Hmong American Research Articles

Refugee-related trauma patterns and mental health symptoms across three generations of Hmong Americans.

Hmong adults who are Vietnam War refugees have been exposed to refugee-related trauma, but little is known about associations between patterns of trauma exposure and mental health outcomes in Hmong adults. We examined patterns of trauma exposure and mental health symptoms (i.e., somatization, depression, anxiety, and probable posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD]) in three generations of Hmong adults (N = 219). Trauma exposure and probable PTSD were measured using the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire-Hmong Version. Somatization, depression, and anxiety symptoms were measured using the Brief Symptom Inventory. Latent class analysis (LCA) and auxiliary analysis of sociodemographic characteristics and mental health symptoms were performed. The best-fitting LCA model described three distinct classes: complex and pervasive trauma (60.3%), combat situation and deprivation trauma (26.0%), and low exposure to refugee-related trauma (13.7%). Participants in the complex and pervasive trauma class were the oldest, had the shortest U.S. residency, were the least proficient in English, and reported the most severe mental health symptoms; those in the combat situation and deprivation trauma class were the youngest, moderately proficient in English, and reported moderate mental health symptoms; and those in the low exposure to refugee-related trauma class were the most proficient in English, had the longest U.S. residency, and reported the least severe mental health symptoms. Our findings call for surveillance and a trauma-informed approach for Hmong elders with limited English proficiency, who have a high risk of experiencing accumulative effects of refugee-related trauma and are susceptible to poor mental health outcomes.

From One Generation to the Next: Hmong American Adolescents’ Views of Maternal Racial Socialization

This study investigated Hmong American adolescents’ perceptions of their mother as helping them understand race as Asian American youths in an urban context. Twenty-four Hmong American adolescents ages 14 to 18 ( M = 15.8; 67% female; 54% U.S. born, 46% born in Southeast Asia) participated in semi-structured interviews, following approval of the Institutional Review Board. Directed content analysis revealed three themes of racial, ethnic, and neutral socialization practices. Frequently, responses reflected the categories of racism awareness, racial group identification, and diversity awareness, as well as no discussion of race (racial socialization theme). Although the study asked specifically about racial socialization, some responses indicated that mothers engaged in cultural practices that included cultural markers and ethnic group identification (ethnic socialization theme). A few responses also represented neutral socialization that emphasized good behavior. Emergent categories included intra-racial discrimination and bicultural socialization. More frequently than girls, boys reported having discrimination experiences without discussing race with mothers. Girls reported more intra-racial discrimination messages, as well as bicultural and neutral messages than boys. These findings can help Hmong American adolescents and their families continue to build successful strategies for dealing with racism and discrimination, and support understanding how Asian Americans address racialized experiences in the U.S.

Reinterpreting the Paj Ntaub (story cloth): A Retrospectrum from a Hmong American

Reinterpreting the Paj Ntaub (story cloth): A Retrospectrum from a Hmong American

Disrupting Deficit Discourses about Hmong Culture

Dominant discourses persistently portray Hmong Americans as stuck in time and tied to Hmong cultural traditions. This article suggests dominant discourses about the oppression of Hmong culture are mechanisms of White supremacy. It examines research with Hmong Americans on gender and sexuality to disrupt deficit discourses about Hmong culture. It provides recommendations for teachers to counteract dominant discourses that instantiate the values, worldviews, culture and structures of White supremacy.

Perspectives of Queer Hmong Youth

This article highlights some of the tensions that exist for Hmong people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ). It uncovers differences and similarities found between the experiences of queer Hmong youth and the larger population of queer youth living in the United States. Despite the perception that a traditional Hmong culture holds no place for queer Hmong Americans, individuals are finding spaces for acceptance and slowly moving the larger Hmong community to a place of understanding and tolerance. A vital part of this movement was Shades of Yellow (SOY), an organization that supported queer Hmong from its inception in 2005 until the group disbanded in June 2017. The life stories of three of its members inform this study, offering a more nuanced look at the experiences of queer Hmong youth living in the Midwest.

Applying Anti Oppressive, Empowerment, and Strengths Based Approaches to Social Work Practice with Hmong Clients

This conceptual article discusses social work practice with Hmong Americans using a framework that embraces anti-oppressive practice, empowerment and strengths-based approaches. Specifically, the Hmong kinship social construct of kwv tij neej tsa (pronounced: ku tee ning ja) is used to elaborate on the importance of upholding family relationships that transcends the worker-client relationship. Social workers are encouraged to empower Hmong to seek and ask for resources that support their collective value of connection to family and group identity, which is a strength that contributes to resilience and buffers against historically oppressive practices and systems.

