On the last weekend of November, Cal Expo fills with the colour of a people who arrived in America with almost nothing. Tens of thousands gather for the Sacramento Hmong New Year, the largest of its kind in the country, and for three days the fairgrounds belong to the Hmong in Sacramento. There are pageant gowns heavy with silver coins, ball-tossing courtships, the deep call of the qeej, and rows of vendors selling papaya salad and sticky rice. It is the public face of a community that, fifty years on, has put down roots deeper than most outsiders ever notice.
The Place
Sacramento is California’s capital, a flat valley city where the American and Sacramento rivers meet, framed by the Tower Bridge and the Capitol dome. It is not a wealthy enclave in the way of the Bay Area suburbs. It is a working city of state employees, farmworkers and immigrants, and its south and north edges hold some of its most affordable neighbourhoods.
It is in those neighbourhoods, South Sacramento and Del Paso Heights and the streets around Stockton Boulevard and Power Inn Road, that the Hmong settled and stayed. The land around the city is rich farmland, and that mattered to a people who had farmed the mountains of Laos for generations.
How It Became Hmong
The Hmong did not choose Sacramento at first. They were brought to America as refugees of a war the United States barely admits it fought.
The Secret War
During the 1960s and early 1970s, the CIA recruited Hmong fighters in the mountains of northern Laos to fight communist forces in what became known as the Secret War, run alongside the war in neighbouring Vietnam. General Vang Pao led the Hmong army. By the war’s end, an estimated 30,000 Hmong soldiers had been killed, along with tens of thousands of civilians.
When Laos fell in 1975, the Hmong who had fought for the Americans faced reprisal. Families fled on foot to Thailand, many drowning crossing the Mekong, and waited in refugee camps for sponsorship to a country most had never heard of.
Arrival, the late 1970s and 1980s
The first Hmong refugees reached the United States in the late 1970s. Federal policy scattered them deliberately across the country, into Minnesota, Wisconsin, Oregon and the cold cities of the upper Midwest, where churches and agencies could resettle them.
It was a hard fit. Mountain farmers were placed in apartment blocks in winter cities, far from one another and from the land. Word spread of California: warmer, with valley soil that looked and grew like home.
The second migration
Through the 1980s and into the 1990s a great secondary migration carried Hmong families west, out of Minnesota and Wisconsin and into the Central Valley. They followed clan and kin, the way the Hmong have always moved, settling near Fresno, Stockton, Merced and Sacramento. Some came to try farming the valley; many came simply to be near other Hmong.
Sacramento grew quickly. By the 2000 census the city counted 18,121 Hmong residents, the third-largest Hmong population of any American city at the time. The community kept growing through the decades that followed, anchored by family reunification and the steady pull of an established place. California now holds the largest Hmong population of any state, more than 100,000 people, ahead of Minnesota and Wisconsin, according to census figures compiled by historians of the community.
Today Sacramento County is home to an estimated 32,000 Hmong Americans, the third-largest concentration in the nation, behind only the Minneapolis-St Paul and Fresno areas. The same migration that built the Hmong community in Fresno, California shaped Sacramento, and the two valley cities have grown alongside the older strongholds of St Paul, Minnesota and Wausau, Wisconsin. The Midwestern roots run deep: many Sacramento families still have relations in the Twin Cities suburbs, including the close-knit Hmong community of Maplewood, Minnesota, a reminder that the great valley migration never fully cut the ties of clan.
Building institutions
What began as scattered families became a community with its own scaffolding. The Sacramento Hmong New Year, Inc. was established in the early 2000s by the Hmong clans to carry the New Year forward for a generation born in America. Civic groups followed. Hmong Innovating Politics, a Sacramento nonprofit, set out to bring young Hmong Americans into education and civic life.
The schools changed too. In 2010 the Sacramento City Unified School District responded to the low achievement of Hmong students by converting Susan B. Anthony Elementary in South Sacramento into a Hmong dual-language immersion school. The programme opened in the autumn of 2011, teaching kindergartners ninety per cent of the day in Hmong. It was the only Hmong immersion programme on the West Coast and the second in the country, after St Paul.
The Landmarks
Cal Expo, 1600 Exposition Boulevard. Every November the California state fairgrounds host the Sacramento Hmong New Year, drawing crowds estimated at around 40,000 over its run. The festival, one of the largest Hmong cultural events in the country, fills the grounds with pageants, qeej music, ball-tossing courtship games, sport and food. For many families it is the one weekend a year the whole community is in one place.
Susan B. Anthony Elementary, South Sacramento. Home to the West Coast’s first Hmong dual-language immersion programme, opened in 2011. Children of refugees and their grandchildren learn to read and write a language that for most of its history was carried only in speech and in the patterns of story cloth.
Jimmy’s Deli Soul Food and Hmong Cuisine, East Del Paso Heights. A neighbourhood institution run by Lue Thao that has traded for over a decade. After years of casual offerings, a full Hmong menu was added in 2015, and the kitchen now serves Hmong sausage, pork belly and papaya salad alongside soul food, the heat dialled up to as many peppers as a customer dares.
