Meet Destiny, a Twin Cities Hmong pop band

Meet Shoua Xiong, host of Hmong-American Reachout KFAI Radio

St. Paul's East Side is the biggest Hmong neighborhood in the U.S. On February 1st, 2002, lawyer and community lobbyist Mee Moua (pronounced MOO-ah) became the first Hmong to be elected to an American state legislature. Said Moua on her election, "We've always been viewed as refugees. As a people, we've never really had a country."* In the early 1990s, most Hmong people living in America were in California. Due to a more accessible housing market, more entry-level jobs, a supportive social services infrastructure, and family connections, most of them now live in the Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Hmong New Year at the Metrodome, November 2001

Two huge Hmong community events in the Twin Cities are the annual Hmong sports tournament, and Hmong New Year. At both, there are many live music and dance performances, as well as music tapes, CDs, and videos available for sale. As well as the opportunity to hear the music, visitors can sample the traditional Lao foods and see the traditional clothing. July 2002 was the 22nd annual Hmong sports tournament in Como Park in St. Paul, where up to 20,000 Hmong people from all over the U.S. traveled to take part.

Hmong New Year, celebrated by Hmong people in Laos, China, Vietnam, Burma and Minnesota, among other places, marks the end of the harvest season with family reunions, feasting, courting, games, singing, a parade, traditional dancing, and a fashion show. The new year is the main gathering time for the Hmong community. On November 23-25th of 2001 about 30,000 people gathered at the Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis for food, sports and fun. The Hmong New Year does not refer to the Western (Gregorian) calendar, so it falls on a different Western date every year.

The history of Hmong people in the U.S.**
The Hmong, which means "free people," were slash-and-burn farmers living in isolated mountain villages in Laos when U.S. Special Forces advisers and the CIA recruited many of them during the 1960s and 1970s. The CIA paid them to fight the Vietnamese-backed Communists in Laos and to harass North Vietnamese Army troops on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which wound along the eastern border of Laos into South Vietnam. As many as 30,000 Hmong died in the conflict, and as many as 100,000 may have been killed during the five years after the war, according to the New York-based Lawyer's Committee for Human Rights.

Hmong market

In 1975 the pro-U.S. governments in Vietnam and Cambodia fell, and the North Vietnamese and their Pathet Lao allies took over what is now the Lao People's Democratic Republic. Thousands of Hmong fled across the Mekong River into Thailand where many were detained in refugee camps for years. (Note: most of the members of local Hmong pop band Destiny were born and raised in these camps.) The last Hmong tribal people living in refugee camps in Thailand began immigrating to the United States on July 17, 1996, closing one of the final chapters of the so-called secret war in Indochina. Recruited by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to fight the Communist Pathet Lao in Laos, thousands of the Lao hill people languished in the Thai camps for more than twenty years after the Communists took power. Afraid of torture and persecution if they returned home to the cool, misty mountains of their native land, as many as 3200 Hmong were expected to resettle in the United States under a U.S.-Thai agreement.

Population estimates based on the U.S. census for 2000***

• Minnesota is home to 41,800 Hmong people.
• Wisconsin (home to 33,791 Hmong) and Minnesota together now account for about forty-five percent of Hmong people living in the U.S.
• There are about 170,000 Hmong living in the U.S.
• The U.S. city with the most Hmong people is now St.Paul, MN, with 24,389; it used to be Fresno, California.
• In the 1990s, California was home to more than half the Hmong in the U.S., but it now has less than forty percent.
• The Hmong are thought to number about twelve million worldwide.

*The New York Times, "The Soul of a New Political Machine is Hmong," February 2, 2002, Section A, Page 15.

**"Last of Hmong Refugees Immigrate to the United States."Microsoft¨ Encarta¨ Encyclopedia 2001. © 1993-2000 Microsoft Corporation.

***The Associated Press, "Midwest replaces Calif. as heart of Hmong community in U.S.," August 15, 2001.