_Consultation%20with%20UN%20Expert.pdf. 41.  See Mr. Lee Thao’s testimony. 42. Human Rights Council, A/HRC/12/34/Add.1, September 18, 2009, no. 428, p. 89. 43.  PaChia Yang, “Burial Rites and Human Rights of the Hmong People,” 10–11. 44.  Chai Lee, foreword to “Burial Rites and Human Rights of the Hmong People” (report prepared for a consultation on the desecration of Hmong graves before the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous People, December 10, 2008, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities), 3. 45.  Lisa Bedolla, Fluid Borders: Latino Power, Politics, and Identity in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 46.  See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press); Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, “Human Rights in a Globalizing World: The Paradox of Empty Promises,” American Journal of Sociology 110, no. 5 (2005): 1373–4111.

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47. Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 98–106. 48.  Wendy Espeland, The Struggle for Water: Politics, Rationality, and Identity in the American Southwest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Chapter 6

1.  Carolyn Wong, “Civic Participation in the Hmong American Community” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 30–September 2, 2007, Chicago). 2.  See Mai Moua, “Leadership Development: A Critical Component to Advancing Hmong Society in the United States,” in The Impact of Globalization and Trans-Nationalism on the Hmong: Selected Presentations from the First International Conference on Hmong Studies, Concordia University, Saint Paul, MN, edited by Gary Yia Lee (St. Paul, MN: Center for Hmong Studies, 2009), 41–51. 3.  Janelle Wong, “Political Socialisation in Immigrant Families: Challenging Top-Down Parental Socialisation Models,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 34, no. 1 (2008): 151–168. 4.  A report on the consultative hearing was written by James Anaya, “Promotion and Protection of All Human Rights: Economic, Social, Civil and Political, Including the Rights to Development: Report by the Special Rapporteur on the situation and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people.” Human Rights Council, Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, A/HRC/12/34/ Add.1, September 18, 2009, 84, http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/ docs/12session/A-HRC-12-34-Add1.pdf. 5.  Renato Rosaldo, “Cultural Citizenship, Equality, and Multiculturalism,” in Race, Identity, and Citizenship: A Reader, ed. Rodolfo Torres, Louis F. Miron, and Jonathan Xavier Inda (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), 253–296. 6.  Interview of Blong Yang by Chai Lee (the author’s research assistant) in Minneapolis, October 30, 2015.

Index

Page numbers followed by “f ” or “t” indicate material in figures or tables. AAPI PES (National Asian American and Pacific Islander Post-Election Survey), 11 Addams, Jane, 40 adult community services, 123 advocacy campaigns, 185–188, 217 African American community: Barack Obama, 29–30, 157–158, 160, 161, 180–182; Blong Xiong on, 153; Blong Yang on, 222; civil rights movement, 171; double consciousness in, 53–54; as low income, 22t, 140; politics and communication, 47; ­portrayed as internal refugees, 36 AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), 135 agriculture, 30, 34, 98, 104, 160, 219–221 Alexander, Jeffrey C., 36 alliances, xxi, 33, 91, 124, 127, 140 “amalgam” of cultural perspectives, 142 American civil rights movement, 15, 74, 83, 88, 124 (124t), 147, 149, 171 Anaya, James, 186, 197, 202, 265nn14, 18 ancestor worship and veneration, 63–64, 142, 186 animist practices and beliefs, 9, 56, 64, 186, 201; foreign to conservative US culture, 221; proper burial practices, 196, 201; three souls belief, 196 Arendt, Hannah, 5–6, 211 Arlington National Cemetery, 73 arts and culture nonprofit organizations, 124 (124t)

Asian American community: Center for Advancing Justice Community of Contrasts series, 21–23; electoral activism by, 259n8; growth rate, 20; post-election survey (AAPI PES), 28–29; poverty and incomes of, 22t Asian American studies, 20 Association for Advancing Hmong Women in Minnesota, 14 authoritarianism versus democracy, 71 Barbershops, Bibles, and BET (Harris-­ Lacewell), 203 Bedolla, Lisa García, 119, 210–211 Bhabha, Homi, 56–57 black-white continuum of moral worthiness, 55 Blau, Judith R., 53 “blended social action,” 92 Blumer, Herbert, 55, 82 Bobo, Lawrence, 54–55, 82 Bostrom, Daniel, 134–136 Brady, Henry E., 11 “brain drain” of educated youth, 126–127 Brinkerhoff, Jennifer M., 65 Brown, Eric S., 53 bullying in school, 28 burial practices, 196, 201–202. See also grave desecration in Thailand Burmese immigrants, 56 Bush, George W., 30, 38, 165, 174

