Drive north on White Bear Avenue on a Saturday morning and the story tells itself in storefronts. A Hmong grocer here, a pho counter there, the vast hull of the old Maplewood Mall ahead, its anchors being reborn as something the original developers never imagined. The Hmong in Maplewood, Minnesota did not arrive with fanfare. They arrived the way most refugee communities do, one family at a time, and then they stayed long enough to remake a first-ring suburb in their own image.
The Place
Maplewood sits just east of Saint Paul in Ramsey County, a city of odd geography that stretches roughly five miles east to west and ten miles north to south, with a long narrow leg dangling toward the bottom. It is not a glamorous suburb. It is a working one, defined for decades by the corporation that built it.
That corporation is 3M. When the company chose to build its Central Research Laboratory complex here in the mid 1950s, the farmland township gained a reason to become a town. Residents voted to incorporate as the Village of Maplewood in 1957, and 3M has remained the city’s largest employer ever since, its sprawling campus anchoring the local economy.
There is a quiet joke locals enjoy: there are no maple trees in Maplewood, a fact the city’s own historians cheerfully admit. What the city does have, in increasing measure, is one of the most established Hmong communities in any American suburb.
How It Became Hmong
To understand why tens of thousands of Hmong made their home in Minnesota, and why so many eventually pushed east into Maplewood, you have to begin in the mountains of Laos.
The Secret War
During the Vietnam War, the United States Central Intelligence Agency conducted a covert campaign in neighbouring Laos, recruiting Hmong fighters to disrupt supply lines and rescue downed American pilots. It became known as the Secret War. When Saigon fell and American forces withdrew, the Hmong who had fought alongside them were left exposed to reprisal.
Thousands fled across the Mekong River into Thai refugee camps. From those camps, beginning in the late 1970s, the resettlement to the United States began. Minnesota, with its established network of voluntary agencies and church sponsors, took in a disproportionate share. Close to 60,000 Hmong refugees would eventually call the state home.
Saint Paul First, Then the Suburbs
The first wave settled overwhelmingly in Saint Paul, particularly the East Side and the Frogtown neighbourhood. Ramsey County would grow into the single most Hmong-populated county in the United States, recording 48,189 Hmong residents in the 2020 census. The capital city became, by most measures, the largest urban Hmong population in the world.
But cities fill up, and families grow. As the children of the first refugees came of age, bought cars, and started businesses of their own, many looked just beyond the Saint Paul line for more space and newer housing. Maplewood, sharing its western border with the city’s East Side, was the natural next step.
The movement mirrored what happened with the Hmong community in Saint Paul, the dense urban core from which Maplewood’s families largely spilled outward. It was suburbanisation without dispersal. People moved a few miles north and east, but they stayed within reach of the same temples, markets, and relatives.
A Statewide Surge
The numbers tell the scale of it. Minnesota counted 17,764 Hmong residents in 1990. By 2020 that figure had climbed to 95,094, a rise of nearly 44 percent in the previous decade alone, faster growth than any other large Hmong state in the country.
Maplewood absorbed its share. By the 2020 census the city of 42,088 was 19 percent Asian, with roughly 13 percent of all residents claiming Hmong ancestry. That is an extraordinary concentration for a Midwestern suburb, the kind of figure usually reserved for enclaves on the coasts.
From Renters to Owners
What changed most over the decades was tenure. The earliest arrivals rented apartments and worked entry-level jobs. Their children and grandchildren bought single-family homes, opened clinics and groceries, and began acquiring commercial property outright.
Nothing illustrates that shift more vividly than the slow takeover of Maplewood Mall, a 1970s shopping centre that had been losing its anchor tenants for years. Where national department stores retreated, a Hmong entrepreneur stepped in to buy the buildings and reimagine them entirely.
The Landmarks
Maplewood Mall, 3001 White Bear Avenue. Opened in 1974 on a 125-acre site, the mall was for two generations the commercial heart of the east metro. As traditional retail faltered, it became something else: the canvas for the most ambitious Hmong-led development the suburb has seen.
The Pan Asian Center, former Macy’s and Sears, Maplewood Mall. Entrepreneur Toua Xiong, founder of Saint Paul’s HmongTown Marketplace, bought the mall’s former Sears building in November 2023 for 5.25 million dollars, then finalised the purchase of the former Macy’s in March 2025 for 3.25 million dollars. The combined development spans more than 400,000 square feet across roughly 24 acres.
Pan Asian Center, Macy’s wing soft opening. On 3 May 2025, Xiong and his partners cut the ribbon on the first phase inside the old Macy’s. The long-range plan calls for a grocer, a food hall, some twenty restaurants, professional offices, a spa, children’s play areas, and an event venue able to seat several thousand. Full completion is targeted for 2027.
HmongTown Marketplace, 217 Como Avenue, Saint Paul. The model for the Maplewood project sits just over the city line. Toua and Nou Xiong opened it in 2004 in a former lumber building, renaming it HmongTown in 2009. With more than 200 vendors selling produce, prepared food, herbal medicine, and textiles, it became the template Maplewood’s developers hoped to scale up.
