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.

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

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.

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.