269

270

Index

California: educational expenditures in, 118 (118t); educational outcomes in, 105; Hmong American population in, 16, 137; Hmong American poverty rates in, 105; Hmong lobbying efforts in, 187; migration to/from other states, 17–18, 19f, 103, 125, 138, 156; monument to Hmong soldiers, 73; no statewide voter mobilization group, 130–131. See also Fresno, California; Oroville, California Cambodian immigrants, 23 (23f), 55, 255n18 camcorders, 65 campaigns, electoral: campaign workers, 10, 31 (31f), 151, 168, 174–175; clans’ role in, 10, 32, 131–132; donations to, 179; endorsements, 130, 132–136; in low turnout elections, 221–222; by non-Hmong immigrants, 131; in non-Hmong-majority areas, 43, 91, 128–129, 135; not claim making, 91; for presidential races, 29–30; using computer technology, 31; using social networks, 10–14; by veterans, 40. See also individual candidates Carleton College oral history project: method, 212–213; reflections of college students on, 209–212; testimony gathering, 201–209 Castle, Timothy N., 2–3 Catholic Church, 16, 63, 101 Catlin, Amy, 46 Center for Public Policy Analysis, 189 Central Intelligence Agency, 57 Central Valley of California, 96–97, 127, 154–156. See also Fresno, California; Merced, California “ceremonial households” (ib tug dab qhuas), 9 Cha, Blong (pseud.), 176 Cha, Lao Chue, xx Cha, Shao, 177–178 Cha, Zhoua, 78 (78f) Chaleun Yiapaoher, xxi Chang, Vaj (pseud.), 164 Chang, Yee, 197 Chao Fa resistance movement, 51 Chicago, Illinois, 156 children: as English-language learners, 24; fewer rights for girls, 62; funerals for, 202, 207–208; and gangs, 98; growing gulf with parents, 79; helping translate for parents, 219; killing of by Laotian troops, 76; large school-age population, 21, 24; Long Walk protest for, 75–77; as noncomba-

tants, 61; parents’ hopes for, 133, 142, 143, 162, 165–166, 176–178; under patrilineal system, 8; performances in public parks, xv; proverbs, stories told to, xx, 15; as refugees, xvi, 1, 3–4, 70, 191; seeing parents working hard, 146; transmitting values to, 216–217; wanting to escape farm work, 153. See also schools/education China: desecration of Hmong graves in, 204; Hmong history in, 6–8; “model minority” immigrants from, 55–56 Chi You, 7 Christian, Jenna, 101 Christianity: and animism, 42–43, 63–64, 169, 186; church-affiliated organizations, 9, 101, 156; conversions to, 42, 64, 101; and messianism, 186; missionaries, 42–43 citizenship: as an “instituted process,” 36; and civic engagement, 216; education in, 118; as equalizer, 54; expedited path to, 215; Hmong achievement of, 6, 12; importance of, 4–6, 54, 61, 193, 197; importance of fostering, 119; intergenerational communication on, 12; interview questions on, 162–165; market fundamentalism and, 36; and participation in politics, 162–165; and power of self-determination, 70–71; preparation for test, 40; and status of foreigners, 37; younger generations’ views of, 61, 67 civil rights: activism, 73–74, 83, 216; lacking in Thailand, 194; movement in America, 15, 74, 83, 88, 124 (124t), 147, 149, 171; nonprofit organizations, 124 (124t) claim making, 91, 127, 219 clans, Hmong: adapting to US culture, 87; clan heads as “community leaders,” 102; patriarchal thinking in, xxii; politics along lines of, 9–10, 184; relocating as a group, 16; social organizations centered on, 51; strengths and challenges of, 147; supraclan structures, 49; taboo on marriage within, 147; as voter mobilization resource, 32 class inequality, 88, 169–170 climate as factor in migration, 103–104 Clinton, Bill, 174, 188–189 Clinton, Hillary, 30, 160 cognitive dissonance, 255n12 Coleman, Norman, 30, 69–70, 76, 197 collective action, factors affecting, 87, 92–95, 129, 139–140, 199, 216–217

Index collective memory/identity, 46, 49, 60, 146, 187. See also identity narratives communal thinking/solidarity: along clan lines, 147; versus American individualism, 184; in community welfare, 63, 216–218; drawbacks of, 218; intergenerational, 62, 146, 216, 219; and masculinity, 58; in politics, 31, 166–167, 217–218 Community Action Against Racism, 73 community improvement nonprofit organizations, 124 (124t) community leadership. See leadership Community of Contrasts series (Asian American Center for Advancing Justice), 21–23 community organizing of youth, 40, 130. See also youth, Hmong American community values embraced by old and young, 62–63, 216–217 competition, cooperation with other racialethnic groups, 129–131 computer skills, importance of, 65 Confucian concepts and values, 55, 142, 144 constituency interests, xxi contractual view of citizenship, 36 Cooper, Joel, 255n12 Costa, Jim, 132 country, Hmong dream of own, 4–5 cremation, 195–196, 265n14 cross-ethnic/cross-racial cooperation, 130, 140 cultural citizenship, 64–65, 220 cultural identity scholarship, 88 cultural practices, neighbors’ fear of, 89 cultural rights as human rights, 198–200 cultural translation, 56–57, 63 culture and religion among Hmong, 169 “cursed,” Hmong as, 83 cycle of undecidability, 37, 58–59, 84 Dao, Long (pseud.), 173 Dao, Yang, xx, 51, 254n4 Dayton, Mark, 77 decision making, 15, 34, 51, 61–62, 72, 90, 184, 216–218 dehumanization of refugees, 192–193 deliberative democracy, 38–39, 94 Delicious Venom hip-hop group, 78 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 59 Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (Minnesota), 133–134, 150 desecration of graves. See grave desecration in Thailand

