Walk the length of East Lake Street on a Saturday morning and the evidence is in the produce. Bundles of lemongrass, bitter melon, Thai chillies and pea shoots stack the tables at the Midtown Farmers Market, most of them grown by Hmong families who have farmed Minnesota soil for forty years. The Hmong in Minneapolis are not a footnote to the city. They are written into its gardens, its classrooms and its most celebrated kitchens.
Minnesota holds the largest urban Hmong population in the world, and while St. Paul tends to claim the spotlight, Minneapolis has its own deep current of this story. It runs from the public housing blocks north of downtown to a James Beard contender’s dining room in Northeast, and it begins, like so much else, with a war the Hmong did not start.
The Place
Minneapolis is the larger of Minnesota’s Twin Cities, a flour-milling town turned corporate hub on the banks of the Mississippi. It is a city of lakes and bicycle paths, of long winters and a stubborn civic faith in public goods: parks, libraries, schools, transit.
For new arrivals with little money, that public infrastructure mattered enormously. The Olson public housing development just north of downtown, the affordable rents of the Phillips and Powderhorn neighbourhoods south of Lake Street, and a dense network of social services made the city a place where a refugee family could begin from almost nothing.
Today the Hmong presence in Minneapolis is woven through the south side and the near north, anchored less by a single enclave than by institutions: a culturally specific public school, a cluster of restaurants, and the farmers markets where Hmong growers have become the backbone of the local food supply.
How It Became Hmong
The Hmong did not migrate to Minneapolis so much as they were scattered there, the aftershock of a conflict most Americans never knew was happening.
The Secret War
During the Vietnam War, the CIA recruited Hmong fighters in the mountains of Laos to fight communist forces and to rescue downed American pilots. It was called the Secret War because Laos was officially neutral and the operation went largely unacknowledged at home.
When Saigon fell in 1975 and the American-backed government in Laos collapsed, the Hmong who had fought alongside the United States became targets. Tens of thousands fled, most of them crossing the Mekong River into Thailand, where they waited in refugee camps such as Ban Vinai.
The first arrivals, 1975 to 1976
The first Hmong family reached Minnesota in December 1975. Federal policy initially treated the Hmong as too unfamiliar with modern life to qualify easily for asylum, and at first only General Vang Pao and others directly employed by the United States government were admitted.
That changed in 1976, when the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act was amended to open the door to the wider Hmong population. Religious sponsors did much of the early work. Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Service and Church World Service resettled most of that first wave, placing families in Minneapolis, St. Paul and small towns across the state.
Building institutions
Within months of that first December arrival, enough Hmong had reached Minnesota for community leaders to begin organising. In 1980, five former USAID employees founded the Association of Hmong in Minnesota, described as the state’s first Hmong nonprofit. The Lao Family Community of Minnesota, a mutual assistance association, was established in the same period to help families navigate housing, work and a bewildering new bureaucracy.
Federal resettlement policy had deliberately dispersed refugees across the country to avoid concentrating them in any one place. The Hmong undid that policy almost immediately. Drawn by family ties, the promise of jobs and Minnesota’s relatively generous public services, families packed up from California, Wisconsin and beyond, including the long-established Hmong community of Sacramento, California, and converged on the Twin Cities. This secondary migration is why a state with brutal winters became the Hmong heartland of America, and why the community spread from the Twin Cities outward to places like the Hmong of Wausau, Wisconsin and west to the Hmong farming families of Fresno, California.
Growth and a second generation
The numbers climbed steadily. By 1990 there were more than 17,000 Hmong in Minnesota. Today the state’s Hmong population is estimated around 90,000 to 95,000, the vast majority of them in the Minneapolis and St. Paul metropolitan area, including the neighbouring suburb of Maplewood, Minnesota.
As the community matured, its profile changed. The early years of factory work, English classes and welfare gave way to homeownership, small businesses and political representation. In 2002, Mee Moua won a special election to the Minnesota Senate, becoming the first Hmong American elected to a state legislature anywhere in the country.
That arc, from refugee camp to statehouse in a single generation, is the spine of the Minneapolis Hmong story. It is told most vividly now not in archives but on dinner menus, where chefs born of that generation are cooking the food of Ban Vinai for a city that has come to revere it.
The Landmarks
Hmong International Academy, 1501 30th Avenue North. A PreK to grade 8 school in the Minneapolis Public Schools, set in the Near North neighbourhood, it teaches the standard curriculum alongside Hmong language and culture. Its dual-language pathway is designed to carry students on to Olson Middle School and Henry High School without losing the language their grandparents carried out of Laos.
Vinai, 1300 Northeast 2nd Street. Chef Yia Vang’s flagship opened in July 2024 in Northeast Minneapolis and was promptly named to The New York Times list of the fifty best restaurants in the United States. It is named for Ban Vinai, the Thai refugee camp where Vang’s family lived before coming to America, and it serves Hmong cooking with no apology and no dilution.
Diane’s Place, 117 14th Avenue Northeast. Opened in 2024 inside the Food Building in Northeast Minneapolis, this is the first restaurant from Diane Moua, a five-time James Beard nominee. It blends Hmong American comfort food with the technique she honed as a pastry chef, using produce from her parents’ farm in Wisconsin. Food and Wine named it Restaurant of the Year for 2025.
