In April 1977, a former embassy clerk named Dang Moua loaded his family into a car and drove into Merced, a farm town in the middle of California where the heat sat heavy over the orchards and the land ran flat to the horizon. He had come from the highlands of Laos by way of a Thai refugee camp, and what he saw in the San Joaquin Valley reminded him of home: room to grow things, a long warm season, and the chance to gather his people in one place. The story of the Hmong in Merced begins with that single arrival, and within a decade it had become one of the largest Hmong settlements in the country.
The Place
Merced sits at the geographic centre of California, roughly two hours from both San Francisco and Yosemite, on the flat farmland of the northern San Joaquin Valley. It is a working agricultural city, surrounded by almond groves, dairies and row crops, with a downtown anchored by the Merced County Courthouse Museum, an Italianate building from 1875 that is one of the oldest structures in the valley.
For most of its history Merced was a quiet farm town. The arrival of UC Merced in 2005 brought new growth, but the city’s character is still rooted in agriculture and in the waves of newcomers who have worked its land, from the Swedish founders of nearby Kingsburg to the Cambodian families of Modesto up the highway.
Among those waves, none reshaped Merced quite like the Hmong. By the late 1980s they made up a striking share of the city, and their presence is woven through its schools, its markets, its fairgrounds and, increasingly, its parks.
How It Became Hmong
A people without a country to return to
The Hmong are a highland people from the mountains of Laos, Vietnam and southern China. During the Vietnam War, the CIA recruited tens of thousands of Hmong fighters in Laos for a covert campaign against communist forces, a conflict later known as the Secret War. They were led by General Vang Pao, and they paid a terrible price.
When Laos fell to the communist Pathet Lao in 1975, the Hmong who had fought alongside the Americans faced reprisal. Many fled on foot across the Mekong River into Thailand, where they waited in refugee camps before resettlement in the United States, France and Australia. The first to reach America were scattered deliberately under federal placement programmes, sent to cities where they had no kin and no familiar work, from the Hmong of Minneapolis and St Paul to the communities that took root in Milwaukee.
Dang Moua and the pull of the valley
Dang Moua had worked as a clerk typist at the United States Embassy in Laos. He arrived in Merced in mid-April 1977, drawn by the warm climate and the prospect of farming, and began to promote the town to Hmong families dispersed across the country.
What followed was a classic chain migration, moving along the lines of Hmong clan and kinship. Families placed in cold northern cities, with no land and no community, heard from relatives that Merced was warm, that other Hmong were there, and that you could grow food. They came by the carload, part of the same valley migration that built the Hmong community in Sacramento to the north.
The numbers climb
The growth was extraordinarily fast. In April 1982, Merced County counted about 1,800 Hmong residents. By that October, officials put the figure at roughly 5,800, most of whom had arrived within the previous six months. By 1997 there were more than 12,000 Hmong in Merced out of a city of about 61,000, close to one in five residents.
The community organised itself, as it had in Laos, around its clans. As of 1997 Merced was home to fourteen of them: the Cheng, Fang, Hang, Her, Kong, Kue, Lee, Lor, Moua, Thao, Vang, Vue, Xiong and Yang.
Arriving into hardship
The Hmong reached Merced just as the local economy was slowing in the early 1980s. Many newcomers could not find work. Higher agricultural jobs required English they did not yet have, and lower ones were already held by Mexican migrant labourers. A people who had farmed mountains for generations found themselves, for a time, dependent on assistance in an unfamiliar valley.
There were cultural collisions, too. The most famous account of Merced’s Hmong is Anne Fadiman’s 1997 book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which followed a Hmong child with epilepsy and her family as they navigated the gap between Hmong healing and American medicine. One of the most widely taught books on cross-cultural care, it cemented Merced’s place in the wider history of the Hmong in Merced.
Building institutions
Out of that difficulty came organisation. The Merced Lao Family Community, Inc., a nonprofit founded in 1981 to serve Southeast Asian refugees, became the backbone of community life, offering social services, youth and adult programmes and cultural arts. It grew from the wider Lao Family Community network tied to General Vang Pao.
The schools adapted under pressure. Merced High School’s North Campus took in more than 200 Hmong students in the early 1980s and rapidly expanded its English-as-a-second-language programme, and Merced College began offering Hmong language courses in 1987. When a fresh wave of refugees arrived from the Wat Tham Krabok camp in Thailand around 2004, the district opened the Newcomer Language Academy at Burbank School to receive the children.
The Landmarks
Merced County Fairgrounds, 900 Martin Luther King Jr Way. Every December the fairgrounds host the Merced Hmong New Year, the community’s largest annual gathering. Sponsored by the Merced Lao Family Community, it fills the grounds with traditional dress, the courtship ball toss known as pov pob, dance and singing competitions, soccer tournaments and stalls of Hmong food and crafts, drawing visitors from across Central California.
Merced Lao Family Community, Inc., 1748 Miles Court, Suite B. For more than forty years this nonprofit has been the first stop for Hmong and other Southeast Asian families in Merced, helping with everything from job placement and citizenship to youth programmes and the preservation of traditional arts. It remains the organiser of the New Year.
Lee’s Merced Community Food Market, 37 East 15th Street. A neighbourhood Asian grocery where you can find the ingredients for Hmong dishes alongside fresh meat, rice and prepared hot food. Markets like this one turned ordinary Merced storefronts into pantries for a cuisine that travels, from lemongrass and bittermelon to the herbs that flavour a bowl of larb.