271

Detroit, Michigan, 141, 159–161. See also interviews De Vincentis, Giuseppe, 264n10 discrimination, 121, 169–173, 175 dispersed living patterns, 129–130 distribution, realm of, 87–88, 90–91 dominant group outlook, 52, 55, 81–82, 199 double consciousness, 53–54, 56 “dreaming about rights,” 186–187 dual identity, 53 DuBois, W. E. B., 53–54, 255n12 Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Hmong in, 13, 86; on city council, 136, 138; community organization and advocacy, 128; influence in local politics, 126–127; profile of Hmong American community in, 101–102; responding to racism, 139; as second largest racial group, 136; socioeconomic statistics for, 105–114 (108t–109t, 112t–113t) Eau Claire Hmong Mutual Assistance Association, 137 education: attainment levels, 11, 24–25 (25f), 38–39, 100, 111, 114–115, 172; institutions as local contexts of participation, 93–95 egalitarianism, 15 elders: avoiding conflict within community, 160; within clan structure, 49; constructing memorials, 72; difficulties faced by, 63, 132, 180; encouraging public service, 15; expectations of leaders, 32, 61, 147; feelings of isolation, 156, 214, 216, 220; and hiring discrimination, 138; identity narratives of, 45, 48, 84–85, 130, 146, 219; low level of English proficiency, 115; power broker role, 72; respect and care for, 168; retaining ancestry-based identity, 130; return to Laos dreams fading, 144; Supplementary Security Income for, 21; as untapped resource, 220; veteran organizations, 62; voting patterns of, 161, 182–183; youths giving voice to, 63, 201, 211, 218–220; youth voter outreach to, xxii, 31, 150–151, 157. See also generational issues Elk Grove, Minnesota, 14 employment: in Detroit area, 160; discrimination in, 159; factory work, 30, 104, 156, 159–160; goals, 88–89; job loss in North Carolina, Michigan, 158–161; levels of, 112t–113t, 114 entrepreneurial skills, 34 Espeland, Wendy, 211–212

272

Index

ethnic associations, 14–15 ethnic enclaves, 129 ethnic identity of Hmong Americans, 6, 87, 91, 118, 186. See also identity narratives among Hmong exhumation of graves. See grave desecration in Thailand exogamous marriage rules, 249n22 Facebook in campaigns, 10 face-to-face campaigning, 12 factory jobs, loss of, 104, 159–160 Fadiman, Anne, 35 fair redistribution, 88 “family values” versus individualism, 58 Fang, John, 181 Fang, Koua (pseud.), 172, 174 Fang, Mary (pseud.), 174–175, 178 Farewell to Freedom film, 256n25 farming, small-scale, 30, 34, 98, 104, 160, 219–221 Feingold, Russ, 38, 76 field research design, 41–43, 141–142 films: camcorder revolution, 65; documentaries from Laos, 66; evidence of grave desecrations, 196; Farewell to Freedom (Moore & Pratt), 256n25; Gran Torino (Eastwood), 58; by Hmong Americans, 66, 81; lowered cost of, 52; not limited in location, 65 First Indochina War, 1 food stamps, 27 foreigners as givers or takers, 57–59 Franken, Al, 69–70 Fraser, Nancy, xvii, 39–40, 87–89, 130 “freedom” in reference to Hmong, 48–49, 71 “free people,” Hmong meaning, 254n4 Fresno, California, 86; Fresno Consolidated Area statistics, 105–114 (108t–109t, 112t– 113t); Hmong leaving for larger cities, 98, 154; Latino population in, 131; leadership conference in, 132; political candidates and elected officials, 151–155; profile of Hmong American community in, 95–99; war memorial, 73. See also interviews; Xiong, Blong Fresno Center for New Americans, 123–124 Frey, Barbara, 200–201, 213, 219 Frogtown, 99 funeral traditions, xix, 63, 196, 201, 207–209 Fung, Archon, 38–39

gender roles, 33, 58, 90 generational issues: bridging generational differences, 46, 72, 79; differing responses to discrimination, 118; and political activism, 15, 51, 60–61. See also elders; youth, Hmong American Geneva Accord (1954), 1–2 Geneva Accord (1962), 2–3 Gilroy, Paul, 53 global community, Hmong as part of, 74 government assistance, 21 government officials, respect and cautions regarding, xix–xxi Gran Torino (Eastwood), 58 grassroots activists/activism: community organizations, 93–94; ethic/culture of participation, 72, 84; Humanity Helping Humanity, 77; interviews with activists, 145, 148, 161–178, 236–239; lobbying Congress for refugees, 188–189; at local level, 116; march against KQRS radio station, 73–74; national networks, 220; views and opinions of activists, 161–178 grave desecration in Thailand, 195–201; costs of proper burial, 207–208; desire for memorial, acknowledgment, 206, 209; filmed evidence of, 196; government response to, 198; Hmong official response to, 196–197; irreparability of harm from, 205, 211–212; previous exhumation incidents, 205–206; reasons given for, 195; town meetings, public hearings on, 51, 208; and UNHCR, 265n18, 265–266n21 Great Recession, effects of, 27, 37 group position and race, 82 growth rate for Hmong Americans, 20 gun control, 158 Gunderson, Steve, 189 Hang, Pakou, 43, 63–64, 134–136, 143, 145, 150–151 Hansen, John Mark, 11 Harris-Lacewell, Melissa, 47, 50, 203 hate-crime designation, 83 Hawj, Foung (Hue, Foung), 13, 43, 48–49, 66 health: cultural practices, 35, 123, 205, 208; health-care jobs, 100, 111, 113t, 115 Health and Human Services, Department of, 17, 104 Hein, Jeremy, 92, 102, 129, 248n10, 262n57 Her, Doua (pseud.), 166