K Fusion Eats, off Power Inn Road. A counter-service restaurant from Chef Kia Le and her family, plating Hmong-inflected Thai and Korean dishes. Papaya salad, Hmong sausage, fried pork belly larb and kapoon chicken noodle soup come built on ingredients used at peak ripeness, a cook’s attention to freshness inherited from the garden.
Vinai Wholesale, near Power Inn. A large grocery named for Ban Vinai, the Thai refugee camp that funnelled so many Hmong to America. Its prepared-foods counter and aisles of purple sticky rice, fresh greens and Southeast Asian condiments make it both a shop and a gathering point, taking custom orders for trays of papaya salad by the party.
Lemon Hill Garden, South Sacramento. A multi-acre plot leased by a neighbourhood church and tended for well over a decade mainly by Hmong residents, many of them elders. Lemongrass, bitter melon, special herbs and sticky corn grow in rows here, and the garden is as much about company and memory as it is about food.
Stockton Boulevard. The spine of Hmong south Sacramento, lined with markets and shops where fresh tofu is made, sweet fermented rice, pickled mustard greens and fresh bamboo shoots are sold, and where stores like Xieng Khouang Market stock vegetables grown by Hmong families in Sacramento and Elk Grove that change with every season.
Where They Came From
The Hmong of Sacramento trace their origins to the mountain provinces of northern Laos, above all Xieng Khouang, the highland heart of the Secret War, a name now carried by a market on Stockton Boulevard. They are a people without a country of their own, having migrated centuries earlier from southern China into the highlands of Laos, Vietnam and Thailand.
Their route to Sacramento ran through the refugee camps of Thailand, Ban Vinai chief among them, then through the cold resettlement cities of the American Midwest. The valley was a second choice that became home: warm, agricultural, and close to kin. Clan ties, the eighteen Hmong clans that organise Hmong society, drew families together here as they always have.
Sacramento Today
Fifty years after the first refugees arrived, the Hmong in Sacramento are no longer only refugees. A first American-born generation has come of age. Young organisers like those at Hmong Innovating Politics run voter drives and leadership programmes, and Hmong names appear on ballots, in school staff rooms and in the kitchens of restaurants that draw customers of every background.
The older world has not vanished. Elders still tend the community gardens of South Sacramento, still consult shamans, still gather their clans at Cal Expo each November. The qeej is still played at funerals that can last days. But the gardens are pressed by development and the cost of land, and elders say the city could do more to keep them growing.
For the Hmong who came of age here, the pride is plain. They speak of being displaced from Laos and yet remaining wholly Hmong, of an identity carried across oceans and camps and cold cities into a valley that finally felt like ground they could stand on. Heritage Month in May and the New Year in November now bracket a year in which the community measures both how far it has come and how much it intends to keep.
It is the ordinary tension of a community that has made it: how to hold a mountain culture in a valley city, how to teach grandchildren a language that nearly died in the crossing. In the immersion classrooms of Susan B. Anthony, in the rows of bitter melon at Lemon Hill, and in the crowds at Cal Expo, the Hmong in Sacramento are answering it, one generation at a time.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Hmong live in Sacramento?
Sacramento County is home to an estimated 32,000 Hmong Americans, the third-largest Hmong concentration in the United States. The city of Sacramento alone counted 18,121 Hmong residents in the 2000 census, then the third-largest Hmong population of any American city.
Why did the Hmong settle in Sacramento?
The Hmong in Sacramento arrived largely through a secondary migration in the 1980s and 1990s. First resettled across the Midwest as refugees, many moved to California’s Central Valley to be near other Hmong, to follow clan and family, and to reach warmer, farmable land that recalled the highlands of Laos.
When is the Sacramento Hmong New Year?
The Sacramento Hmong New Year is held at Cal Expo, usually over the last weekend of November. Organised by the Sacramento Hmong New Year, Inc., it draws crowds estimated around 40,000 and is considered one of the largest Hmong cultural festivals in the country.
Why did the Hmong come to the United States?
The Hmong were recruited by the CIA to fight communist forces in Laos during the Secret War of the 1960s and 1970s. When Laos fell in 1975, those who had fought for the Americans faced reprisal and fled to refugee camps in Thailand, from where they were resettled in the United States beginning in the late 1970s.
Where can you find Hmong food in Sacramento?
Hmong food in Sacramento centres on the south of the city. Jimmy’s Deli in East Del Paso Heights serves a full Hmong menu, K Fusion Eats off Power Inn Road plates Hmong-inflected dishes, and Stockton Boulevard markets and Vinai Wholesale sell papaya salad, sticky rice, Hmong sausage and fresh greens.
Is there a Hmong language programme in Sacramento schools?
Yes. Susan B. Anthony Elementary in South Sacramento runs a Hmong dual-language immersion programme that opened in 2011, teaching kindergartners most of the day in Hmong. It was the first Hmong immersion programme on the West Coast and the second in the United States, after St Paul, Minnesota.
If your family’s story passed through Sacramento, or any of the places Hmong have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the mountains of Xieng Khouang and the camps of Thailand, to the gardens and fairgrounds of the Central Valley, to wherever you are now.