Main Street Market and Smart Save, 211 West Main Street. A full-line Asian grocery on Merced’s main commercial street, often called one of the best Hmong stores in town, with a butcher and a hot food counter. Its place on Main Street shows how thoroughly the community became part of the city centre.
Merced County Courthouse Museum, 21st and N Streets. The 1875 courthouse, opened as a museum in 1983, tells the story of the people who have settled the Great Central Valley. For a community that has worked so hard to keep its own history alive, the downtown landmark is a reminder that the Hmong story is now part of Merced’s permanent record.
General Vang Pao Park, Freemark Avenue near Cardella Road. Of Merced’s more than forty parks, this one in north Merced will be the only one named for a member of the Hmong community. Its plans include terraced landscaping evoking rice fields and interpretive panels telling the Hmong story, a permanent honour for the general who led the Secret War and helped found the Lao Family Community.
Mercy Medical Center Merced. The city’s hospital became a quiet landmark of change in 2009, when it formally allowed Hmong shamans to perform certain healing ceremonies for patients, one of the first such policies in the country, a direct answer to the misunderstanding Anne Fadiman had documented a decade earlier.
Where They Came From
The Hmong of Merced trace their roots to the mountains of Laos, particularly the highland provinces where they farmed and where so many were recruited into the Secret War. After 1975 their path ran through the refugee camps of Thailand, places like Ban Vinai and, for the last great wave, Wat Tham Krabok, before resettlement in the United States.
What is unusual about Merced is that almost no Hmong were sent there directly. The community is the product of secondary migration, the movement of refugees away from their placement cities toward one another. Families left the cold and isolation of the upper Midwest and the East Coast and converged on the Central Valley because relatives were there, the climate was forgiving, and the land could be farmed.
That farming instinct never left. Across the valley, Hmong families turned scraps of rented and backyard land into market gardens, growing Asian specialty crops such as eggplant, lemongrass, long bean, bittermelon, squash and moringa, and selling strawberries and produce at farmers’ markets and roadside stands. By 1997 the Merced Chamber of Commerce featured a Hmong woman holding vegetables in its tourist brochure.
Merced Today
The Hmong population of Merced is smaller now than at its peak. By 2010 the census counted 4,741 people of Hmong descent, about 6 per cent of the city, down from estimates near 15,000 in the late 1980s. Some families left under welfare reform in the 1990s for the Hmong heartlands of Minnesota, including Maplewood, as well as Wisconsin and North Carolina; others followed fishing work to Alaska in the late 2000s. Merced County today is home to roughly 6,762 Hmong residents.
But the community that remains has put down deep roots, moving from the margins to the centre of Merced life. Paul C. Lo, who grew up in the area, became the first Hmong American judge in the United States when he was appointed to the Merced County Superior Court in 2014. Hmong Americans serve on city councils, run nonprofits like the Hlub Hmong Center, founded in 2010, and teach the community’s history in valley schools.
You can read the change in the small things. Lemongrass grows in front gardens. Asian groceries line Main Street. The fairgrounds fill every December for the New Year, and in 2025 the wider valley marked fifty years since the Hmong first arrived. What began with one car pulling into a hot farm town has become, half a century on, a permanent and self-confident part of who Merced is.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did the Hmong come to settle in Merced, California?
The Hmong in Merced are largely the result of secondary migration rather than direct resettlement. After community leader Dang Moua arrived in 1977 and promoted the town, Hmong families originally placed in colder, more isolated parts of the country moved to Merced through clan and kinship networks, drawn by the warm climate and farmland.
How many Hmong people live in Merced?
At its peak in the late 1980s, Merced was home to an estimated 15,000 Hmong. By the 2010 census the city counted 4,741 people of Hmong descent, about 6 per cent of the population. Merced County today has roughly 6,762 Hmong residents.
When is the Hmong New Year celebrated in Merced?
The Merced Hmong New Year is held each December at the Merced County Fairgrounds at 900 Martin Luther King Jr Way. Organised by the Merced Lao Family Community, it features traditional dress, the ball-toss courtship game, dance and singing competitions, food stalls and crafts, and draws visitors from across the region.
Why are the Hmong in Merced known for farming and gardens?
The Hmong were highland farmers in Laos, and that tradition continued in the Central Valley. Families in and around Merced grow Asian specialty crops such as lemongrass, bittermelon, long bean, eggplant and moringa, as well as strawberries, often on small rented plots and in backyard gardens, selling at farmers’ markets and roadside stands.
What is the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down about?
Anne Fadiman’s 1997 book follows a Hmong family in Merced whose young daughter had severe epilepsy, and the painful gap between Hmong healing traditions and American medicine. It is widely taught in medical and cultural studies and helped make Merced central to national conversations about cross-cultural care.
Who was General Vang Pao and why is a Merced park named after him?
General Vang Pao led the Hmong forces in the CIA-backed Secret War in Laos and helped found the Lao Family Community network that supported refugees in the United States. Merced is building General Vang Pao Park in the north of the city, with terraced rice-field landscaping and interpretive panels, the only one of its more than forty parks named for a member of the Hmong community.
If your family’s story passed through Merced, or any of the places Hmong families have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the highlands of Laos and the camps of Thailand to a farm town in the heart of California, to wherever you are now.