Index Her, Teng (pseud.), 164 Her, Thoua, 181 Her, Vang (pseud.), 165 Her, Vincent, 71 Her, Yang (pseud.), 180–181 Hernandez, John, 132–133 Herr, Paul, 68 Hickory-Morganton-Lenoir, North Carolina, Hmong in, 86; community leader comments on, 159–160; invisibility to larger community, 126–127; limited employment opportunities in, 125–126; need for collective action, 140; profile of Hmong American community in, 86, 102–104, 120; socioeconomic statistics, 105–114 (108t–109t, 112t–113t). See also interviews hierarchy: in decision making, 62; in social organizations, 51 high school youth interviews: questionnaire text, 225–227; results, 119–127; table of responses, 228–231 Hillmer, Paul, 57 “hill tribes,” 186 hip-hop and storytelling, 77–79 Hispanic American growth rate, 20 Hmao ethnic group, 6 Hmong American Alliance, 64 Hmong American Mutual Assistance Association (Minnesota), 30, 100 Hmong American Partnership, 14, 100 “Hmong American politics” narratives, 50–51 Hmong American Writers’ Circle, 35 “Hmong Army,” 3 Hmong at the Turning Point (Dao), xx “Hmong Circle,” 40 Hmong-language newspapers, 100 Hmong National Development Inc. (HND), 14, 99, 139 Hmong Veterans Naturalization Act, 36–37, 40 Hmu ethnic group, 6 HND (Hmong National Development Inc.), 14, 99, 139 Holocaust and stateless persons, 6 home ownership rates, 27–28, 156–157 Honig, Bonnie, 37, 57, 58–59, 84, 211 How Do I Begin (Hmong American Writers’ Circle), 35 Huay Nam Khao camp, 190

273

Hue, Foung (Hawj, Foung), 13, 43, 48–49, 66 Humanity Helping Humanity, 77 Human Rights Program (Univ. of Minnesota), 200–201 hunting, 55, 79–83, 158 Hurricane Katrina, 36 Hwang Di (“Yellow Emperor”), 7 “hybrid” identity, 53–56 identity narratives among Hmong, xxii, 45; as amalgam, 216; bridging generational differences, 46; collective memory, 46, 49, 60, 146, 187; cultural history, 94; divided by different worlds, 52–53; expression on the Internet, 65; freedom seeking, 50–52, 92; leading to political participation, 6; multiple versions of, 49; oral, 46; political leaders and, 59; religion and, 63–64; of right to human dignity, 193–194; translating, 59–66; and US-born Hmong, 198–200. See also Carleton College oral history project “in-between” generation, 33 income support, 89 indigenous people: Hmong as, 186–187, 200, 263n4; and religious freedom, 210–211 individualism versus “family values,” 58 institutional factors aiding political participation, 86 intergenerational bridge building, 72 internal migration patterns, 16–20 (18f, 19f) International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 199 international human rights laws and norms, 186, 191, 200–201 Internet communications, 65, 84 interviews, 145; of candidates and elected leaders, 145–146; high school youth interviews, 119–127, 228–231; questions for adults, 142, 232–235; questions for high school students, 225–227; research design, 41–43, 141–142, 144–145, 161–162; responses of adult business/service professionals, 241–245; responses of adult grassroots participants, 236–240 invisibility issue, 158–161 “irrationally aggressive” image of Hmong, 48 Jane Addams School for Democracy, 40, 124 jobs. See employment

274

Index

Kang, Dee (pseud.), 178 Kennedy, Edward M., 189 Khang, Kur, 46 Khang, Mao, 34 Khang, Tou (pseud.), 170, 175 Kho Xiong ethnic group, 6 Kohn, Steven, 81 Kong-Thao, Kazoua, 13 KQRS radio, 73–74 labor unions: candidate endorsements, support by, 133–136, 146; and community activism, 128, 131, 136; in Michigan, 160; in North Carolina, 159 Lai, James, 136–137 language: city comparisons of, 110–111, 115; discrimination against non-English speakers, 171; and employability, 98; Hmong-language radio programs, 103; interpreters during citizenship tests, 36; linguistic isolation, 24, 28, 30, 38–39, 63; youth benefiting from English skills, 63 Lao Family Community of Fresno, 14, 29–30, 51, 70, 73, 99 Lao People’s Democratic Republic, 1 Laos: discrimination in, 171; dreams of return fading, 144; film, documentaries from Laos, 66; forced repatriations from Thailand to, 189–192; Hmong political leaders in, xx–xxi, 186–187; killing of refugees in, 76; Laotian Americans, 23 (23f); Laotian Hmong during war, 60; Long Walk for Freedom protests against, 75–77; National Liberation Front of Laos, 69; as neutral, independent state, 2; plans to return to, 70; refugees leaving, 188; strategic importance of, 2; US bombing of, 3; US military assistance to, 2 Laos Memorial (Arlington National Cemetery), 73 Lao Theung ethnic group, 3 Latecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir (Yang), 35 Latino community, 22t; alliances with Hmong Americans, 127; identity, 119; supporting Vang Pao, 154 leadership: accountable to people, 71, 166; changing views of, 32–34; community views on characteristics of, 166–169; constructing, disseminating political narratives, 49; differences in Hmong

