On a cold April morning in 1976, the Moua family stepped off a plane at the Eau Claire airport and into a Wisconsin spring they had no words for. They had crossed the Mekong, sat in a Thai refugee camp, and flown half the world to a small mill town where pastors waited with coats. Half a century later, the Hmong in Eau Claire are no longer strangers passing through. They are the second largest ethnic group in the county, the farmers who fill the Saturday market, and the families who turn a hockey arena into a sea of embroidered colour every autumn.
The Place
Eau Claire sits where the Eau Claire River pours into the Chippewa, in the rolling western half of Wisconsin the locals call the Chippewa Valley. The name is French for “clear water,” given by fur traders who paddled these rivers long before the sawmills came.
In the nineteenth century this was a lumber boomtown, one of the great white pine milling centres of the upper Midwest, its riverbanks crowded with logs floated down from the north woods. When the pine ran out, the city reinvented itself around tyres, paper, and eventually the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, whose students pour across the footbridges each September.
Today it is a city of roughly seventy thousand, anchored by a revitalised downtown, a restored riverfront at Phoenix Park, and a music scene that punches far above its weight. It is also, quietly, one of the most important Hmong towns in America.
How It Became Hmong
The Hmong did not drift to Eau Claire by accident. They came because of a war the United States spent decades pretending it had not fought.
The Secret War and the flight from Laos
During the Vietnam War, the CIA recruited tens of thousands of Hmong fighters in the mountains of Laos to fight a covert campaign against communist forces, disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and rescue downed American pilots. It was called the Secret War, and the Hmong paid for it in blood.
When American forces withdrew in 1975 and Laos fell to the communist Pathet Lao, the Hmong who had sided with the United States faced reprisal and persecution. Families fled on foot through the jungle, crossed the Mekong River into Thailand, and waited in crowded refugee camps for a country that would take them.
The first Hmong refugees were legally admitted to the United States in 1975, the same year Saigon fell. They were scattered across the country by resettlement agencies, often with no choice in where they landed, from the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis to small mill towns like Eau Claire.
Pastors, churches, and the first families
Eau Claire’s Hmong story begins with sponsorship. Church organisations such as Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Service took on the work of resettlement, finding apartments, winter clothing, and first jobs for families who had farmed mountainsides their whole lives.
The Moua family, who arrived in April 1976, were among the earliest, greeted at the airport by the pastors who had agreed to sponsor them. Through the late 1970s and into the 1980s, more Hmong neighbours followed, sponsored family by family, household by household.
For people who had grown rice and corn on Laotian hillsides, a Wisconsin winter was a shock that words struggle to carry. There was the cold, the language, the unfamiliar food, the bewildering paperwork of an American life.
Building an institution: ECAHMAA
By the early 1980s the community was large enough, and the challenges sharp enough, that the Hmong organised their own institution. In 1982 they founded the Eau Claire Area Hmong Mutual Assistance Association, known as ECAHMAA.
It was built to do the practical, unglamorous work that holds a refugee community together: translation, help with housing, employment, education, and navigating a healthcare system written in a foreign language. It remains the only agency in the greater Chippewa Valley specialising in Hmong cultural and linguistic needs.
Decades on, ECAHMAA now serves well over a thousand people a year, runs rice and food pantries, owns and manages affordable housing on the west side of the city, and provides everything from youth programmes to victim advocacy. It is led today by executive director True Vue.
Secondary migration and the families who stayed
Not every Hmong family resettled in Eau Claire arrived directly from Thailand. Like Hmong communities across the country, Eau Claire grew partly through secondary migration, as relatives who had first been placed in other states moved to be near family, jobs, and a community that already understood them.
That clustering is what built critical mass. An estimated six thousand Hmong now live across the Chippewa Valley, with just over three thousand in the City of Eau Claire itself. In Eau Claire County, the Hmong are the second largest ethnic group, behind only white residents of European descent. Across Wisconsin the figure tops sixty thousand, the third largest Hmong population of any state, anchored by larger hubs in Milwaukee and Wausau.
The garden as a foothold
Many of the first generation had been farmers in Laos, and farming became one of the surest footholds in Wisconsin. Families took plots of land, grew vegetables and flowers, and began selling at the downtown market, work that needed strong hands and patience more than fluent English.
That tradition has now passed through two and three generations, a thread connecting Laotian hillsides to Eau Claire’s riverfront pavilion. It is the most visible Hmong presence in the city, and the easiest for any newcomer to find: walk into the Saturday market and follow the bitter melon, the lemongrass, and the cut gladiolus. The same market gardening built communities from Sacramento to Fresno.
The Landmarks
Eau Claire Area Hmong Mutual Assistance Association, 1320 W. Clairemont Avenue. The institutional heart of the community since 1982. From this office the association runs housing, pantries, translation, and youth and elder programmes, and it anchors much of the city’s Hmong civic life.
