Hmong America

Chia Youyee Vang came to the United States as a child refugee and returned to the diaspora as its historian. This compact study traces how Hmong Americans built community after 1975, from mutual assistance associations and churches to New Year celebrations and veterans' politics, drawing on oral histories alongside the archive. Against the familiar framing of the Hmong as a people acted upon, by the CIA, by resettlement policy, by welfare reform, Vang documents a people organizing, arguing, and building institutions on their own behalf. It is the right first monograph for a Hmong Studies course and the book to hand a reader who has finished the memoirs and wants structure underneath the stories. Two hundred pages, clearly written, no theoretical throat-clearing; assign it early and everything after it lands better.