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Hmong Post-war
Identity Production: Heritage
Maintenance and Cultural Reinterpretation
(By
Gary Yia Lee, Ph.D.)
The Hmong-Australia
Society (NSW Branch)
Paper presented at the
ICCOM Forum on “Armed Conflict and Conservation”, Rome,
Italy, on 4-6 October 2005, and published
in Stanley-Price, N, ed. Cultural Heritage in Postwar
Recovery (Rome: ICCROM, 2007)
Contents
1
Introduction
2
Approach
3
Context
4
Thematic presentation
5
Conservation strategy
6
Identity production
7
Conclusion
8
References
INTRODUCTION
As per the
ICCROM guidelines (May 2005) for the Forum, this paper
focuses on the ways in which members of an ethnic
community have tried to preserve their culture and
identity after more than 20 years of war. The armed
conflict is the Lao civil war (1953-1973) and the people
are the Hmong who were displaced from Laos or are still
there. My aim is to see how and with what outcomes the
Hmong have managed their cultural identity within the
homeland or in the Western countries where many now
live.
The paper
begins by locating the Hmong in their historical and
geographical context. I will touch on the impact of the
war on the Hmong (global dispersion) before moving on to
a presentation on the five themes in the ICCROM
background paper, and the pragmatic conservation
strategies used by the Hmong such as formal learning,
electronic recording and broadcasting, the Internet,
newspapers and books, video and film making, and the
commercialisation of cultural artifacts. Before
concluding, I will look at the new Hmong identity that
is produced and its implications for an “authentic”
Hmong culture.
The paper
takes on a broad scope and historical perspective. It
looks at the effects of war on a community whose culture
is markedly different from the majority groups that its
members now have to integrate into. Also considered is
the multi-pronged, transnational revival of their
cultural heritage in response to urgent cultural needs
after their post-war relocation in foreign cultures. To
this extent, the paper does not touch on risk
preparedness to prevent destruction of cultural
properties. It only examines how a people recovers its
sense of belonging after a long war and the
post-conflict recovery strategies they have used in
doing so. The information for the paper comes from
diverse sources such as publications on the Indochina
War and the Hmong culture; discussion groups and
literature on identity on the Internet, websites on the
Hmong in Southeast Asia and in Western countries
(language, music and religion), my own writings, and
observation during my visits to Hmong communities in
different places over the years as both an
anthropologist and a refugee worker.
The Hmong
number more than 10 millions world-wide with more than 9
millions in China - if other branches of the Miao
nationality are included. Apart from those in Western
countries, the sub-group known as Hmong currently
numbers more than 5 millions world-wide with four
millions in southern China; 600,000 Vietnam; 400,000 in
Laos; 120,000 in Thailand; and about 2000 - 3000 in
Myanmar (Tapp and Lee 2005).
Geography:
The only land-locked country of 236,800 square
kilometers in area in Southeast Asia, Laos is bordered
by Cambodia in the south, China in the north, Myanmar
and Thailand in the west, and Vietnam in the east. The
Mekong river runs along most of its western border.
With many mountainous and forested areas, its total
arable land is only about 4 percent – mostly along the
Mekong river valley. The country’s agriculture and
transportation are often affected by the tropical
monsoon which dominates its weather patterns from May
through October each year (Savada 1994: ch.2).
The 1995 Laos population census (Lao State Planning
Committee 1997) shows the number of Hmong as 315,465 or
6.9 per cent of the total population of 4,574,848 – the
fourth largest ethnic group after the Lao (52.5%),
Phutai (10.3%) and Khmu (11%). The Hmong are found in
all northern Laos down to Borikhamxay province, with the
majority living in Xieng Khuang. They are rural mountain
dwellers, although an increasing number now live in
Vientiane city as public servants, students or factory
workers. On the whole, they continue to engage in
subsistence agriculture with some hunting, fishing and
gathering.
History:
there is no historical records to show where the Hmong
originated from Some claim that they left Mesopotamia
in Biblical times, then migrated north trough Russia,
Siberia and Mongolia before settling in their present
location (Savina 1924, and Quincy 1988: 16-17). Others
believe that they have always been in southern China,
well before their territories were occupied by the
Chinese (Ch’eh 1947 and Yang 1995). The Hmong first
migrated to Laos in the nineteenth century, mostly
through Tonkin (North Vietnam).