Environmental Factors for Motivation of First-Generation Hmong American College Students in Academic Attainment

This qualitative thematic analysis study examined the motivations of first-generation college graduate Hmong American students in their educational attainment. Currently, Hmong American students are facing cultural and institutional barriers which continue to impact access to and achievement in college. Although there is an educational disparity, for some within the Hmong American student community, there is resilience to overcome and graduate from institutions of higher education which is important to understand. Culturally Engaging Campus Environment Model underpinned the one-on-one in-depth interviews of purposively sampled first-generation college graduate Hmong American students who attended the University of California, Merced. The findings from the study highlighted ways family supports, role models, breaking culturally normed gender roles, Hmong Student Associations (HSAs), and intentional holistic campus supports are important motivational environmental factors in Hmong American students’ higher education journey.

Nepantlera Pedagogy in an Immigrant Youth Theater Project: The Role of a Hmong Educator in Facilitating the Exploration of Culture and Identity

Background/Context:Community-based youth theater programs afford youth opportunities to explore and “author” new identities by “performing writing.” Yet, we know much less about the ways in which immigrant youth are exploring struggles and changes within their families and ethnic community. We particularly lack research about the roles of immigrant adult educators in youth programs, and the significance to the pedagogical process of their experiences, being, and modes of interacting with young people who share with them a common ethnicity.Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study:The purpose of the study is to explore the role of a community-based Hmong immigrant educator as a “nepantlera,” or boundary-crossing “guide” in Hmong youth’s negotiation of culture and identity. It is guided by three questions: (1) How does nepantlera pedagogy move beyond self–other dichotomies? (2) How does nepantlera pedagogy facilitate rewriting the self to construct new visions of ethnic identity? and (3) How does nepantlera pedagogy entail risking the personal?Setting:The research setting was a Hmong community-based arts organization in an urban center in the Midwestern United States.Population/Participants/Subjects:Three 1.5-generation Hmong American adult staff of a community-based organization, one Korean American teaching artist from a local theater company, and 11 second-generation Hmong American adolescents participated in the study.Research Design:The study draws from a critical ethnographic investigation of the culturally relevant practices of a youth theater project within a Hmong coethnic organization.Data Collection and Analysis:Ethnographic data collection occurred over the 4-month program cycle of the theater project. Data sources include field notes from participant observations, semi-structured interviews, audio and video recordings of the activities, work products, and documents about the program and organization. The data were analyzed with thematic analysis techniques.Findings/Results:The findings suggest that the nepantlera pedagogy of the Hmong immigrant educator fostered opportunities for Hmong youth to (1) disrupt binaries between first-generation and second-generation immigrants by exploring not only differences but also commonalities; (2) imagine new ethnic selves by exploring and rewriting a Hmong edict against same-last-name relationships; and (3) experience the vulnerability of their Hmong educator through disclosure about his personal life.Conclusions/Recommendations:The nepantlera pedagogy of an immigrant educator within a coethnic community-based organization brings a perspective from the nepantla, or “in-between,” of culture and identity that provides immigrant youth with a deeper level of cultural knowledge and connectedness to navigate their multiple worlds.

Race, ethnicity, and the incorporation experiences of Hmong American young adults: insights from a mixed-method, longitudinal study

ABSTRACT Through the lens of racialized incorporation, this paper draws upon three decades of surveys and interviews to analyze the initial experiences of young adult Hmong migrants in the United States. The first part describes the aspirations and understandings of these young adults as adolescents (circa 1989–1994). Early in resettlement, they, like their parents, stressed education and mobility; however, in contrast to traditional assimilation theory and model minority stereotypes, their aspirations were oriented toward family, traditions, and ethnic identification. The second section (2002–2007) documents how they came to embrace a distinctive bicultural identity during the transition to adulthood even as they became increasingly aware of its tenuousness, the constraints of racism, and their own complicated place in American racial hierarchies. Focused on ethnic identity and the complexity of racialization, the Hmong case provides the foundation for theorizing varied patterns of incorporation and the value of multi-method, life-course approaches.

Hmong American Charter Schools: An Exploratory and Descriptive Study

In this exploratory and descriptive study, I explored, analyzed, and described data provided by existing seven Hmong American charter schools. I aggregated my findings into these categories: communities and history; mission, vision, and/or core/value/future/belief statements; governance structure; curriculum; calendar; student support services; co-curricular activities; student information; staff information; student achievement; parental resources and involvement; communications; budgets/school finance; student enrollment; transportation; and other notable(s). For each category, I summarized the data explored and described, and for most of the categories, I provided supporting details to add depth.

