On the southeast edge of Fresno, where the city thins into open ground, a farmer bends over rows of plastic-covered beds in the cool of an April morning. The crop might be strawberries, or bitter melon, or the long beans and mustard greens that fill the back of a pickup bound for a roadside stand by Friday. The work looks like Laos, and it is meant to. The people who plant these fields carried the knowledge across the Mekong River, through Thai refugee camps, and into a valley that, from a certain angle in the right season, can almost pass for the highlands they left behind.
The Hmong in Fresno are among the largest concentrations of Hmong Americans in the country, a community built almost entirely since 1977 by people who arrived with nothing and were promised even less. This is the story of how they got here, what they made, and why, every December, tens of thousands of them come back.
Southeast Fresno: The Place
Fresno sits at the center of California’s San Joaquin Valley, ringed by some of the most productive farmland on earth, with the Sierra Nevada rising to the east. The Hmong community settled most densely on the city’s southeast side, in working-class neighborhoods threaded by Kings Canyon Road and served by Fresno Unified schools. Housing here runs to modest postwar single-story homes and apartment complexes, with farmland beginning where the subdivisions end. It is flat, hot in summer, and close to the fields.
How Southeast Fresno Became a Hmong Heartland
Before the Hmong
Fresno was farm country long before the Hmong arrived, worked in waves by Armenian, Japanese, Mexican, and Punjabi families who turned the valley’s soil into orchards and vineyards. The Japanese presence ran deep enough that the Fresno Fairgrounds served as a wartime assembly center where Japanese Americans were held in 1942 before incarceration. By the 1970s the southeast side was a patchwork of established immigrant farming families and aging housing stock, the kind of place where rent was cheap and land was near. It was, in other words, ready for newcomers who knew how to grow things.
The Hmong Arrive
The Hmong came to America because of a war the United States barely admitted it was fighting. Through the 1960s and early 1970s, the CIA recruited Hmong fighters in the mountains of Laos, roughly 30,000 soldiers under General Vang Pao, to block North Vietnamese supply lines in what became known as the Secret War. When Laos fell to communist forces in 1975, the Hmong who had fought for the Americans faced reprisal. Tens of thousands fled on foot, crossing the Mekong into Thailand, many drowning on the way.
They landed in Thai holding camps, above all Ban Vinai in Loei province, which swelled to some 45,000 people by the mid-1980s. Families waited there for years before the United States accepted them. The first refugees reached America in the mid-1970s and were deliberately scattered by federal resettlement policy across dozens of states, a strategy meant to ease the burden on any one city. It also broke clans apart.
Fresno had exactly one Hmong family in 1977. What happened next was not federal policy but its undoing.
Southeast Fresno at Its Peak
Hmong families began leaving the cold cities and isolated towns where they had been placed and moving toward each other, and toward land. This secondary migration accelerated through the early 1980s, and California’s Central Valley was the magnet: relatives were here, the climate was mild, and the farming was familiar. The numbers tell the story plainly. Four families in 1978. Two thousand people by 1980. Seven thousand by 1981, twelve thousand by 1982, around twenty-six thousand by the end of the decade.
By the early 1990s roughly 35,000 Hmong lived in Fresno, and California held more than half of all Hmong in the United States. The 2010 census still counted more than 24,000 Hmong residents in the city, close to five percent of its population. To be precise about a common claim: the Minneapolis and St. Paul metro area in Minnesota has a larger Hmong population overall, and the deep Hmong roots of the Hmong community in St. Paul run just as far back. Fresno and St. Paul are the twin capitals of Hmong America, one built on farmland, the other on a northern river city.
The Change
Arriving safe was not the same as arriving easy. Many Hmong reached Fresno speaking no English, with skills rooted in mountain farming that did not transfer to an industrial economy. A large share lived on public assistance in subsidized housing through the 1980s, a fact community leaders today recount without flinching. Paul Lo, who fled Laos as a boy and later became the first Hmong American judge, has put it bluntly: they grew up on welfare, and they were destitute.
The push back into farming was partly a return to what people knew and partly a response to crisis. The 1996 federal welfare reform capped benefits at five years, which fell hard on large Hmong households. Families leased small plots on the urban fringe and started growing for market. The transition was uneven, marked by debt, language barriers, and the strain on a generation of children who became translators for their parents at clinics and welfare offices. Out of that decade came a farming community that now numbers in the hundreds of families.
The Landmarks of Hmong Fresno
The Vang Pao Statue, Fresno Fairgrounds (1121 S. Chance Ave). When General Vang Pao died in nearby Clovis on January 6, 2011, some 40,000 mourners filled downtown Fresno for a six-day funeral, one of the largest the city had ever seen. In 2013 a statue of a young Vang Pao seated among the fields was unveiled at the fairgrounds, and the Hmong New Year parade now begins there each December, at the feet of the commander who led the community out of Laos.
The Fresno Center (formerly the Fresno Center for New Americans). Founded in 1991 by Dr. Tony Vang as refugees poured into the county, it grew from a tiny office into one of the largest Hmong service organizations in the country, with cultural brokers who speak Hmong, Lao, Khmer, and more. It is the place generations of arrivals turned to for help with citizenship, health, and the bewildering paperwork of American life.