and American views of, 90; generational change in, 66–72; Hmong radio station, 158; interviewee’s notions of ideal Hmong ethnic leader, 142–144; in Sheboygan, 155–158; should “love the people,” 166–167; women, 33–34, 123. See also interviews; political careers Lee, Chai, 210 Lee, Choua, 13, 122 Lee, Gary Yia, 34, 59–60, 247n8, 254n4 Lee, Kou (pseud.), 172 Lee, Mai Na M., 4–5, 7–9, 48, 65 Lee, Neng, 136 Lee, Noel, 66 Lee, Nou (pseud.), 163, 168 Lee, Pang (pseud.), 176, 177 Lee, Pao (pseud.), 166 Lee, Pheng, 181 Lee, Tou SaiKo, 78 (78f) Lee, Va-Meng (pseud.), 171 Lee clan, xix, 8 Leepreecha, Prasit, 65 Lia, Fue (pseud.), 174 Lien, Pei-te, 151 linguistic isolation, 24, 28, 30, 38–39 livable income concerns, 89 Lo, Lormong, 13 Lo, Ying (pseud.), 167, 169 Lo Bliayao, xx local contexts of participation, 87; citizenship education, 116–119, 217; educational institutions, 93–95; “parity assisting” institutions, 87–92; population concentrations, 95. See also schools/education Long Walk for Freedom, 75–77 Lor, Fue (pseud.), 169, 171 Lor, Noah, 13, 146, 154–155 Lor, Yang, 259–260n18 “love the people,” leaders expected to, 166–168 Lutheran churches, 156 Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, 101 Lutheran refugee agencies, 16, 101 Ly, Steve, 14 Lyfoung, Touby, xx Lyfoung, Tougeu, xx Lyfoung, Toulia, xx Maceda, Oralia, 131 Mandela, Nelson, 75

Index manufacturing jobs, 111 “Many Mountains” song, 8 Margalit, Avishai, 34–35 market fundamentalism and citizenship, 36–37 Martinez-Cobo, Jose, 186 masculinity and identity, 58, 90 Masquelier, Adeline, 254n72 matrilineal practices among Hmong, 9 McCain, John, 29, 158, 161 McMorris Rodgers, Cathy, 197 mean per capita incomes, 113t, 114 Mekong River crossing, 75 Merced, California, 127, 151–155 messianic movements, Hmong, 5 Metro chapter, Minnesota Deer Association, 83 Miao ethnic group, 6–7 migration patterns of Hmong refugees, 16–20 (18f, 19f), 96, 99, 103–104 military allies, Hmong as, 38, 56, 57, 68, 188. See also war veterans, Hmong Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota, Hmong in, 14, 18, 40, 57–58; Hmong Americans elected to office, 13–14; KQRS radio incident, 73–74; migration to from other states, 19f, 98, 131; St. Paul City Council, 134–135. See also high school youth interviews; Moua, Mee Minnesota: Asian American community in, 149; caucus system in, 136; and Chi Soua Vang case, 79–80, 173; educational expenditures, 118 (118t); educational outcomes, 105; as friendly hotspot for Hmong Americans, 131; Hmong American population in, 16; Hmong American poverty rates, 105; Hmong hunter association, 83; Hmong lobbying efforts in, 14, 187; migration to/from other states, 17, 19f, 125, 156, 160; party caucus nominating system in, 133–134; racial violence in, 79–80; Take Action Minnesota, 124, 130. See also Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota, Hmong in “model minorities,” 55 moral worthiness as black-white continuum, 55 Moua, Chai (pseud.), 171, 173, 177 Moua, Louansee, 68–69 Moua, Mee, xxi; on American identity as other, 54; campaign workers emphasiz-

