Community Building, Home-Making and Empowerment

By Choua P. Xiong

Overview of the Area of Study

“Av luaj tawg plo, sawv hlo, Av luaj tawg nrees, sawv tsees. Nyob muaj niam muaj txiv, Muaj kwv muaj tig, Muaj neej muaj tsa, Tsis yog tawm hauv qhov av los.”

– HMoob proverb

Translation: When the land broke, the fractured dirt formed up. When the land cracked, the fractured dirt stood still. One has a mother and father, paternal relatives and maternal relatives. One did not rise from the broken ground.

            This HMoob proverb begins by comparing the ruptured earth and HMoob people, demonstrating that like the ruptured earth, HMoob people have an origin. This proverb also imparts on the listener a moral that HMoob people’s origins have always been traced through their community: mothers, fathers, maternal familial ties, and paternal familial ties. HMoob people’s practices of community have historically been centered on building relationships that extend one’s blood kinship, whether through marriage, shared clan lineages, or proximity. Since the mass displacement of HMoob people after the Secret War, HMoob people have had to rebuild and reimagine their communities and homes. Today, HMoob people live in various places throughout the world including: Australia, China, France, French Guiana, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, Vietnam, South Korea, Thailand, and the United States. HMoob communities throughout the world make up what scholars consider the HMoob diaspora. While the lessons in this area of study primarily focus on HMoob people in the United States, this chapter will also provide a brief discussion of how HMoob people build communities across the diaspora.

            This chapter is primarily for teachers and educators to explore how the concepts of community, home-making, and empowerment can be understood within  heterogenous HMoob communities. The details discussed in this chapter will not cover all forms of HMoob approaches to community building, home-making, and empowerment. This chapter should also not be utilized to represent all of HMoob communities either. The eight lessons included in Area of Study 4 provide students with an opportunity to explore how some Hmong people collectively establish community, belonging, and political power in the United States. Students will explore the ways some HMoob people imagine and create community in response to various factors such as discrimination, oppression, anti-Asian sentiment, racialized violence, and war. Students will develop an understanding of how Hmong communities thrive and forge paths forward through political and civic engagement.

Kinship as Community: HMoob Community Building Practices

As a historically patriarchal and communal group, one avenue that HMoob people have utilized to understand and cultivate “community” is through kinship-based relationships. Relationships from this perspective are created by establishing relations that extend one’s kinship system. Individuals’ status and relationship to one another is based on their established kinship. For example, your relationship with another person can be established as a sister, brother, aunt, uncle, grandparents, mother, father, and/or in-laws regardless of their blood relations. Even strangers can take on the status of a relative. These relationships then form a concept of community where an individual’s responsibilities and commitment to others mimic their relationships with their immediate kin. Concepts of community in this worldview operate through a collectivist value system that emphasizes the group’s well-being. This practice of an extended kin-network as community emphasizes reciprocal responsibilities to one another that replicate the familial commitment to provide social, economic, and political care that alleviate inequalities and access to resources. This worldview of community employs a method of knowing based on building closeness as a large extended family.

This understanding of community and community-building practices has been central to how some HMoob people create homes and establish their sense of belonging and place. When HMoob people were forced to migrate in the aftermath of the Secret War, this kin-network as community approach has been one way in which HMoob people sustained and created their place of belonging throughout the diaspora. Although many HMoob people have lost their immediate families and/or entire clan families, HMoob people employed this practice of community building to recreate new homes for themselves. From this worldview, the community acts as a large extended home. Thus, this chapter introduces the concept of home-making as an entry point to explore the ways different people cultivate home as an extension of their community.