Phoenix Park Farmers Market, 300 Riverfront Terrace. Built on a reclaimed brownfield where the two rivers meet, the pavilion has hosted the downtown market for two decades. Hmong growers are among its longest-serving vendors, and on a Saturday in July their tables of greens and flowers are the busiest in the place.
Egg Roll Plus, 1611 Bellinger Street. A family-run, takeout-only kitchen serving Hmong, Thai, and Vietnamese food, and a local institution for its egg rolls, which have topped Chippewa Valley best-of polls year after year. For many Eau Claire residents it is the first taste of Hmong cooking they ever had.
Sonnentag Event Center. The university’s arena now hosts the Eau Claire Hmong New Year, the community’s largest annual gathering, drawing thousands across two days each autumn for traditional dress, food, music, and ball-toss courtship games.
Chippewa Valley Museum, 1204 Carson Park Drive. In Carson Park, the museum keeps “Hmong in Eau Claire,” a web exhibit and educational resource of oral histories, photographs, and a timeline, and has mounted exhibitions pairing Hmong and Norwegian immigration to mark fifty years of resettlement.
Pablo Center at the Confluence. The downtown arts centre, standing where the rivers join, has hosted programming marking a half century of Hmong life in Eau Claire, including documentary screenings on the community’s first fifty years in America.
University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. The university on the river has become a gathering point for the second and third generations: Hmong students, Hmong student organisations, and scholarship of the community’s own history, much of it written by the children and grandchildren of the first arrivals.
Where They Came From
The Hmong of Eau Claire trace their roots to the highlands of Laos, with deeper ancestral memory of southern China, from where the Hmong migrated south over centuries. In Laos they lived in mountain villages, growing rice, corn, and vegetables, and raising livestock on terraced slopes.
What brought them to Wisconsin was not opportunity but survival. They came as refugees of the Secret War, persecuted for having sided with the United States, by way of the Mekong crossing and the Thai refugee camps that held them in limbo for months or years.
The clans, the Mouas, Yangs, Xiongs, Lees, Vues, and others, carried their family names and kinship networks intact. Those networks did the quiet work of resettlement, pulling relatives toward one another until a scattering of sponsored families became a genuine community on the Chippewa.
Eau Claire Today
Fifty years on, the Hmong are woven through the ordinary life of the city. They are nurses and teachers, small-business owners and university students, market gardeners and city employees. The generation that arrived speaking no English has raised children and grandchildren who are fully of Eau Claire, even as they keep the language and the clan ties alive.
The annual Hmong New Year, the Noj Peb Caug that marks the harvest and the turn of the year, has grown from a community event into a regional one, filling the Sonnentag for two days and drawing thousands. The summer brings the HMoob Day celebration to Phoenix Park, and the farmers market keeps its Hmong tables busy from May to October.
There is preservation work underway, too, a recognition that the first generation’s memories are finite. Museums, the university, and the community itself are racing to record oral histories before they are lost, marking the fiftieth anniversary of a resettlement that began with a few families and a handful of sponsoring pastors. It is an honest, living history, neither finished nor forgotten, still being written along the clear water that gave the city its name.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Hmong people live in Eau Claire?
Just over three thousand Hmong live in the City of Eau Claire, with an estimated six thousand across the wider Chippewa Valley. In Eau Claire County the Hmong are the second largest ethnic group, behind only white residents.
Why did the Hmong settle in Eau Claire, Wisconsin?
The Hmong in Eau Claire came as refugees of the Secret War in Laos, beginning in 1975, resettled by church sponsors such as Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Service. The community then grew through family sponsorship and secondary migration as relatives moved to be near one another.
When did the Hmong first arrive in Eau Claire?
The earliest Hmong families arrived in the mid-1970s, with the Moua family landing at the Eau Claire airport in April 1976. More families followed through the late 1970s and 1980s, and the community founded the Eau Claire Area Hmong Mutual Assistance Association in 1982.
What is the Eau Claire Hmong New Year?
The Hmong New Year, or Noj Peb Caug, celebrates the end of the harvest season. In Eau Claire it is held each autumn at the Sonnentag Event Center, drawing thousands over two days for traditional dress, food, performances, and courtship ball-toss games.
Where can you find Hmong food and culture in Eau Claire?
Egg Roll Plus on Bellinger Street is a long-standing family-run spot for Hmong cooking, and Hmong growers sell produce and flowers at the Phoenix Park farmers market from May to October. The Chippewa Valley Museum keeps a “Hmong in Eau Claire” exhibit of oral histories and photographs.
What is ECAHMAA?
The Eau Claire Area Hmong Mutual Assistance Association, founded in 1982, is the only agency in the Chippewa Valley specialising in Hmong cultural and linguistic needs. It provides housing, food pantries, translation, education support, and advocacy to more than a thousand people each year.
If your family’s story passed through Eau Claire, or any of the places Hmong have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the highlands of Laos and the camps of Thailand, to a riverfront market in the Chippewa Valley, to wherever you are now.