From 1893,
France controlled Laos as part of its Indochina empire.
Despite formal independence in 1954, the war to take
Laos back from France, started by the Lao Issara (Free
Lao) in 1945, continued when the USA became involved in
Indochina to stop the spread of communism after the
French withdrawal. By then, the Lao Issara had managed
to control most of northern Laos, the home territory of
the Hmong and other hill tribes.
From the
beginning, the Hmong had been drawn to fight on both
sides of the conflict. Those who were under the French
sided with the rightist Royal Lao Government (RLG),
while those in areas controlled by the communist Pathet
Lao (PL) who replaced the Lao Issara, remained with
them. The RLG received support from the United States
and the PL from North Vietnam and the Soviet Union.
After 1961, North Vietnamese troops became heavily
involved in battles for the PL. The American CIA,
fearing a communist victory, began recruiting Hmong
into the so-called “secret army” under the Hmong leader,
Gen. Vang Pao. Despite a Second Geneva Conference in
1961-62 to end the Lao hostilities, the war continued
until the 1973 Paris Cease-fire Agreements halted
American military involvement in Indochina, thus
hastening the communist take-over and the collapse of
rightist factions in Cambodia, Laos and South Vietnam in
1975. Laos is now known as the Lao People’s Democratic
Republic (Lao PDR) with its own new communist flag.
After 1975, those
Hmong on the RLG side fled Laos to seek asylum in
Thailand later found permanent settlement in Western
countries so that today 200,000 are living in the United
States; 20,000 in France; 1,800 in Australia;
1,400 in Canada, 500 in Argentina and 110 in Germany.
The majority who
could not escape to Thailand submitted themselves to
the communist Lao PDR, but about 16,000 went into
hiding with their families in the jungles of Phu Bia,
the highest mountain of Laos, and other areas from where
they have continued to resist the Lao authorities (Lee
1982: 212-214).
THEMATIC PRESENTATION
The ICCROM
background paper (2005) proposes five themes for
exploration: (i) dynamism of identity, (ii) records of
memory, (iii) handicraft and traditions, (iv) landscape
and environment, and (v) physical reconstruction of lost
cultural items. I will now discuss these themes in as
much as they apply to the Hmong situation.
1. Culture
and Identity
A culture
brings meaning to the lives of its members, and gives
them a sense of belonging, a sense of identity through
having a common history, language and other cultural
attributes. Culture is thus a unifying force for its
members, but it can also be a source of conflict in
complex urban environments where many cultures co-exist
and compete for recognition, where a person may have
multiple identities through affiliation with more than
one role, sub-group and culture. When faced with new and
incompatible demands, members of a culture may need to
alter some their cultural attributes to accommodate the
new challenges, thereby also changing their cultural
identity.
Two
cultural items, one tangible (costumes) and one
intangible (music), will be used here to illustrate
Hmong identity change due to hybridity and external
influences.
Ethnic
Costumes: before WW II, the Hmong lived isolated in
the highlands of Laos. Apart from a colonial tax they
had to pay in opium and silver coins to the local
chiefs, the Hmong needed not venture from their villages
as Chinese traders brought in items they needed from the
outside world. In those early days, their ethnic
costumes and their language were the most tangible group
identifiers. White Hmong women used white hemp skirts
and Green Hmong women wore batik blue skirts while the
men put on a black skull cap, and White Hmong men had a
black turban wrapped around their head.
After
WWII, Hmong costumes gradually changed. As the Hmong
became displaced by the Lao civil war and were unable to
afford ethnic costumes or jewellery, they gave up their
ethnic attires in preference for cheaper Western casual
clothes for the men and Lao women costumes for the
women. The Hmong were no longer mere subsistence hill
farmers, but now refugees, students, soldiers,
government officials, and business people. They were not
only Hmong in their isolated jungle enclaves, but also
Lao citizens living alongside other Lao people. Hmong
costumes were still being used, but mainly for special
occasions such as the New Year or weddings.
Traditional Music: prior to and during the armed
conflict, Hmong music consisted of singing, the playing
of flute, mouth harp and the reed pipe. Each instrument
was used on its own, and the singing was done without
any music. Traditional singing consists of learned or
improvised poetry as lyrics and put to folk tunes that
vary from region to region or from one sub-group to
another.