275

ing “team,” 151; characteristics of district, 129; documentary on, 66; election to state senate, 13, 128, 136; as “Hmong senator,” 147–148; on impact of her election, 149; mentoring young activists, 133; on Minnesota as “hotspot” for young Hmong Americans, 131; on other Asian American communities, 149; representing Hmong and non-Hmong, 129, 143, 147–148; retirement of, 13; as role model, 33, 220; role of clans in election of, 10, 147; use of younger campaign workers, 10; on value of citizenship, 4, 6; voter mobilization, 10–11, 31 (31f); working on grave desecration issue, 197, 201–202, 213, 219 Moua, Pa Sia Low, 101 Moua, Yong Kai, 138 Moua clan, 8 Moua Sue, xx Moynihan, Daniel P., 189 multiculturalism, 88, 157 Multi-Ethnic Alliance, 51 multiple identities, 53–56 mutual assistance associations, 30, 33, 100, 102, 136–139, 156–160 naming practices, Hmong, 8–9 narratives: of freedom seeking, 50–52, 199; of Hmong American experience, 193, 198 National Hmong Grave Desecration Committee, 201 National Liberation Front of Laos, 69 Native Americans, 82, 212 “negative” vs. “positive” politics, 34–35 Neng, Lee Vang, 256n25 New Orleans, 36 Ng, Franklin, 46 Nguyen, Madison, 69 Nichols, James, 82 Nong Khai detention, 264n10 nonprofit organizations, 124–125 (124t) nonresponse bias in data, 24 normative standards of social justice, 87 North Carolina: educational expenditures, 118 (118t); migration to from other states, 19f; racial discrimination in, 159 Oakley, Phyllis, 189 Obama, Barack, 29–30, 157–158, 160, 161, 180–182 obligation to speak up, 74

276

Index

occupational categories, 25–27 (26f, 27f), 30, 34 Office of Refugee Resettlement, 17, 104 Ong, Aihwa, 55, 255n18 oral communication: “ordinary talk,” 47, 50; for passing along knowledge, 168; in politics, 47; storytelling traditions, 52, 122 Oroville, California, 14 “parity assisting” institutions, 87–92 participation, contexts of: citizenship, 38–41; educational institutions, 93–95; freedom, 62; parity, xvii, 39–40, 87–92; population concentrations, 95; public memorials, 72; storytelling, 72–79. See also political activism/participation participatory citizenship, 38–39 participatory parity, xvii, 39–41, 87, 91–92, 116, 127, 140 Pathet Lao, 1, 3, 51, 60–61, 185, 188 patrilineal practices among Hmong, 8–9 Patriot Act, 154 Pawlenty, Tim, 174 per capita income, 11 performing arts, 50 persecution, fear of, 5 Personal Responsibility and Work Oppor­ tunity Reconciliation Act (1996), 17 Petchabun Province, Thailand, 190, 264n10 pharmacists, 160 Pogemiller, Lawrence, 197 policy issues: influence on candidate choice, 166–169; views of Hmong on, 27–29 political activism/participation: discussion within families, 121; and identity construction, 12; importance of local politics, 157–158; increasing sophistication of voters, 135; interview questions on, 162–165, 179–182; and leadership, xix–xxi, 91; in Minneapolis/St. Paul, 73–74, 127–128; motivational resources for, 215; and political powerlessness, 70; and racial-ethnic geography of electoral districts, 128–129; and support for Hmong candidates, 175– 176. See also participation, contexts of political asylum seekers, 190 political careers: aspirations of/for children having, 176–178, 214; early Hmong American successes, 13; positive views of, 143–144, 172. See also Lor, Noah; Moua, Mee; Thao, Cy; Xiong, Blong

political party preferences: DemocraticFarmer-Labor Party (Minnesota), 133–136, 150; Democratic/Republican preferences, 33, 132, 151, 173–175, 179–183; liberal/ conservative preferences, 47, 158, 182–183; in US presidential elections, 29–30, 158, 161, 179 politics of economic redistribution, 39, 90, 92, 94 politics of recognition, 39, 44, 90, 92, 94 Porte Alegre, Brazil, 38 postfuneral ceremonies, 202 poverty: data for Asian Americans, 21–24 (22t, 23f), 113t, 114, 116; as felt discrimination, 39; politics about serving poor, 166–169, 183; rate for Hmong Americans, 21–24 (22t, 23f) power-broker style of politics, 72 power of self-determination, 70–71 presidential versus local elections patterns, 29–30 promissory notes for future government position, 69 Protocol to the Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos (1962), 2 proverbs, xx public assistance, 22t, 37, 99–100, 113t, 114, 139 public hearings, 51, 92, 208, 211 public school systems, 93 public service careers, 100–101 qhuab kom (song of blessing), xix racial-ethnic geography of electoral districts, 95, 110, 128–129, 137, 146 racial-ethnic identity, 119; of electoral districts, 128–129; hate-crime designation, 83; Hmong as minority, 54; neighborhood backlash against rituals, 88–89; racial discrimination, 121–122, 169–173; racist portrayals of Hmong culture, 73 radio stations, 158 Ramakrishnan, Karthick, 253n58 recession (2008), effects of, 27, 37, 63, 155, 160 reciprocal recognition, 39 recognition, realm of, 39, 87–88, 90–91 redistributive realm, 39 refugees: Ban Na Pho refugee camp, 189– 190; dreams of return to Laos unrealistic,

