Chia Youyee Vang. Hmong America: Reconstructing Community in Diaspora. (The Asian American Experience.) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2010. Pp. xxii, 200. Cloth $75.00, paper $25.00

Extract

Chia Youyee Vang takes up the question, “How do refugees build an ethnic community from scratch … when they arrive with almost no material resources but a long history of nation-building aspirations in their homeland?” The resulting book is a valuable addition to the study of U.S. migration and Asian American history. Through her focus on people who entered the United States as “refugees” rather than “immigrants,” Vang provides a case study of an increasingly visible—albeit politically and administratively fraught—category of newcomers in America. That Hmong Americans have received little attention from Asian American historians (they are eclipsed in the scholarship on Southeast Asians by studies of Vietnamese and Cambodians) makes the book an especially welcome contribution.

Framed by her interest in the connections between homeland memories and practices with community building and changing identities in the United States, Vang's study begins in Asia and reviews the history of the Hmong and U.S. involvement in Laos during the Vietnam War. Although this is not the first study to link the expansion of American global power to U.S. immigration, the book establishes the history of Hmong Americans as an especially clear-cut case of U.S. militarism begetting the migration of displaced people across American borders. Since the early 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency had organized members of minority groups in Laos into guerrilla units to fight a “secret war” against Vietnamese and Lao communists. Resulting in rural displacement and dependency on American forces, this intervention also gave rise to a refugee crisis following the U.S. withdrawal in 1973 and the rise of the Pathet Lao in 1975.