Asia Supermarket, southeast Fresno. Opened in 1994 by a Hmong family, it became a hub not only for Hmong shoppers but for the broader valley, stocking the lemongrass, fish sauce, and live produce that no mainstream grocer carried. It is one of the older Hmong-owned anchors of the southeast side, a reminder that the community built its own commercial infrastructure from scratch.
The V-Nai Mini Mall, E. Kings Canyon Road. Opened in December 2012 and modeled on Minnesota’s famous Hmong Village, it was Fresno’s first cluster of Hmong-specific shops under one roof, from gift stalls selling DVDs and clothing imported through Thailand to seamstresses stitching ceremonial garments. One shopkeeper said simply that it reminded them of home.
Vang Pao Elementary School, Fresno Unified School District. A public school named for the general stands as proof of how thoroughly the Hmong have entered the civic life of the city. The children who walk through its doors are the grandchildren of refugees, and the name on the building tells them where they come from.
The Hmongstory Legacy exhibit, Fresno Fairgrounds Commerce Building. Founded by Lar Yang and David Lee, this traveling, grassroots museum project mounts multimedia exhibitions, including its 2022 “Vinai” show, that walk visitors through the Hmong journey from war to refugee camp to America. It exists because a community without a homeland decided to build its own archive.
Where the Fresno Hmong Came From
The Hmong are a highland people whose history runs back through southern China, from which they migrated into the mountains of Laos in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Fresno community traces above all to the highlands of northeastern Laos, the rugged Xieng Khouang region around the Plain of Jars, where Hmong villages clung to the ridgelines and where Vang Pao based his guerrilla command at the secret base of Long Tieng.
Almost no one came straight from those villages. The path ran from the mountains, across the Mekong, into Thai camps like Ban Vinai and Nam Phong, and only then to America, often after four or more years of waiting. The clan structure that organizes Hmong society, the eighteen patrilineal clans such as Vang, Yang, Lee, and Xiong, survived the whole journey and shaped where families resettled, because a clan name in Fresno meant relatives, and relatives meant a place to land.
Hmong Fresno Today
Fifty years on, the community has split into the two stories every immigrant generation knows. There are still poorer pockets in southeast Fresno, families on the margins of a high-cost state. And there is now a layer of judges, council members, teachers, doctors, and farmers selling to upscale markets that did not exist a generation ago. Blong Xiong became the first Hmong member of the Fresno City Council in the mid-2000s, and Hmong officials have served on school boards and the council ever since.
Farming remains the community’s signature. Hundreds of Hmong families work small plots around the county, and groups like the National Hmong American Farmers, built up by organizer Chukou Thao, have fought for fair treatment and access to grants and greenhouses. In spring, Hmong and Mien strawberry stands line the roads around Fresno, Clovis, and Sanger, and at the Cambodian community in Long Beach and other Southeast Asian enclaves across the state, the same refugee-to-market arc has played out in different crops and trades.
The clearest sign that the center holds is the calendar. Every late December the Hmong Cultural New Year fills the Fresno Fairgrounds for several days, a gathering that has drawn well over 100,000 people across its run and ranks among the largest Hmong events in the world. Like the resettlement of the Vietnamese in Little Saigon, the Hmong story in Fresno began in a war’s wreckage. What it has become is a homeland by choice, planted one field and one New Year at a time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Hmong settle in Fresno?
The Hmong in Fresno arrived mostly through secondary migration in the early 1980s, leaving the scattered cities where federal policy had placed them to reunite with relatives and return to farming. California’s Central Valley offered a mild climate, agricultural work, and the clan networks that draw Hmong families together. By the early 1990s about 35,000 Hmong lived in the city.
Is southeast Fresno still a Hmong community today?
Yes. The Hmong in Fresno remain one of the largest such communities in the United States, anchored on the city’s southeast side, though many families have prospered and moved outward. Farming, Hmong-owned businesses along Kings Canyon Road, and the annual Hmong New Year keep the community’s identity firmly rooted there.
What are the most famous Hmong landmarks in Fresno?
The best known is the General Vang Pao statue at the Fresno Fairgrounds, where the New Year parade begins each December. Others include The Fresno Center, founded in 1991, the V-Nai Mini Mall on E. Kings Canyon Road, Asia Supermarket, and the Hmongstory Legacy exhibit that documents the community’s refugee past.
Where did the Fresno Hmong come from?
Most trace their roots to the highlands of northeastern Laos, especially the Xieng Khouang region around the Plain of Jars, where Hmong villages supported General Vang Pao’s wartime command. After Laos fell in 1975, families fled across the Mekong into Thai refugee camps such as Ban Vinai before resettling in the United States.
When did the Hmong first arrive in Fresno?
The first Hmong family reached Fresno in 1977, just two years after the end of the Secret War in Laos. Growth was explosive once secondary migration began, rising from a handful of families to several thousand people within a few years and to roughly 35,000 by the early 1990s.
If your family’s story passed through the mountains of Laos, a Thai refugee camp, or the farm rows of southeast Fresno, it is part of a larger map of how people make new homelands.