The Urban Ethnic Community and Collective Action: Politics, Protest, and Civic Engagement by Hmong Americans in Minneapolis–St. Paul

Abstract

This paper replicates and extends Sampson et al.'s (2005) collective efficacy explanation of civic action events to ethnic communities formed through international migration. It examines political, social movement, and civic collective action of Hmong Americans in Minneapolis–St. Paul through a content analysis of events reported in one of the community's ethnic newspapers from 2002 to 2011 (N = 541). Initially a dispersed group of refugees from Laos, by the early 2000s, 25 percent of all Hmong Americans lived in the Minneapolis–St. Paul metropolitan area. Most (68 percent) of their collective action is for civic engagement, not politics or protest. This civic engagement is mostly for socioeconomic improvement (53 percent) but also social solidarity (47 percent). As Sampson et al. found in Chicago, the spatial distribution of Hmong collective action is shaped more by the location of ethnic and public institutions than by ethnic residential concentration. The paper concludes that the analysis of collective action events in ethnic communities should combine social ecology, institutional, and interactional models.