In the Wake of George Floyd: Hmong Americans’ Refusal to Be a U.S. Ally

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the tenuous relationship between refugees and African Americans, specifically Hmong Americans in relation to Black Lives Matter following the murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers, one of whom is Hmong. We argue that Hmong expose the messiness of race relations in the U.S. due to their implication as a U.S. ally in Southeast Asia. While Hmong refugees/Americans can be called to enact violence on behalf of the U.S. militarized state, Hmong American activists refuse the reprised role of the ally, insisting on justice for Floyd and other Black people killed by the police.

Visibility, Voice, and Place: Hmong American College Student-Initiated Organizing as Creative Praxis

While scholars have noted the levels of educational attainment of Hmong Americans compared to East Asian Americans as well as the overall population, this focus has undermined the achievements of Hmong Americans. To shift the discourse on Hmong American students and provide a liberatory perspective, I examined the student-initiated organizing efforts within a Hmong ethnic student organization at a public university in the University of California system. Drawing on interviews with 16 members, document analysis, and participant observation, I found that participating in the organization provides a means for collective action aimed at addressing experiences of invisibility in the social, curricular, and cultural dimensions of the institution. These collective efforts highlight creative praxis that reimagines and constructs Hmong American student place on campus.

Academically Achieving Hmong American Students in Higher Education

As the largest Asian-American ethnicity at one large public Institution of Higher Education in California, undergraduate Hmong students as a whole are falling behind other sub-groups in graduation rates. Fortunately, a handful of Hmong students do find their way through the challenges of their collegiate experiences to attain academic success. This study identified and connected with four high achieving undergraduate female Hmong American students at the IHE to explore the factors for a successful academic experience counter-narrative. This qualitative asset-based in-depth, semi-structured virtual interview approach allowed discovery into unique and shared narratives regarding their academic achievements. Verbatim transcript analyses in relation to the current literature on Hmong American college students and the frameworks of the Model Minority Myth, Critical Race Theory, and Microaggressions, illuminated important themes as considerations to cultivate increased undergraduate Hmong American student academic achievement. These included aspects of recognizing the mismatch of traditional Hmong cultural norms and the individualistic values of the U.S. IHE, supporting student self-advocacy, and increasing awareness of the Hmong ethnicity as distinct from other Asian groups to dismantle the harmful consequences of the Model Minority Myth on Hmong student success.

Not a white girl and speaking English with slang: Negotiating Hmong American identities in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, USA

Abstract This paper analyzes metalinguistic comments of two young Hmong Americans in the Minneapolis-St Paul area regarding their identity negotiation using tactics of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz & Hall 2004a, 2004b, 2005), the notion of brought-along identity (Williams 2008) and Zhang's (2017) sociohistorical perspectives in analyzing linguistic variation. Two Hmong American individuals were selected from over 60 Hmong American interviewees because their vowel production is nearly identical to each other and that of the local white youth. Although their almost identical vowel production is viewed as their acculturation to the local white majority norm in the first- and second-wave variationist sociolinguistic perspective (Eckert 2012), their speech's characterization reveals a range of potential meanings (Eckert 2008) to index nuanced and unique positions in their local community. The young woman is ambivalent about her speech being characterized as “not having an accent” and claims that she is “not a white girl”. The teenage boy discusses his speech as “Hmonglish” and “English with slang” but carefully distances himself from quintessential African American English. While their characterization of their speech is distinct from each other, their tactics are strikingly similar. Through highlighting and downplaying differences and similarities to a locally salient way of speaking that indexes whiteness or blackness, the two Hmong Americans carve out their own complex identities of race, ethnicity, gender, and class in a local setting.

Framing racial position and political standing: Hmong Americans in the Wisconsin State Journal and the Chico Enterprise-Record

Although membership is regarded as an important condition of immigrants’ capacities to influence the political system, the literature on immigrant political incorporation has tended to focus on formal citizenship status, giving the impression that other forms of membership matter less for immigrants’ political capacity. Arguing for the need to account for ethnic groups’ perceived racial position within local contexts, this paper explores how media outlets, as public institutions, construct the identity of Hmong Americans in ways that affect their political standing. Using a textual analysis approach, we examine how two newspapers within two US communities frame Hmong’s group identity. Our findings show that the papers situate Hmong within a field of racial positions, albeit, not in the same ways that past research predicts would apply to Asian Americans. While differing in the particulars, the two newspapers are quite similar in the frames they use to depict Hmong Americans: civic ostracism, racial ambiguity, and threat. The media neither refer to Hmong as Asians nor valorize them vis-a-vis another racial category. Nevertheless, media representations frequently sully Hmong as a threat to the community. We discuss the implications of our findings for immigrant political incorporation.