Home-Making as a Displaced Community

The concept of home-making here does not refer to the common perception of making a domestic home. Instead, home-making as a concept offers a broader reimagination of a community that embodies the affects associated with home. For example, Low (2013) notes that emotions associated with home are “predominantly positive including feelings of love, warmth, trust, and understanding combined with comfort, relaxation, and security” (p. 233). Despite such positive affects associated with home, home can also be a contradictory place that can simultaneously provoke and comfort us (Moore, 2000). Nonetheless, the concepts of home and home-making is central for understanding HMoob people and how they cultivate community. Home for refugee communities becomes questionable because there are constant instabilities in the physical and political state of home. Rather than focusing on the fleeting and uncertain conditions of being displaced from your home, HMoob practices of community as a kin-network draws on the strength to establish familiarity while they are “on the run” (Vang, 2021).  In this way, home-making refers to the ways in which HMoob people engage in creating a community that embodies the affects of a home.

Sociologists have examined the various patterns of how immigrant groups established and integrated themselves into their new host country (Massey, 1995; Portes & Rumbaut, 2014). The field of immigration studies resulted in various models for understanding immigration integration within social hierarchies. For example, Portes and Bach (1985) studied how immigrant groups create ethnic enclaves as one form of integration. They argued that some immigrant groups create an alternative system, the ethnic enclave economy model, to generate social capital in response to economic changes. Stronger coethnic community includes large concentrations and diversified occupational structures, while a weak coethnic community means small concentration and primarily manual workers. This ethnic enclave model had been utilized to track and identify the success rates of immigrant integration. While this ethnic enclave model highlights the trend of the large and small concentration of ethnic communities resettling into certain areas, this model focused primarily on the integration process and economic prospects.

Unlike these sociological theories about immigrant integration, home-making as a framework explores a different inquiry about how displaced groups expand their networks within and outside of the physical ethnic enclaves. For communities like HMoob people, the process of creating a home stretches beyond state and national borders. Thus, through this practice of kin-network as community, HMoob people partake in “home-making” utilizing multiple modalities that expand time and space. Home-making as a framework for understanding HMoob practices of community in this area of study pushes against dominant perspectives that refugee and immigrant communities must exclusively realign themselves to the host country. Rather than following the prescribed path of complete integration into the host country, home-making emphasizes the multiple and fluid ways in which HMoob people engender new definitions of community.

Focusing on the HMoob communities in the United States, researchers have examined the various locations in which HMoob people resettled. Although HMoob people were intentionally resettled in various places throughout the United States, HMoob people engaged in secondary migration to form pockets of HMoob ethnic enclaves (Chan, 1994). HMoob people currently reside in various states across the United States, but the states with the highest number of HMoob people are California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin (U.S. Census Data, 2020). Within California, HMoob people primarily form large ethnic enclaves in the Central Valley and Sacramento. The largest HMoob ethnic enclave in Minnesota is concentrated in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. In comparison to California and Minnesota, the HMoob ethnic enclaves in Wisconsin are spread throughout the state resettling near suburban and metro areas. Similar to other refugee and immigrant groups, HMoob refugees in the United States were resettled into impoverished neighborhoods or the “hyperghettos” as coined by Tang (2015). Refugee resettlement into the hyperghetto neighborhoods extends HMoob people’s long history of being subjugated under imperial rule and colonial conquest.

Responding to Minoritization and Inequities

Home-making is also about finding identity within a place. As an ethnic group constantly on the run, HMoob people are tasked to continuously reinvent and reimagine their identity against dominant imperial and colonial narratives. HMoob people engage in home-making to generate and establish new forms of identity within each place that they live. Most importantly, the ways HMoob people home-make is often in response to the forms of inequities that they have encountered. HMoob people continue to face inequities throughout the diaspora as a minoritized racial and ethnic group. Montgomery (2016) extends Laguerre’s work that racialized others in the United States are minoritized by being “represented on a lower stage of (intellectual, moral, economic) development and thus in need of governance and discipline by whites” (p. 780). As Montgomery (2016) writes, minoritization looks different from different racial groups and can also differ across different countries, ethnicities, and socioeconomic statuses. Minoritization for HMoob people stems from their relationship with the ruling state as racialized, colonial, and imperial subjects. Thus, the forms of inequities that HMoob people faced are tied to how HMoob people are minoritized within their contexts across the HMoob diaspora. The different processes in which HMoob people are made into minorities across the diaspora is important for understanding the dynamics and contested relationships that HMoob people must navigate within their immediate kin-network and the larger political, economic, and professional network.

