Diversity in Diaspora: Hmong Americans in the Twenty-First Century

Chapter 9. The Double Diaspora: China and Laos in the Folklore of Hmong American Refugees

209 9 The Double Diaspora China and Laos in the Folklore of Hmong American Refugees Jeremy Hein When Hmong refugees first migrated to the United States in 1975, they joined a multicultural society with a long and complex immigration history. American society often boasts of the more than thirtysix million European immigrants who came to the United States between 1820 and 1930 (Dinnerstein and Reimers 1999). Much less publicized is that in 1924, the U.S. government intentionally curtailed immigration by implementing a quota system that favored western Europeans (i.e., Protestants ) and discriminated against southern and eastern Europeans (i.e., Catholics and Jews). Even less well known is the large internal migration of U.S. citizens in the two decades prior to the arrival of the first Hmong Americans. During the 1950s and 1960s, millions of African Americans left the rural South for the urban North, pushed out by the mechanization of agriculture and pulled by the expansion of industrial jobs. Tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans migrated from their island home to mainland cities for similar reasons. Mechanization of coal mining and the depletion of some mines altogether pushed thousands of whites from the hills of Appalachia to big cities. And thousands of Native Americans moved from remote reservations to metropolitan areas when the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs attempted to force assimilation and undermine the sovereignty of tribes. These domestic migrations began the racial and ethnic diversification of many predominately white cities before the “new immigration” from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean. The renewal of international migration in the late twentieth century occurred after the U.S. government ended its nationality-based quota immigration policy in 1965 (Dinnerstein and Reimers 1999). Then the Refu- 210 Hein gee Act of 1980 permanently established an annual number of refugee admissions negotiated by the president and Congress. Since 1990, each year approximately eight hundred thousand immigrants and refugees become legal permanent residents of the United States (a process distinct from U.S. citizenship). According to the director of the U.S. Census, “The twentyfirst century will be the century in which we redefine ourselves as the first country in world history which is literally made up of every part of the world” (Prewitt, quoted in Alvarez 2001). This overview of U.S. multicultural history provides an important reminder that Hmong Americans are one of hundreds of tiles in the mosaic, one of hundreds of patches in the quilt called American society. Yet the metaphors “mosaic” and “quilt” (in contrast to “melting pot”) indicate that folklore—the informal, oral traditions of culturally distinctive groups (Oring 1986a)—has an enormous influence on the meaning of unity and diversity in the United States (Dorson 1983). Narratives (“stories”) are one of the most common forms of folklore (Oring 1986b). They are found among virtually all racial and ethnic groups in the United States (Dorson 1967), and much of this oral literature is created, reproduced, and revised by families (Zeitlin, Kotkin, and Baker 1982). Family folklore preserves the deeds of ancestors who symbolize the achievement or rejection of prevailing social values (Boatright 1973). There are numerous themes in family folklore, but among the most common are tales about kin who “triumph over poverty and hardship” (Zeitlin, Kotkin, and Baker 1982, 46). These narratives often emphasize geographic mobility and take the form of “crossing-over stories” that describe “a reason for departure, a journey, and struggle for survival in a new home” (62–63). Among European Americans, family-tree stories often describe how “their ancestors had come here as immigrants to make a better life and that they had faced adversity to do it” (Waters 1990, 162). The family folklore of some whites also includes migration from one region of the United States to another, such as tales of ancestors who left the East Coast for better opportunities in the Midwest (Stahl 1989) or West (Boatright 1973). African Americans have an even stronger folklore about freedom and domestic migration that emphasizes “the need to move, the existence of places to go, and the ability to get there” (Levine 1977, 262). Since white prejudice and discrimination were causes of blacks’ geographic mobility and unexpected hardships in their new homes, overcoming racial oppression is a central element in many African American songs, proverbs, and other oral traditions (Dundes 1972; Turner 1993). Given the significant themes of hard times and pulling up stakes in The...