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Chapter 5 Small-Town Hospitality and Hate W hites accounted for nearly 100 percent of residents in Eau Claire and Rochester when refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia began arriving in the mid-1970s. The first arrivals came directly from Southeast Asia via the federal resettlement program organized by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. At the migration’s peak, two hundred to three hundred refugees flew into the small regional airports over the course of a year. Others moved to Eau Claire and Rochester after initially settling in another part of the United States, pushed by unfavorable conditions in large urban areas and pulled by the presence of kin. Birth rates that are high by U.S. standards further contributed to the growth of Southeast Asian populations in places where few nonwhites lived. Thus, within fifteen years of the migration’s start in 1975, more than 1,400 Cambodians lived in Rochester and about 1,900 Hmong lived in Eau Claire. The ways native-born people in these places reacted to Southeast Asian refugees reveal a pattern of American race and ethnic relations that can be termed “small-town hospitality and hate.” Some whites wanted their community to live up to ideals about social solidarity and neighbors helping neighbors, but others viewed the refugees as unwelcome strangers who threatened the established social order. This duality is aptly conveyed in a volunteer’s explanation for why she began assisting the Hmong in Eau Claire: “I was . . . concerned about the lack of communication that existed on a city-wide basis which caused the Hmong to be recipients of hostility and abuse, especially among the young school children and teenagers. I was committed to becoming better informed about them so that I could help members of my church and community relate to them in a more positive way” (Gonlag 1985, 124). Hospitality The absence of racial and ethnic diversity in Eau Claire and Rochester did not mean that arriving refugees landed in a hostile environment. 79 Many Americans enthusiastically assisted the Hmong and Cambodians, facilitating the formation of Asian American communities in the most unlikely of places. A small-town ethos of volunteerism and civic pride motivated some local people, such as the Rochester 4-H club, which picked an unprecedented annual community project: co-sponsoring an extended Cambodian family of twelve.1 In keeping with the organization ’s agricultural mission, club members farmed a garden plot with the family and submitted a scrapbook of their work to a county competition (and won second place). In Eau Claire, the special-needs coordinator at the Chippewa Valley Technical College helped organize the first Hmong New Year celebration in 1980 and became the chairperson of the Eau Claire Advisory Refugee Committee.2 The twenty members of the committee coordinated the work of over eighty volunteers who helped the Hmong with problems ranging from clothing and furniture to shopping and employment.3 Religious faith, however, provided the primary inspiration for beneficent midwesterners and explains why Southeast Asian refugees came to Wisconsin and Minnesota in the first place. In July 1975, the Gloria Dei Lutheran Church sponsored the first of the refugees to come to Rochester, a former South Vietnamese Army pharmacist and his wife.4 Three Vietnamese orphans became the first refugees in the Eau Claire area when a family in adjacent Altoona adopted them in April 1975. Their father explained the adoption decision this way: “The lord has blessed us, we want to pass that on to these children, and we’ll be blessed again.”5 By 1989 Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services had sponsored 299 Hmong refugees in Eau Claire and the U.S. Catholic Conference had brought in another 244 (Miyares 1998). The church-congregation sponsorship model typified the initial resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees across the United States and produced some of the most intimate interactions with local people that the refugees would ever experience (Fein 1987). In Rochester thirty members of the First Church of the Nazarene assisted Cambodian refugees. They became sponsors, greeting new arrivals at the airport, and subsequently helped the refugees obtain basic necessities, learn English, and find jobs. But according to one volunteer, their work with Cambodians went well beyond material survival: “The government can offer money and food stamps but it cannot offer friendship and moral support.”6 Religion not only provided the infrastructure for refugee resettlement in small midwestern cities but also the moral...

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