For instance, Southeast Asian countries as a region and recent nation-states had historically recognized the range of ethnic heterogeneity. Regardless, these countries still maintain a certain order of hierarchy that privileges the imperial ethnic group. Thailand, for example, continues to center ethnic Tai as the “Thai” national and ethnic identity and portray other ethnic groups as “hill tribes,” “ethnic minority,” and “highland minority.” The particular categorization of certain groups minoritized HMoob people in Thailand, reproducing inequitable structures, policies, and practices. In response to such exclusionary structures, HMoob people in Thailand partake in home-making by creating new definitions of identity. Many HMoob people in Thailand joined the Indigenous Peoples’ Movement in Thailand as a new social movement to politically identify themselves and challenge their minoritized positions. The Indigenous People’s movement in Thailand is an example of how minoritized groups enact home-making as a way to build solidarity with one another. Through these larger interconnected political groups, HMoob people are empowered to fight against the injustices and inequities they faced as minoritized subjects.

Pertaining to the experiences in the United States, HMoob people are primarily minoritized through race and class frameworks. HMoob people, racialized as Asians, typically fall into two dominant racialization categories: “perpetual foreigners” and “failed model minorities.” Perpetual foreigner refers to the ways in which Asian Americans are seen as national threats, incompatible, and unassimilable in the United States. This racialization positions HMoob people as forever outsiders who are unable or unwilling to adhere to the United States. Thus, racialized as perpetual foreigners, HMoob people are often scrutinized or questioned for their loyalty and/or alignment with the values of the United States.

The racialization as “failed model minorities” explains how HMoob people’s minoritization in the United States is both racialized and classed. The more common “model minority” is a stereotype that Asian Americans are the model minorities who have achieved academic and economic success in comparison to other racial groups. Although HMoob people may be Asians, they became part of the failed model minorities because they continue to struggle academically and economically. This failed model minority framework continues to be a harmful narrative that is utilized to blame HMoob people for their failures post-refugee resettlement. Rather than recognizing that the existing racial and socioeconomic hierarchies in the United States produces structural inequities for HMoob and refugee resettlement, this racialization as a failed model minority continues to perpetuate the disadvantageous racial and socioeconomic conditions that HMoob people entered.

In response, many HMoob Americans have turned to forming political groups as cross-racial and ethnic coalitions to counter these forms of minoritization. HMoob people have long recognized that building political power is one avenue to implement change to their living conditions. Some HMoob Americans have developed political power through participation in democratic processes such as voting, being elected government officials, and influencing local, state, and national laws and policies in the United States. Most notably, several HMoob American leaders developed their political campaigns in collaboration with other racial and ethnic groups. The reasoning behind cross-racial and ethnic coalitions are to establish communities and practices of home-making that dismantle the existing hierarchies that produce minoritization. Therefore, this form of cross-racial and ethnic solidarity as political power is an example of how some HMoob people have reimagined and recreated homes that center the collective wellbeing. These practices of home-making and cultivating cross-racial and ethnic communities exemplify the empowerment felt and enacted by HMoob Americans. Rather than portraying HMoob efforts to build political power as only a place of struggle, teachers and educators can reframe the ways HMoob people build community and home-make from a place of strength and empowerment.

HMoob Community in Diaspora

Thus far, this chapter has highlighted how HMoob people build communities within their local communities and across racial and ethnic lines. This next section focuses on the larger connections between HMoob people across the diaspora. Although HMoob people reside in various places throughout the world, many HMoob people have invested in building community with one another across national borders. After the mass displacement of HMoob people into the west, HMoob people have engaged in various modes of communication as a way to maintain their relationships in Southeast Asia. In the 1980s, HMoob people engaged in various forms of interactions including written letters, messages on cassette tapes, and sending textiles, herbal medicines, and gifts. While physical visitations were limited, HMoob people often attempted to send messages to their loved ones through individuals who are more mobile including sponsors, educators, and volunteers.

