The Hmong in Fresno: Refuge After the Secret War

The Hmong people have been in Fresno since the late nineteen seventies, and Fresno now has the largest urban Hmong population in the United States. How that happened is a story that begins not in California but in the mountains of Laos, in a war that the United States government ran for more than a decade without officially acknowledging it was happening.

During the Vietnam War, the Central Intelligence Agency recruited Hmong fighters in Laos to fight a proxy war against the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese forces moving through Laotian territory. The program was called the Secret War, and it was secret in a specific bureaucratic sense: the United States was not officially at war in Laos, so the program did not officially exist. General Vang Pao commanded the Hmong forces, and at its peak the operation involved tens of thousands of Hmong soldiers and their families. When United States forces withdrew from Southeast Asia in nineteen seventy-three and the communist Pathet Lao consolidated control of Laos in nineteen seventy-five, the Hmong who had fought alongside the CIA found themselves in an impossible position. They had fought against the government that now controlled their country. Many fled into Thailand. Tens of thousands died in the mountains or in the refugee camps.

Beginning in nineteen seventy-six, the United States admitted Hmong refugees through resettlement programs, and the first groups arrived in California through church and government sponsorships. The Central Valley proved attractive for practical reasons: agricultural work was available, the climate was warmer than the upper Midwest cities where other Hmong communities had settled, and chain migration brought additional families to places where relatives had already established themselves. Fresno became, through that accumulation, the primary Hmong urban center in the country.

The community that built itself in Fresno did so while negotiating the distance between the mountain agriculture of highland Laos and the industrial farm labor economy of the San Joaquin Valley, between an oral tradition that had no written script for the Hmong language until missionaries developed one in the nineteen fifties, and an American school system that operated entirely in English. That negotiation is still underway. The first generation of Hmong American children born in Fresno are now adults with their own children in Fresno schools.

The question of acknowledgment is not fully settled. The United States government's formal recognition of the Hmong contribution to the Secret War, and the obligations that recognition might carry, remains contested in the policy record. The refugee families who came to Fresno came because a commitment was made and then the terms of that commitment changed. They built a community anyway.