Book Review: Voting Together: Intergenerational Politics and Civic Engagement among Hmong Americans

Book Review: Voting Together: Intergenerational Politics and Civic Engagement among Hmong Americans

Research on Hmong American College Students

The current study sought to review the existing literature that has contributed to our understanding of Hmong Americans in higher education. A literature search identified 32 articles that met the inclusion/exclusion criteria for the current review. The results of this scoping review demonstrate that research on Hmong American college students has received increased scholarly attention within the past six years and is primarily limited to academic communities that focused on Hmong studies. In addition, this body of research have mainly been examined qualitatively through a psychosociocultural lens with Hmong male and female university students. Based on these findings, recommendations for synthesizing the current research, shifting the focus of future research, and including theoretical perspectives in future research are provided.

Two Hate Notes: Deportations, COVID-19, and Xenophobia against Hmong Americans in the Midwest

Two Hate NotesDeportations, COVID-19, and Xenophobia against Hmong Americans in the Midwest Kong Pheng Pha (bio) In February 2020, I received a xenophobic hate note in my campus mailbox regarding President Donald Trump's negotiations with the Lao government to deport Hmong living in the United States back to Laos. The hate note read: "Deport all Hmongs, Deport all illegal aliens HMONGS, ICE & CBP are law enforcement and should be obeyed, No room for criminals, No Amnesty ever."I was shaken and unsettled. The xenophobic hate note created intense anxiety for me because I know that my advocacy as a Hmong American scholar and professor teaching and speaking to the media about the deportation issues rendered me a vulnerable target for racists and xenophobes. In the following days, I discussed the deportation negotiations with Laos at length in my course, "Hmong American Experiences in the U.S." My students were furious about the larger American public's ahistorical, inaccurate, and misguided readings regarding the Hmong presence in the United States as forcibly displaced political refugees who fought as proxy soldiers for the Central Intelligence Agency's secret war in Laos in the 1960s and 1970s. One Hmong American student commented that the deportation negotiations made her feel unwanted in the United States. How can I convey that I care about her? My spirit was shattered; I was on edge, demoralized, and fearing for my safety. The news reports, activism, and social discourse surrounding the deportation negotiations came to a screeching halt when news of COVID-19 broke out all over the world just one month later, in March 2020. While still recovering from a traumatic racist experience with the hate note, I was [End Page 335] thrust into another world of racism and xenophobia amidst the rapidly spreading global pandemic. A familiar wave of anti-Asian racism swept across the United States, as reckless as the virus itself. I was struck by another racist and xenophobic incident when a hate note was taped onto a Hmong American couple's apartment door in Woodbury, Minnesota. The note read: "We're watching you fucking chinks take the Chinese virus back to china. We don't want you hear infecting us with your diseases!!!!!!!!!!–your friendly neighborhood."1 The explosion of racist violence against Asians during the outbreak of COVID-19 exacerbated my fears of being Asian American in western, mostly rural Wisconsin. For my students, the couple, and myself, it is difficult to shake off that unsettling feeling of being targeted by both the U.S. settler state and racists on the ground. I find myself asking how we can turn to each other for support and care in these times of heightened racism. There is one strand of social discourse that connects the two hate notes directed against me in Wisconsin and the Hmong American couple in Minnesota. The first note conflates Hmong as "illegals" and renders invisible the specific historical context that was the caveat to Hmong political migration to the United States. The second note conflates Hmong Americans with Chinese and China, and renders Hmong Americans invisible and anything but Americans. In the note that I received, the writer deployed the concept of "illegal aliens" towards Hmong to justify our deportation. "Illegal aliens" are understood pejoratively to be subjects whose presence in the United States is unlawful and thus whose existence in and of itself constitutes criminality. The "illegal alien" is reduced to a condition of statelessness because they do not belong in the U.S. nation-state via their lack of legal citizenship and/or formal recognition of their presence. For Hmong, the deployment of "illegal aliens" feels familiar due to the Hmong's historical and political conditions as stateless refugees. Although different from the position of the "illegal alien," nonetheless our deportability even as political refugees serves to remind us that we are neither citizens nor Americans, if not in the legal sense, then certainly in the social sense. The Woodbury note contained an equally pernicious undertone. It aligns closer to the yellow peril discourse attributed to Asians as diseased invaders. Hmong Americans are effaced by racism, even though Hmong Americans make up the largest...

Their Last Breath: Death and Dying in a Hmong American Community.