Hmong
music changes dramatically after 1975 and settlement in
the West. A few young men started to imitate modern
music with Hmong lyrics put to band music. This new
musical experiment went through further refinement and
increased in popularity over the years, resulting in a
whole new industry being born. It now has recording
studios in Laos and the USA along with a global
commercial distribution network through Hmong shops and
on the Internet. It has sprawled many singers ranging in
taste from easy listening to rap music. This new music
shows true hybridity with tunes and lyrics borrowed from
many cultures such as American, Indian, Chinese, Korean,
or Thai. Except for the lyrics in Hmong, this modern
music can no longer be used as a unique identifier for
Hmong cultural identity as it is just like the music of
other cultural groups.
Another
complicating factor is that in their modern settings,
the Hmong are no longer just Hmong, but Lao Hmong,
French Hmong, or Hmong Americans as those in the USA
prefer to be known. The Hmong identity has become
secondary in the face of external pressure. Juggling
for living space with many other culturally diverse
groups, they now have multi-layered hybrid identities
that demand careful negotiation, depending on what other
people assign to them and no longer only on what they
give for themselves. The Hmong identity is determined
today not only by the Hmong but also by other people, by
factors outside their control, outside their culture and
community.
2.
Hmong Records of Memory
The Hmong
are an oral tradition people, and have no written
records of their long history or culture. Books,
libraries and archives were not found with them until
1953 when the Romanised Popular Alphabet (RPA), a
Latin-based script, came into use in Laos and is now
widely adopted (Nyiaj Pov 1991). With this system of
writing, one of the longest attempts at Hmong records of
memory is the work of Fr Yves Bertrais (also known in
Hmong as Txiv Plig Nyiaj Pov), a French Catholic priest.
With the help of Hmong students in the early 1960’s in
Laos, he began collecting Hmong folk stories, religious
rituals, traditional songs, wedding and funeral
practices. After 1975, he went on to do further research
among Hmong refugees in French Guyana with occasional
visits to the Hmong in China. This life-time
undertaking has seen the publication of 16 volumes in
RPA between 1964 and 1986 in a collection called
“Patrimoine Cultural Hmong” (Hmong Cultural Heritage),
with other volumes still under preparation.
Other specialised areas of Hmong life, history and
culture in China, Laos and Thailand have been published
in English, French, and Chinese by anthropologists and
other writers. Hmong scholars have also started to
publish on Hmong history and culture. A rare collection
of historic photographs and colonial documents related
to the Hmong during the French occupation of Laos is
kept at the Musee de la France d’Outre-Mer at the
University of Aix-en-Provence, in the south of France.
Today, large numbers of articles and books come out each
year on the Hmong and are listed in bibliographies
online by the Hmong Studies Resource Center in
Minnesota, USA (see
http://www.hmongstudies.org/).
A number of oral history projects undertaken by schools
in America has also been published. The Hmong Cultural
Center in St. Paul, MN, (www.hmongcenter.org)
puts out the peer-reviewed Journal of Hmong Studies
twice a year and a newsletter updating on the latest
publications.
This
information “recomposing” has been greatly accelerated
during the last ten years with a proliferation of
on-line Internet information and discussion on a myriad
of social issues connected with the Hmong. There are
hundreds of Hmong websites on all kinds of subjects,
individuals and groups. The Hmong Homepage (www.hmongnet.org),
has many links to other websites, projects and community
activities. Hmong in the US also helped set up sites
for the Hmong in Thailand, Laos and China, so that
on-line contacts can be made or information shared with
other Hmong world-wide. In addition, much information
“recomposing” has been made through representation on
video and audio recordings in Hmong which are sold
commercially. There are video documentaries on Hmong
communities in Laos, China, Burma and French Guyana.
Many of these documentaries have been made by Xu Thao of
All-Pro Productions, California. They are very popular
among the older illiterate Hmong who cannot read books
or use the Internet. A popular series is the video
reconstruction of Hmong history in Laos and China by
Yuepheng Xiong of Hmongland Publishing, Minnesota, USA.
3. Handicrafts
and Traditions
Handicrafts: as a subsistence people, the Hmong
used to do their own weaving, basket-making and black-smithing.
Today these handicrafts still exist in the homeland,
except weaving and cloth-making. The latter has fallen
out of favour because hemp clothes are coarse and their
colours do not last. People prefer to buy modern nylon
and synthetic fabrics that are better quality. Hmong
women are famous for their multi0coloured embroideries.