Midtown Farmers Market, Lake Street and Hiawatha Avenue. At the eastern end of Lake Street, this market is where the city sees its Hmong farmers most plainly. Hmong growers raise vegetables and flowers on small plots in the surrounding counties and sell them here, supplying produce that has become a fixture of the south Minneapolis table.
Midtown Global Market, 920 East Lake Street. Housed in the old Sears building on East Lake Street, this international market gathers food and goods from the many communities that share the corridor. Among its stalls, Hmong and Southeast Asian vendors sit alongside Mexican, East African and other neighbours, a fair reflection of who actually lives on Lake Street. That diversity runs across the wider metro, from the Nigerian community of Brooklyn Park to the Indian families of Chanhassen.
The Hmong American Farmers Association. Founded to support a large pool of veteran Hmong growers across the Twin Cities, HAFA represents farmers who have typically worked the land for more than twenty years on fewer than ten acres each. Many of its members live in Minneapolis and St. Paul and farm in the surrounding Dakota and Washington counties, supplying the very markets that define the season here.
Olson public housing, north of downtown. The Olson development just north of the city centre was one of the early footholds for Hmong and Lao refugees in Minneapolis, a place where families with almost nothing could find a roof while they learned the city. It is less a monument than a starting line, the kind of address that rarely makes a guidebook but anchors a community’s memory.
Where They Came From
The Hmong are a people without a country of their own. For generations they lived in the mountains of Laos, and before that in southern China, a highland farming culture organised around clan and kin rather than any national border.
Almost every Hmong family in Minneapolis traces its American beginning to the same passage: the mountains of Laos, then flight across the Mekong, then years in Thai refugee camps including Ban Vinai, Nong Khai and others. The camps are not an abstraction here. They appear on restaurant signs and in the names parents chose, a shared origin point that binds the community across clans.
That clan structure still matters. Surnames such as Vang, Moua, Xiong, Yang and Lee mark the eighteen Hmong clans, and they continue to organise family life, mutual aid and the great communal gatherings. It is no accident that the chefs and senators who carry this story forward carry those names.
Minneapolis Today
The Hmong story in Minneapolis is now a story of arrival rather than struggle, though the struggle is not forgotten. The generation that landed in the late 1970s with no English and no money raised children who run restaurants reviewed in national magazines, teach in dual-language classrooms and farm land their parents could only have dreamed of owning.
The food is the clearest measure of the shift. A decade ago Hmong cooking in Minneapolis lived mostly in market stalls and family kitchens. Today it occupies some of the most talked-about dining rooms in the city, with Yia Vang and Diane Moua bringing the flavours of Ban Vinai to audiences who once knew nothing of the Secret War. The Hmong in Minneapolis no longer have to explain themselves; the city has learned to listen.
It is not a finished story. The largest Hmong institutions, Hmong Village and the Hmongtown Marketplace and the great Hmong New Year festival, sit across the river in St. Paul, and Minneapolis families still cross town for them. But the gardens are here, the schools are here, and increasingly the kitchens that define the city’s table are here too. The mountains of Laos feel a long way off, and yet they are present in every bundle of lemongrass on Lake Street.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Hmong in Minneapolis and Minnesota?
The Hmong in Minneapolis arrived as refugees after the Secret War in Laos, resettled from 1976 onward by religious sponsors such as Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Service. Family ties, jobs and Minnesota’s public services then drew thousands more in a secondary migration, making the Twin Cities the largest urban Hmong population in the world.
When did the Hmong first come to Minnesota?
The first Hmong family arrived in Minnesota in December 1975, shortly after the fall of Saigon. Broader resettlement began in 1976 after the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act was amended, and the population grew steadily to more than 17,000 by 1990 and roughly 90,000 today.
Which Minneapolis neighbourhoods have Hmong communities?
Hmong families settled across the south side, particularly the Phillips and Powderhorn areas near Lake Street, and in the near north around the Olson public housing development. The Hmong in Minneapolis are anchored today by institutions like the Hmong International Academy in Near North rather than by a single enclave.
Where can I eat Hmong food in Minneapolis?
Northeast Minneapolis has become the centre of Hmong dining, with chef Yia Vang’s Vinai on Northeast 2nd Street and Diane Moua’s Diane’s Place inside the Food Building. The Midtown Global Market and Midtown Farmers Market on Lake Street also feature Hmong and Southeast Asian food and produce.
What is the connection to Ban Vinai?
Ban Vinai was a large refugee camp in Thailand where many Hmong families lived after fleeing Laos. Countless Minneapolis Hmong trace their journey through it, and chef Yia Vang named his acclaimed restaurant Vinai in its honour, making the camp’s name part of the city’s culinary vocabulary.
Is the Hmong New Year celebrated near Minneapolis?
Yes. The Minnesota Hmong New Year, one of the largest in the country, is held each November at the Saint Paul RiverCentre across the river and draws tens of thousands of attendees. Minneapolis families regularly cross town to join the celebration, which marks the harvest and honours ancestors.
If your family’s story passed through Minneapolis, or any of the places Hmong people have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the mountains of Laos and the camps at Ban Vinai, to the gardens along Lake Street, to wherever you are now.