On a Sunday morning on East Park Avenue, the chanting starts in Pali, then the monk switches to Lao and the room settles. Outside, the corn belt goes on being the corn belt. Inside, people who crossed the Mekong in the dark are folding their hands. The story of the Laotians in Des Moines begins with a war the United States never formally declared, and continues because one Iowa governor answered a letter that forty-nine of his colleagues left on the desk.
The Place
Des Moines sits where the Raccoon River meets the Des Moines River, a state capital of about 215,000 people at the centre of a metro roughly three times that size. It is an insurance city, a farm-finance city, a place of low brick warehouses and gold-domed civic ambition, and for a long time it was overwhelmingly white.
The Laotian community settled mostly on the east and south sides, in the older working neighbourhoods beyond the state capitol where housing was cheap and factory shifts were a bus ride away. Those are still the streets where the temples are, and where a plastic tub of jeow bong changes hands in a car park after a funeral.
How It Became Laotian
The war nobody named
Between 1964 and 1973, Laos absorbed one of the heaviest aerial bombardments in history, delivered in a conflict that Washington called the Secret War because it was never put to Congress in those terms. Lowland Lao, Hmong, Tai Dam and other communities were recruited, displaced or simply flattened by it.
When the Pathet Lao took the country in 1975, the most exposed were those who had worked with the Royal Lao government or the Americans. Former officers, civil servants, teachers, translators and their families began moving toward the Mekong at night. The river is the border, and on the far bank was Thailand.
The governor who answered
In July 1975 President Gerald Ford wrote to every state governor asking for help resettling refugees from Southeast Asia. Iowa’s Robert D. Ray, a moderate Republican then in his third term, did not just reply. That same month he created the Governor’s Task Force for Indochinese Resettlement.
The request that reached him concerned the Tai Dam, an ethnic group originally from the Black River valley of northwestern Vietnam who had fled to Laos in 1954 and were forced out again in 1975. They had asked, in a letter passed governor to governor, to be resettled together rather than scattered. Ray was the only one who said yes.
In September 1975 the American embassy granted the group refugee status, and Ray accepted responsibility for roughly 1,200 people. The first flights landed that autumn, bringing 633 Tai Dam refugees, the first Southeast Asian refugees to be resettled in Iowa. Within two years the figure was near the full 1,200.
Jobs, not welfare
The task force grew into something no other state had. Expanded to serve all refugees and renamed the Iowa Refugee Service Center, it ran not out of the welfare department but through Job Service of Iowa, whose director Colleen Shearer headed the effort. Ray’s reasoning was practical and political at once: refugees who were working would keep their dignity, and Iowans who saw them working would keep backing the programme.
It became a national reference point, eventually operating as the Iowa Bureau of Refugee Services, the only state-run refugee resettlement agency of its kind in the country. Not everyone approved. In 1979 the Washington Post reported on Black Iowans asking, fairly, why a state that had found money and staff for new arrivals had not found the same for people already here.
Nong Khai, Sa Kaew, and a coupon in the Register
In October 1979 Ray joined five other governors on a trip to China and added a detour into Thailand. At Nong Khai he met Tai Dam families who had waited in camp for years. At Sa Kaew he walked among tens of thousands of Cambodians lying in a field, survivors of the Khmer Rouge, many of them dying where they lay.
He came home and started Iowa SHARES, for Iowa Sends Help to Aid Refugees and End Starvation. It launched the day before Thanksgiving with a coupon printed on the editorial pages of the Des Moines Register and the Des Moines Tribune. Ordinary Iowans cut it out and posted money.
That same year Ray offered to take 1,500 Vietnamese boat people, becoming the first head of government anywhere to say so publicly. By then the pipeline into Iowa was an institution, and Lao families were moving through it.
The Lao families who followed
Ethnic Lao arrivals came later than the Tai Dam and in a steadier trickle, through the Refugee Act of 1980 and the family petitions that followed. A historical marker in Des Moines dates the first Lao refugee families in Iowa to November 1981.
The work was what work was. Assembly lines, meat processing, hotel housekeeping, night shifts at the plants ringing the metro. Wages were low but they were wages, and Des Moines rents were forgiving in a way coastal cities were not. Word travelled to relatives in California and Minnesota, and a secondary migration began: Lao families who had landed elsewhere moved to Iowa because a cousin there had a house, a car and a job.
Building the temple
A Lao community without a temple is a community holding its breath. Land on East Park Avenue was bought in 1983, and what began as a small house became a compound: a central temple with an ornate altar, a residence for the monks, two guest houses. Wat Lao Buddhavath is where Lao New Year, Songkan, is kept in April, and where the dead are honoured on Ancestor’s Day.
By the 2000s the community was organised above ground as well. The Lao American Association of Iowa was founded in 2001 by elders who wanted the dances, the music and the ritual language to survive the generation that carried them across the river, and the Lao Natasinh group formed to teach and perform the classical dances. A second temple, Wat Phothisomphan, was organised in 2009 and opened in 2016.
The Landmarks
Wat Lao Buddhavath, 1804 East Park Avenue, Des Moines. The first Lao Buddhist temple in the city, grown from a house bought in the 1980s into a four-building compound. Services run on Sundays in Lao with chanting in Pali, the community gathers roughly monthly for tak bat alms-giving, and in 2024 the temple was raising an open-air shelter on the grounds for the crowds that a Songkan weekend brings.