Those with the most skills in embroideries made the
brightest costumes. Today, however, the rich are those
with the best costumes as the latest style of ready-made
Hmong clothes can be purchased through shops. Needle
work has become a lost art for many Hmong women,
particularly those in the diaspora where few girls want
or need to learn embroideries, being more busy going to
schools or to work for wages.
Embroideries are still carried on by women in the
homeland for their own use and to send to relatives in
other countries to sell for money. Large hand-made
quilts, wall hangings, pillow cases and table clothes
were made in great numbers this way for sale
internationally (Cohen 2000). The reed pipe musical
instrument or “qeej”, so necessary to play mortuary
music at funerals, is still made for consumption by the
Hmong world-wide.. These cultural artifacts continue to
survive because they have become commercial products in
demand by the Hmong in the diaspora. The Hmong culture
thus lives on through its silversmith artisans, music
instrument makers and needlecraft workers.
Traditions:
While the Hmong remain in
Laos, they can practise many of the traditions related
to their religion of ancestor worship, shamanism,
traditional medicine, funerals, oral story telling,
weddings, and kinship norms. Once resettled in the
West, however, the social environment there is very
different. There are laws prohibiting the slaughtering
of animals in the home as required by Hmong ancestral
rituals and healing ceremonies. Shamanic healing is
still prevalent, even with those now living in the West,
but it may require the slaughtering of a small pig. A
Hmong funeral is a major event, lasting up to a week
when it involves an elderly in the community, and
needing four to ten oxen to be slaughtered as food for
visitors and as sacrificial animals for the dead person.
It is thus difficult to hold proper Hmong funerals in
Western countries where funeral homes are only quiet
places for a quick mortuary service, not the
slaughtering of animals.
Hmong
practice of herbal medicine is another prevalent
tradition, but many of the Hmong medicinal plants and
herbs may not be available in their current place of
residence. They may have them sent in dry form from the
homeland, but this often get them into trouble with
local customs and quarantine officers. The result is
that herbal medicine is becoming a lost tradition for
the Hmnong in the diaspora. With the passing of many of
the elderly, shamans and herbalists have also become
scarce as few young people want to take up this ancient
arts of healing.
4. Landscape
and Environment
In Laos,
the Hmong used to move villages every few years after
the farming land around their settlements had become
exhausted. Their houses were simple wooden structures
with a shingle or grass roof, and they rarely carved any
landscape or built anything lasting such as shrines or
monuments. Nevertheless, many of those in the diaspora
acutely miss the homeland environment. As a pastoral
people, the Hmong prefer to live on mountain tops with
a cool climate and lush tropical vegetation. For this
reason, about 3000 of them chose to settle in French
Gyuana and resume farming in this tropical environment.
In France, a large number went to live in Nimes where
they eventually dominated the vegetable growing business
in the region. In Australia, half of its 1,800 Hmong
population moved to North Queensland to grow bananas. A
return to tropical farming helps to satiate the longing
for landscapes and a way of life they had left behind.
Others
prefer venturing back to Asia to search for kinship ties
or simply to reconnect with familiar places is another
option. They made video of these places to bring back to
view by those who could not visit, and eventually a
whole video production industry was born from these
early personal travel documentaries. Today, thousands
of Hmong in the diaspora return to Laos and Thailand to
join the New Year in November each year, since New Year
celebrations in the West are not as authentic and
entertaining as the genuine event in the homeland where
young girls in their best ethnic costumes come out in
drove to play ball games and to engage in courtship –
something inexistent in the West. A few even found life
in the diaspora so unappealing that they decided to
repatriate to the homeland. They wanted to return to an
environment where life is simple, where they feel safe
from crimes and unrestricted by official law and
regulations, and where they can resume the practice of
old cultural traditions they have difficulty with in the
West.
5. Physical Reconstruction.
As
stated before, the Hmong do not have any enduring icons
or monuments destroyed by the war which have to be
physically rebuilt. At most, they have cultural items or
traditions which became lost or forgotten during the war
and after relocation to the West, such as ethnic
costumes, embroideries and musical instruments.