3M global headquarters, 3M Center, Maplewood. The reason the suburb exists at all, the 3M campus employs around 12,000 people. It is no Hmong landmark, but it is the economic backdrop against which the community’s homeownership and small businesses grew.
White Bear Avenue commercial corridor. The avenue running north from the Saint Paul line is the everyday spine of Hmong Maplewood, lined with Asian groceries, eye clinics, restaurants, and family-run shops. It is where the community does its ordinary business, far from any ribbon-cutting.
Maplewood Mall Transit Center, White Bear Avenue. The Metro Transit hub beside the mall stitches the suburb back to Saint Paul by bus, the same route many families travelled when they first moved north. It is a small thing, but it explains why the move outward never meant leaving the old neighbourhood behind.
Where They Came From
The Hmong are not from any single nation. Their homeland for centuries was the highlands spanning southern China, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand, where they farmed steep mountain slopes and lived largely apart from lowland governments. Most of Minnesota’s Hmong trace their immediate origins to the highlands of Laos.
After the Secret War, the path ran through the refugee camps of Thailand, above all Ban Vinai, before resettlement scattered families across the United States. Many who first landed in California or other states later moved to Minnesota to rejoin relatives, drawn by the gravitational pull of the Twin Cities clans.
That secondary migration matters. The Hmong organise themselves around eighteen or so patrilineal clans, and clan ties, not job markets alone, often determined where a family settled. Once Saint Paul became the centre of gravity, every new arrival had a reason to come, and the spillover into suburbs like Maplewood, Woodbury, Maple Grove, and beyond followed naturally.
The same logic drew Hmong families to other corners of the country, from the Hmong community in Fresno, California to the mill towns of central Wisconsin, where the Hmong in Wausau built a comparable enclave. Minnesota simply held the largest gravitational mass.
Maplewood Today
Walk the White Bear Avenue corridor today and the Hmong presence is matter-of-fact rather than performative. It is in the groceries stocking lemongrass and bitter melon, in the clinics with bilingual signage, in the steady traffic of families running weekend errands. This is not a museum district. It is a place people live.
The community’s centre of gravity remains Saint Paul, and the great annual gathering is still the Minnesota Hmong New Year, held each late autumn at the Saint Paul RiverCentre. Organised by United Hmong Family, the festival draws more than 30,000 people for two days of food, music, pageantry, and the courtship ball-toss game known as Pov Pob. Maplewood families pour into it each year, then carry the season home.
What is genuinely new is the ambition on display at the old mall. The Pan Asian Center is a bet, and not a certain one. Its developers have spoken candidly about financial hurdles, and only a fraction of its vendor space was filled at the time of its soft opening. Whether it becomes the east metro’s answer to a great Asian marketplace, or a half-finished dream, will say a great deal about the next chapter of Hmong Maplewood.
Either way, the trajectory is unmistakable. A community that arrived as refugees of a hidden war now owns the largest commercial building in town. In Maplewood, the Hmong are no longer the newcomers. They are the developers.
Frequently Asked Questions
How large is the Hmong community in Maplewood, Minnesota?
At the 2020 census, Maplewood had about 42,088 residents, of whom roughly 19 percent were Asian and around 13 percent claimed Hmong ancestry. That makes the Hmong in Maplewood, Minnesota one of the most concentrated suburban Hmong populations in the United States.
Why did so many Hmong settle in the Twin Cities area?
The Hmong fought alongside American forces during the CIA’s Secret War in Laos, and after the Vietnam War many fled to Thai refugee camps before resettling in the United States. Minnesota’s network of sponsors and voluntary agencies drew close to 60,000 Hmong refugees, concentrating them in Saint Paul and its suburbs.
How did the Hmong come to Maplewood specifically?
Maplewood borders Saint Paul’s heavily Hmong East Side. As the children of the first refugees prospered and sought newer housing and more space, many moved a few miles north into Maplewood while staying within reach of the same markets, clans, and temples.
What is the Pan Asian Center at Maplewood Mall?
It is a Hmong-led redevelopment of the former Sears and Macy’s buildings at Maplewood Mall, led by HmongTown Marketplace founder Toua Xiong. Spanning more than 400,000 square feet, it is planned to include a grocer, food hall, restaurants, offices, and a large event venue, with full opening targeted for 2027.
Where is the Minnesota Hmong New Year held?
The Minnesota Hmong New Year takes place each late autumn at the Saint Paul RiverCentre, organised by United Hmong Family. It draws more than 30,000 attendees and remains the central annual gathering for Hmong families across Maplewood and the wider east metro.
Where did Maplewood’s Hmong families originally come from?
Most trace their immediate origins to the highlands of Laos, by way of refugee camps in Thailand such as Ban Vinai. The Hmong homeland historically spanned the mountains of southern China, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand, and families organise around patrilineal clans that shaped where they resettled.
If your family’s story passed through Maplewood, 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 the storefronts of White Bear Avenue, to wherever you are now.