As the technological world advances, many HMoob people have gained access to more communication opportunities, such as international phone calls and teleconference calls. HMoob people have utilized these micromedia as platforms to share news and communicate with one another. The internet, especially, has served as the most prominent channel for HMoob people to communicate across the diaspora. HMoob people continue to make connections with one another through social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. In more recent years, HMoob people throughout the diaspora have been able to travel back to prominent countries with large HMoob populations to visit and learn about each other's lives. HMoob people have relied on their kinship networks to connect them to family members on their visits. Some HMoob people have created new familial connections during their visits as well. In this way, HMoob people have been able to develop a broader sense of community and home that crosses their physical geographic location.

During HMoob people’s visits to countries with other HMoob people, they are able to transport their sense of home and community from their permanent home to the new environment through the practices of a kin-network community. Operating through this worldview, the visits to the HMoob communities in different parts of the world generate a global home. This global home comes alive when the visiting individual establishes familiarity and kin-network community in the new environment. While this diasporic community seems to refer exclusively to HMoob individuals, this kin-network worldview is not just about the community that HMoob people build for one another. Rather, this practice of the kin-network as community sees the diasporic and local community as interconnected and part of a larger community with complex social, political, and professional relationships between HMoob and non-HMoob people. Most importantly, this practice of a kin-network as community is a framework for understanding the relationships that many HMoob people have with both one another, and non-HMoob groups.
 

Significance for Educators

The concepts presented in this chapter are pivotal for exploring how displaced and minoritized groups like HMoob people conceptualize and engage in community building. This chapter highlights key terminologies and frameworks for educators to contextualize and approach the study area lessons in a way that recognizes the strength and assets of the HMoob community. As educators adopt the lessons presented in this model curriculum, they can also model to their students the diverse ways in which people understand and engage in community life.

Considering the changes resulting from globalization, the lessons introduce students to concepts of human diversity within a growing multicultural and multilingual society. The opportunities to explore issues regarding oppression, inclusion/exclusion, and empowerment will enable students to imagine and create innovative and socially just solutions to social inequities. These lessons are designed so that students should be able to demonstrate empathy and compassion for marginalized communities and recognize how their lives are interconnected. Additionally, students from minoritized backgrounds should be able to see themselves represented and develop a sense of empowerment to fully contribute and participate in their local and global communities.

The lessons included in this study area explore some of the ways in which HMoob individuals and organizations garnered political power within the U.S. democratic system, such as through “Civic Engagement and Empowerment” and “Hmong in American Political Power.” The area of study also includes lessons on how HMoob people’s understandings of community and home-making are impacted by their history of war and displacement, as demonstrated in the lessons “Grounding of Homeland and Statelessness” and “War & Home.” The content from this chapter is meant to support educators’ background knowledge to facilitate culturally sustaining pedagogy that recognizes HMoob assets rather than solely victimhood. Returning to the opening quote, HMoob people, like any other forms of life, have an origin and a history. We can only unveil this history when we reorient our perspectives through a HMoob worldview.  

 

References

Chan, S. (1994). Hmong means free: Life in Laos and America. Temple University Press.

Massey, D. S. (1995). The new immigrant and ethnicity in the United States. Population and Development Review, 21(3), 631–652.

Moore, J. (2000). Placing home in context. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 20(3), 207-217.

Montgomery, A. (2016). Reappearance of the public: Placemaking, minoritization and resistance in Detroit. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40(4), 776-799.

Low, S. M. (2013). The new emotions of home. Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the National Insecurity State, 233.

Portes, A., & Rumbaut, R. G. (2014). Immigrant America: A portrait. Third Edition. University of California Press.

Portes, A., & Bach, R. L. (1985). Latin journey: Cuban and Mexican immigrants in the United States. University of California Press.

Tang, E. (2015). Unsettled: Cambodian refugees in the New York city hyperghetto. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

U.S. Census Bureau. (2020). ACS Population Table 2020-Hmong only. Retrieved from https://www.socialexplorer.com/us-census-data 

Vang, M. (2020). History on the run: Secrecy, fugitivity, and Hmong refugee epistemologies. Duke University Press.