Attempts have been made for
the physical reconstruction of cultural artifacts such
as the iconic reed pipe or “qeej”. Before, the new Laos
opened its doors to foreign visitors in the late 1980’s,
the Hmong in the diaspora used to buy their “qeej” from
the refugee camps or Hmong villagers in Thailand. Some
even tried to make the instrument locally using plastic
pipes, but this proved unpopular as the plastic
instrument did not sound as good as the genuine bamboo
one. Today, the diasporic Hmong can purchase the “qeej”
without problem from Laos so that the only problem
remaining is to find people who know how to use it, or
who are willing to learn to play funeral music with it.
A few
enterprising individuals tried to reproduce Hmong
embroideries by machines in Japan using Hmong patterns
on dyed materials, but they looked more like cheap
multicoloured fabrics than genuine hand-sewn
embroideries so few people used them. Traditional
costumes did not need to be replicated, as they have
always been available. They are the single cultural
item that has been most successfully adapted and
transplanted back to the homeland, due to easy access to
fine and colourful fabrics and the inventiveness of
Hmong women in Western countries. They combine the
styles and colours of Hmong costumes from other
countries, and remix the skirts from one sub-group with
the blouse or head gear from another. Where the items
are not too divergent, they use items from another
country such as China with those from Laos in order to
come up with the best and brightest combination.
CONSERVATION STRATEGIES
From the
above discussion, it can be seen that a variety of
conservation strategies has been used by the Hmong to
recapture or to move forward their cultural heritage for
personal use or for commercial mass consumption where
radically different mainstream environments make it
difficult to maintain some traditions. This is true
especially of religious and funeral practices that
require the slaughtering of live domestic animals. Other
traditions may weaken or disappear from lack of
interest, lack of skilled practitioners such as
needlecraft and other artisans; or from the lack of the
necessary resources such as small bamboo stalks to make
a good reed pipe musical instrument.
Overall,
the strategies used by the diasporic Hmong to meet their
heritage needs and challenges have included:
(1)
facilitating
the relearning of ritual chants and performances by
interested young people and individuals through classes
sponsored by Hmong organizations;
(2)
encouraging
the practices of modified religious and funeral rituals
acceptable to the new societies they now live in, and
conversion to Christianity.
(3)
making and
consuming large numbers of music videos, feature films
and video documentaries depicting “real” heritage items
and traditions from the homeland;
(4)
setting up
websites to discuss and display information on Hmong
history, culture, and other issues of concern;
(5)
recomposing
and disseminating cultural information through books,
and other communication media such as television and
radio broadcasts, and newspapers;
(6)
visiting the
homeland in Laos, Thailand or China to get a taste of
“real” Hmong” people, their culture and everyday life;
and
(7)
selling
traditional herbal medicine, hand-made embroideries and
ethnic costumes from the homeland, and publications on
the Hmong in the diaspora through shops and personal
outlets to those interested in preserving or learning
about their “Hmongness”.
The
production and commercial distribution of videos and CDs
have been especially successful and pervasive as a
method to make available visual images and oral
information on different aspects of Hmong cultural
heritage for learning or vicarious entertainment both in
the homeland and in the diaspora. Each year, many of
these media products are issued in America by
enterprising Hmong individuals and media companies. The
categories produced range from rock music and songs to
kungfu-style action and war movies, and documentaries on
rural Hmong life in Thailand, Laos or China. Thai,
Korean, Indian and Chinese films have also been dubbed
in the Hmong language for Hmong viewers, thus helping
to expand their cultural horizons and external
influences.
The Hmong
culture has undergone much change during the last 30
years. Costumes that were unique as markers of their
separate ethnicity are now a mixture of colours and
designs borrowed from other cultures and Hmong
sub-groups, and are no longer worn as everyday attires.
The Hmong language has also been affected. Many young
people living in Western countries or the homeland are
no longer fluent in their mother tongue. While some
have tried different ways to maintain their culture,
others want to embrace modernity and have actively
promoted change by adopting ideas and practices from
other cultures they live with – such as music, fashion
and religion.
Some
scholars see these changes and differences as a blessing
rather than a curse, because they reflect the Hmong’s
ability for flexibility with their culture and
identity. Schein (2004), for example, argues that these
seeming contradictions and disagreements allow the Hmong
opportunities to engage in “identity exchange” and
“identity production”.