Hmong Americans have typically been unwilling to use biomedical palliative care for end-of-life needs. This has resulted in confusion and frustration for Hmong patients, families, and nurses. Hmongs' end-of-life care choices for family members usually involve in-home caregiving provided by the family using a combination of biomedicine and traditional healing methods. Health care decisions are made for the patient by the family and community in this familistic culture. A qualitative approach was used to explore the beliefs that ultimately determine end-of-life care goals and strategies for Hmong patients. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 15 family caregivers of terminally ill patients and 5 shamans and Hmong funeral officiants. Several themes affecting care choices were identified, including cultural legacies of the responsibility of end-of-life caregiving by the family, the desire for family privacy in caregiving, and the role of community in the care for the dying, as well as completion of the rituals that ensure the soul of the deceased reaches the afterlife. Suggestions for improving communication between Hmongs and biomedical providers include providing information about end-of-life care beliefs and strategies to biomedical care providers and providing information to Hmong patients and families about hospice and palliative care options and services to support family care.

Radical Times, Continuities in Struggle

Radical Times, Continuities in Struggle Joo Ok Kim (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Mike Murase / GIDRA. The recent AMSJ series On Teaching in the Time of COVID-19 asks how American Studies and related fields attend to this moment of crisis. We might begin with the #JeNeSuisPasUnVirus movement in France, in which Asian-raced peoples digitally highlight their resistance against pandemic-related verbal and physical assaults that associate them with the novel coronavirus. And we might begin there to perceive the transnational histories that inform this crisis. Doing [End Page 39] so discloses overlapping colonialisms in Asia, calling for U.S. military aggressions in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos (in both known and "secret" wars) to be examined alongside the presence of differentiated Asian diasporas in France and in the United States.1 Learning from #JeNeSuisPasUnVirus, a call to uncouple the contemporary conflation of racial "other" with the virus in this time, also requires the uncoupling from centuries of discourses affixing disease to differentially racialized human bodies, which is also this time. Arundhati Roy's recent naming of the pandemic as a portal for a different future and Saidiya Hartman's meditations on the dramatically disproportioned death toll—"an exclusive tally of loss" accounting for American lives lost in the U.S. wars in Vietnam and Korea—further invites us to consider how the time of "in the Time of COVID-19" registers globally.2 What Hartman calls an exclusive tally of loss, initially observing the media's implicit refusal to consider the deaths of Asian peoples in the wars, registers differently with the current intensified scale of COVID-19 deaths among Black, Indigenous, and Latinx populations. The U.S. wars in Vietnam and Korea, the refugee diasporas from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to the United States, and the militarized logic underwriting the migrations, are also entangled with the police murder of George Floyd. Tou Thao, the Hmong American police officer who stood by as Derek Chauvin killed Floyd, is entwined in this history. The "police action" known as the Korean War, which inaugurated the U.S. security state and extended the infrastructure of militarization to police, is interwoven in this history. The Korean War's imprint on Black communities, and intensified Jim Crow policing throughout the 1950s, is linked to this history. On Toni Morrison's Korean War novel, Home, A. J. Yumi Lee observes Morrison's expansive thinking which "places the contemporary idioms of police and prison abolition and transformative justice in a broader historical and imaginative frame," such that unended, ongoing, endless wars are not conceptually exempted from global protests demanding racial justice.3 Perhaps On Teaching in the Time of COVID-19 asks us, as we negotiate the pedagogical imperatives of teaching, and of learning, to consider the time—refracted, recursive, anomalous—this virus punctures. One example calling attention to this time is the "living data" of COVID Black, a Black digital humanities project which tasks community members and scholars to actively catalogue critical statistics and social stories of Black diasporic communities.4 The urgency of this digital project grasps not only the structured public health inequities for Black communities disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, but also the renewed global public attention to centuries [End Page 40] of anti-Black violence, an iteration of Hartman's "The Death Toll." As Dorothy Roberts and Ruha Benjamin remind us, in studying the years, decades, centuries of surveillance in this nation-state, whether codified as technology or not, is the application of emerging methods to further the suppression of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian bodies.5 Their scholarship has also informed an open letter by critical public health scholars opposing public facial recognition technology, in response to the novel coronavirus in this time.6 The critical sweep of public health they define is broad, as the facial misrecognition impact of such technology represents an innovated continuation of racist policing and criminalization. The state's logic of racialized criminality, alongside its willful, malignant articulation of racialized disposability, is compounded in the current COVID-19 outbreak at San Quentin, a California prison that has incarcerated—politically quarantined—Black revolutionaries such as George Jackson. The accompanying image, a...