Wat Phothisomphan, 2560 SE 14th Street, Des Moines. The city’s second Lao temple, and a building with a strange second life. It went up in the early 1950s as a Baptist church, fell derelict after its pastor died, and was bought and converted by a monk named Ajahn Jackson. It opened as a Theravada meditation monastery in 2016.
Robert D. Ray Asian Gardens, 909 Robert D. Ray Drive, Des Moines. A pavilion on an undulating bridge above a pond that spills in waterfalls into the Des Moines River, opened in spring 2009. It is the closest thing the city has to a public thank-you note.
Western Gateway Park, downtown Des Moines. Thirteen acres of open ground, opened in 2006, that now hosts CelebrAsian each May, Iowa’s largest Asian American festival, run by the Iowa Asian Alliance since 2003. The Lao contingent cooks, and it dances: recent programmes have included Fon Kinnaly, the folk tale of the half-bird, half-human celestial being.
Bahn Hao, Des Moines. Sou, a first-generation Lao American, started making small batches of chilli paste in her home kitchen in 2019. The name means “our home”. Her jars of jeow bong and phrik jiao now sit on Iowa shelves, which is a modest sentence describing something rare: Lao food sold under a Lao name in the Midwest.
Tai Studies Center, 5116 Westwood Drive, West Des Moines. The archive of the Tai Dam, whose 1975 arrival opened the door later Lao families walked through. Tai Village Inc. was founded in 2003, and the community has since built a cultural centre on the north side of Des Moines with a welcome house named for Governor Ray.
Where They Came From
Most Lao families in Des Moines trace back to the lowland Mekong provinces: Vientiane and its plain, Savannakhet, Champasak and the towns strung along the river in the south. These were the areas most tied to the Royal Lao government, which is precisely why leaving became necessary in 1975.
Almost nobody flew out. The route was overland to the Mekong, across by boat or inner tube or by swimming, then into the Thai camps, Nong Khai among them, for a wait measured in years. Sponsorship papers, a medical screening and a flight number came at the end of it, and for a particular set of families the flight number ended in Des Moines.
The Hmong who fled the same collapse largely resettled in the Hmong community of St Paul, Minnesota, and Cambodian survivors built their own centres in places like Modesto, California. Iowa’s share of that scattering was distinctive because it was deliberate: the state asked for people, by name, as a group.
Des Moines Today
Recent census-based estimates put roughly 6,900 Laotians in Iowa, about 2,900 of them in Polk County and roughly 1,700 inside Des Moines itself. Not a large number in absolute terms, but it makes Iowa’s Laotian share of population close to three times the national rate, which tells you how concentrated the decisions of the 1970s and 1980s were.
The community has aged into the ordinary. The children who arrived in winter coats donated by church groups are now in their fifties and sixties, and their own children went to East High and Hoover and Lincoln and then to Iowa State and Drake. The temples run their services partly in translation now, because they have to.
What persists is the calendar. Songkan in April, the water and the flowers and the string-tying. The bowls set out for the monks. The funerals where three generations sit on the floor together. It is a quieter continuity than the one at the German colonies at Amana or the Danish settlement at Kimballton, where heritage has had a century and a half to become architecture, and it looks different again from the Dutch of Sioux Center or the Lebanese of Cedar Rapids. Iowa has been absorbing arrivals for a very long time. The Lao are simply the most recent chapter with living witnesses.
Fifty years on from 1975, Iowa Public Radio found younger generations still working at the traditions, which is the honest present tense: not preserved, not lost, worked at.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Laotian refugees settle in Des Moines?
Because Iowa asked for them. In 1975 Governor Robert D. Ray was the only US governor to agree to resettle a Southeast Asian refugee group together, and the office he built for it, later the Iowa Refugee Service Center, kept operating for decades. Laotians in Des Moines arrived through that machinery and through family sponsorship afterwards.
How many Laotians live in Des Moines?
Recent census-based estimates put around 1,700 Laotians in the city of Des Moines and about 2,900 in Polk County, out of roughly 6,900 statewide. Iowa’s Laotian share of population runs close to three times the national average.
Where is the Lao Buddhist temple in Des Moines?
Wat Lao Buddhavath is at 1804 East Park Avenue, on land the community bought in 1983. A second temple, Wat Phothisomphan, is at 2560 SE 14th Street and opened for services in 2016 in a converted 1950s Baptist church.
Are the Tai Dam the same as the Lao?
No. The Tai Dam are a distinct ethnic group originally from the Black River valley of northwestern Vietnam who fled to Laos in 1954 and out again in 1975. They arrived in Iowa first, in 1975, and ethnic Lao families followed. Both communities are part of the wider Laotian story in Des Moines, and both have their own institutions.
When do Laotians in Des Moines celebrate Lao New Year?
Songkan falls in April and is kept at both Lao temples, with water blessings, alms-giving and the tying of white cotton strings around the wrist. The Laotians in Des Moines also take part in CelebrAsian at Western Gateway Park each May, where the Lao group performs classical dance.
What was Iowa SHARES?
Iowa Sends Help to Aid Refugees and End Starvation, a public appeal Governor Ray launched in November 1979 after visiting the camps at Nong Khai and Sa Kaew in Thailand. It began with a coupon printed on the editorial pages of the Des Moines Register and Tribune, and Iowans posted in money.
If your family’s story passed through Des Moines, or any of the places Laotians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village on the Mekong to a temple on East Park Avenue, to wherever you are now.