When Hmong from America
visit their co-ethnic “Miao” in China, they are often
bewildered by the fact that large sections of the Miao
population do not speak Hmong nor have they customs and
myths pointing to a similar origin and culture with the
Hmong. Despite this, the Hmong visitors usually
identify themselves as Miao with their hosts. When Miao
from China visit the Hmong in America, they also
identify themselves as Hmong (Schein 1998). This
identity switch is based not on a common culture and
language, but on a “general notion of fraternity as well
as more particularized bonds of kinship and marriage
alliance”, leading to mutual obligation (Schein 2004:
278). This identity exchange is done for economic and
political motives: each side hopes that economic
opportunities and political unity will ensue from the
encounters.
In this
context, there are few cultural attributes involved and
no enduring “authentic” culture on which identity can be
solely based. Since culture is dynamic and often
changes, its components will eventually diverge and
differ when people move from one another to different
locations. Although rooted in the past, identity is
dynamic and can be seen as “production” (Hall 1989:68)
involving “questions of using the resources of history,
language and culture in the process of becoming rather
than being: not ‘who we are’ or ‘where we came from’ so
much as ‘what we might become’, how we have been
represented and how that bears on how we might represent
ourselves.” (Hall 1996:4)
For the
Hmong in the diaspora and the Miao in China, the
reconstruction of their shared identity through economic
exchanges and cultural visits reflects this process of
“becoming” and of how they want to represent themselves
rather than simply agreeing to how the mainstream
cultures have represented them. This attempt at
“identity production” arises out of social, economic and
political expediency, carved from “not only linguistic
and cultural dimensions, but also political and economic
strategies…a multidimensional and potent
transnationality that is constructed precisely out of
the entangling of the cultural with the economic and the
political.” (Schein 2004: 274).
Whether
the changing Hmong culture and new identity are
“authentic” or not is not important since culture is
constantly changing. What counts is the ongoing search,
the process, the continuing efforts to recover cultural
heritage, to explore cultural options and identity
possibilities, and to experiment with different
versions, to mix them from a variety of source
countries in the hope of finding the best possible model
– as Hmong women have done with their costumes. Erikson
(1960: 47-48) notes that transmigration, like all
catastrophes and crises, demands "the sudden assumption
of new and often transitory identities…. Adoption of new
cultural features in reaction to the new environments is
a reconquest of subjective centrality and omnipotence…
in a world which has made the person a mere number in a
dislocated mass.”
For
the Hmong, exposure to a bewildering diversity of
cultures and identities not only within the global Hmong
community but also with other groups of people, has made
this diversity a positive force by allowing them to
borrow desirable cultural features from these groups, to
recuperate and reinterpret their own cultural heritage.
A more acute level of shared national consciousness has
been developed, a globalised identity has been forged
based on the bringing together, and the adoption, of
Hmong cultural items and the practices of the various
countries of residence. This has helped create a new
transnational and dynamic culture among the Hmong
world-wide, largely made possible by modern
communications, the Internet, intra-ethnic video
consumption and ease of travel.
This paper
has looked at how the Hmong have tried to forge a new
transnational identity, based partly on the sharing of
cultural attributes for those in the West and in Laos,
and on political or economic dimensions between those in
the diaspora and China, the original homeland. Despite
this effort, it is till too soon to know if it has
helped the Hmong in the diaspora to recover from the
effects of 20 years of war in Laos, from the loss of
their power base and place of birth to the enemy, the
fragmentation of families, kinship networks and clans in
the rush to escape Laos and find asylum in other
countries.
As in the
past, the Hmong’s future is an unknown landscape and is
largely dependent on their ability to maintain their
social unity, their strong kinship and mutual support
system within the existing clan relations
(Keown-Bomar2004). As shown by Rojo and Paez (2000),
cultural heritage recovery can be a social cohesion
strategy, if it is done formally as a way to generate
and preserve social relations between social groups.
Schein (2004: 286) puts this well for the Hmong when she
says that
“the
coalescence of interests that impels the Hmong/Miao
forging of transnationality has permitted the
elaboration of common identity despite communication
barriers and cultural disjunctions. As minorities in all
of the states in which they reside, the choice to travel
what Appadurai (1993) has called the "postnational,"
translocal route seems one of their best hopes. An
identification forged out of cultural production and
what I have called identity exchanges could be for both
Hmong and Miao a means not only to reconnect but
simultaneously to circumvent marginalization within
their respective states.”
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