Index 144; Hmong as, 4–5, 15–17, 50, 55, 70, 248n10; Hurricane Katrina victims as, 36; labeled illegal migrants by Thailand, 198, 204–205, 211; misunderstandings of host country, 142; resettled from Thailand to United States, 190; service organizations for, 101; Wat Tham Krabok Buddhist monastery, 189–190, 193–194, 195–198 religion, 63–64, 169, 196, 210–211. See also grave desecration in Thailand remittances, 50, 192 research methods, xxi–xxii residence patterns, 16–20 (18f, 19f) resistance movements, 37, 51, 60, 67–69, 75–76, 84–85, 264n10 resource-based model of voting, 11 restaurant business, 160 “Rise of Asian Americans, The” (Pew Research Center), xix rituals, neighbors’ objections to, 88–89 Rolfe, Meredith, 12 Romney, Mitt, 29 Rosaldo, Renato, 64–65, 220 Rosenstone, Steven J., 11 RPA alphabet, 65 Sampson, Robert J., 92 Schein, Louisa, 65, 81 Schlozman, Kay Lehman, 11 scholarship: on cultural identity and social justice, 88; feminist, 89–90; on Hmong Americans, 18–20; on identity formation, 45; on racial prejudice, 55 schools/education: educational attainment levels, 11, 24–25 (25f); enrollment levels, 110; Hmong as teachers, counselors, 127; Hmong on school boards, 122; importance of elected offices, 117–118; knowledge of English, 24, 28, 30; peer violence in, 28; per pupil expenditures in, 118 (118t); reforms needed in, 39, 116–117; school-age population of Hmong Americans, 21, 24; study of California high schools, 117. See also high school youth interviews Scott, James F., 186–187, 263n4 Scottish highlanders, 48 Second Indochina War, 2 Secret War in Laos, xv, 2, 56–57, 61, 72–73, 187, 215 Sen, Amartya, 62

277

shared experiences of Hmong Americans, 86–87. See also identity narratives among Hmong Sheboygan, Wisconsin, 73, 155–158. See also interviews Simon, Paul, 189 Simpson, Alan K., 189 Sinclair, Betsy, 12 Smith, Philip, 189 social connections outside of clans, 9 social justice scholarship, 88 social networks and voter mobilization, 10–14 social voting, 11–12 socioeconomic data for Asian Americans: generally, 21–25 (22t, 23f, 25f), 104–114 (108t–109t, 112t–113t); Hmong internal migration patterns, 16–20 (18f, 19f) Somali American communities, 130 Somers, Margaret R., 5, 36–37 special elections, 136 Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, The (Fadiman), 35 spiritual and religious values, 63–64 standardized test performance, 122–123 stories. See narratives St. Paul, Minnesota, 86; Fifth International Conference on Hmong Studies, 78; Hmong American candidates in, xxii; as informal “Hmong capital,” 18, 100; political candidates and elected officials, 146–151; profile of Hmong American community in, 99–101; socioeconomic statistics for, 105–114 (108t–109t, 112t– 113t); urban concentration of Hmong in, 18, 128; urban farming project in, 219– 220. See also interviews; Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota “subjectification” stories, 255n18 suicides, 27 “sung poetry,” 46 Supplementary Security Income, 21 sustained rights claim making, 127 Symonds, Patricia V., 8, 196 Take Action Minnesota, 124, 130 “taking liberties” activism, 62, 75 “taking” rights, 91 Tak radio show, 74 Tanton, John, 58 Tapp, Nicholas, 7, 48–49, 56

278

Index

taxation: in China, xx, 7, 48, 144; in United States, 168, 175 “terrorist” labeling of Hmong veterans, 37–38, 57, 68 Thailand, Hmong refugees in, 188–190; forced repatriations to Laos, 188–192; government cost/benefit analysis regarding, 194; government not recognizing refugee conventions, 197; Hmong American advocacy for, 74, 75; as indigenous, 200; prewar Thai Hmong population, 195; relocations to United States, 190. See also grave desecration in Thailand Tham Krabok Foundation, 195, 265n14 Tham Krabok shelter, 189–190, 193–194, 195 Thao, Chue, 208, 213 Thao, Cy: characteristics of district, 129; election to state House of Representatives, 13, 43, 133–134; following father into politics, 149; on freedom to speak up, 74; on growing sophistication of Hmong voters, 135; leading protest of racist radio station, 74, 149; on relations with white hunters, 83; retirement, 134; on Vang Pao’s arrest, 69–70; wanting seat at the table, 150; winning by mobilizing Hmong constituents, 128–129, 133–134, 136 Thao, Dai, 13, 76, 134 Thao, Gao (pseud.), 167, 169 Thao, Kaying, 14 Thao, Lee, 204–206, 207–209, 213 Thao, Lia, 207, 213 Thao, Mai (pseud.), 168, 171 Thao, Mary, 14 Thao, Tsu (pseud.), 165 Thoj, Va-Megn, 81 Time Is Right for Mee, The (Lee), 66 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 59 “transnational politics” narratives, 50–51 tso plig ceremony, 196 Tuan, Mia, 55, 82 Twin Cities. See Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota two selves, sense of having, 52–53 Tyson Foods, 160 unemployment rate, 27. See also employment “ungovernability” of hill tribe communities, 186 United Hmong Association in Hickory, 103 United Lao National Liberation Front, 51, 61, 69

United Nations, 211; Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 5; Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 199–200; High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 188, 190–191, 197, 264n10, 265n18; High Commissioner of Human Rights, 201; Human Rights Council, 197; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 199; investigation of grave desecration, 196–197, 202–203; special rapporteur James Anaya, 202–203; Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, 186; Thailand not recognizing refugee conventions, 198–199 United States: congressional National Hmong Graves Desecration Committee, 197; as global power, 54; Neutrality Acts, 67; regions of Hmong migration in, 18f, 19f; USA Patriot Act, 37–38, 57 University of Minnesota, 20, 135, 201, 211, 213, 219 Valadao, David, 132 Vang, Bee, 256n26 Vang, Chai Soua, 79–84, 172 Vang, Chia Youyee, 64 Vang, Fong (pseud.), 180 Vang, Long (pseud.), 163–164, 167–168 Vang, Mai Der, 45 Vang, Pobzeb, 188–189 Vang, Tony, 13, 43, 117, 152 Vang Pao: aiding current Laotian resistance, 51, 61, 69; alliance with Americans in Secret War, 3, 32; arrested on weapons charges, 67–68; arrival of in United States, 96; forming Fresno Hmong Council, 14; generational responses to arrest, 67–69; Hmong criticism of, 69–71; peaceful protests supporting, 153–154; as respected leader, 131, 171 Vang Xiong X. Toyed, 201 veil and second sight, possessing both, 53 Vento, Bruce, 35–36, 40 Ventura, Jesse, 175 Verba, Sidney, 11 Veterans Act (Hmong Veterans Naturalization Act), 36–37, 40 Vietnamese immigrants, 55–56, 138 Vietnam War, 1–3; Hmong evacuation to Thailand, 3–4; as irrevocable turning point, 48. See also war veterans

Index Vogeler, Ingolf, 101 volunteerism, 121, 158 “voting together,” 12 voting/voter mobilization, 10–14, 31–32, 214; in 2008/2012 presidential races, 29; highschool student voting interest, 121; one person, one vote, 4; social versus resourcebased models of, 11–12; turnout rates, 11– 13, 29, 157, 159–160, 215; use of computer technology for, 31 (31f); youth campaign workers, xxii, 31f, 133, 150–151, 157 Vue, Chue, 14 Vue, May, 46 Vue, Thomas, 136 Vue, Xang (pseud.), 174 Walnut Grove, Minnesota, 14 war veterans, Hmong, 32; disabled, 21; early leadership by, 66–67; expedited US citizenship for, 35–37, 61; food stamps cut for, 27; labeled as “terrorists,” 37–38; Lao Veterans of America, 189; lobbying congress, 187–188; memorials to, 73; as military allies to Americans, 38, 56, 57, 68, 188; varying war goals of, 60–61 Wat Tham Krabok Buddhist shelter, 189– 190, 193–194, 195–199, 202. See also grave desecration in Thailand welfare reform, 17, 27, 98, 99 Wellstone, Paul, 135, 175 White community, 22t white voters, 135, 136, 150 “Whole Food Model,” 34 Wisconsin: and Chi Soua Vang case, 173; confrontations with white hunters, 55, 79–83; educational expenditures, 118 (118t); migration to from other states, 19f; Native American land and fishing rights in, 82 “without a country,” meaning of, 4–5 women: as leaders, 14–15, 33–34, 123, 130; as noncombatants in Secret War, 61, 75; suicides among, 27; workplace issues, 89–90 writers, Hmong-American, 35 Xang, Bai (pseud.), 164 Xang, Dia (pseud.), 177 Xieng Khouang (Laos), 8 Xiong, Blong, xxi; alliances with Latino voters, 140; building unity with other eth-

279

nicities, 153; elected to Fresno city council, 13, 43, 133, 151; elected to Minneapolis city council, 133, 151; Hmong American pride in, 174; as mediator between old, young leaders, 152; on need to bridge generations, clans, 131–132; non-Hmong constituents of, 129; not the “Hmong representative,” 152–153; on protests of Vang Pao arrest, 153–154; running in special election, 136; unsuccessful races for state congress, 132–133 Xiong, Chue, 14 Xiong, Joe (Joey) Bee, 13, 136, 138 Xiong, Kao, 206, 213 Xiong, Mai See (pseud.), 170 Xiong, Mee (pseud.), 173, 175, 176 Xiong, Michael, 13 Xiong, Pang, 14 Xiong, Pa Ze, 204, 208–209, 213 Xiong, Saidang, 136 Xiong, Tou, 13 Xiong, Tou Ger, 80–81, 83 Xiong, Yang Sao, 24 Xiong, Yee Leng, 14 Xiong, Yuepheng, 67–68 Xiong clan, 8 Yang, Blong, 10, 13, 40–41, 43, 221–222 Yang, Burlee, 35 Yang, Kaliah (pseud.), 163 Yang, Kao Kalia, 35, 52–53 Yang, Kong (pseud.), 173 Yang, Kou, 96, 98 Yang, Lee, 205–206, 213 Yang, PaChia, 210, 266n31 Yang, Phoua (pseud.), 176 Yang, Shoua, 71 Yang, Xiong, 13–14 Yang, Zong Khang, 76 Yia, Ly, xx youth, Hmong American, 61, 130; as campaign workers, xxii, 31f, 133, 150–151, 157; community organizing of, 40, 130; creating oral history of grave desecration, 201– 204; in Detroit, 161; first generation, 52; generations 1.5 and 2, 15; helping educate elders about America, 150; inspiring to community, 222; political aspirations of and for, 176–178; political office as option for, 143–144. See also generational issues; high school youth interviews