Explore the vast range of titles available.

With the rise of digital tools used for media entrepreneurship, media outlets staffed by only one or two individuals and targeted to niche and super-niche audiences are developing across a wide range of platforms. Minority communities such as immigrants and refugees have long been pioneers in this space, operating ethnic media outlets with limited staff and funding to produce content that is relevant and accessible to their specific community.  Micro Media Industries  explores the specific case of Hmong American media, showing how an extremely small population can maintain a robust and thriving media ecology in spite of resource limitations and an inability to scale up. Based on six years of fieldwork in Hmong American communities in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California, it analyzes the unique opportunities and challenges facing Hmong newspapers, radio, television, podcasts, YouTube, social media, and other emerging platforms. It argues that micro media industries, rather than being dismissed or trivialized, ought to be held up as models of media innovation that can counter the increasing power of mainstream media.  

Through a sociological analysis of Hmong former refugees' grassroots movements in the United States between the 1990s and 2000s, Immigrant Agency shows how Hmong, despite being one of America's most economically impoverished ethnic groups, were able to make sustained claims on and have their interests represented in public policies. The author, Yang Sao Xiong argues that the key to understanding how immigrants incorporate themselves politically is to understand how they mobilize collective action and make choices in circumstances far from racially neutral. Immigrant groups, in response to political threats or opportunities or both, mobilize collective action and make strategic choices about how to position themselves vis-à-vis other minority groups, how to construct group identities, and how to deploy various tactics in order to engage with the U.S. political system and influence policy. In response to immigrants' collective claims, the racial state engages in racialization which undermines immigrants' political standing and perpetuates their marginalization.

Since the 1980s, there has been a considerable change in the religious life of the Hmong ethnic communities from the mountainous provinces of northern Vietnam—specifically, their conversion to Protestantism. Protestantism was introduced into the communities under a modified model known as Vàng Trứ/Vàng Chứ through the endeavors of the Far East Broadcasting Company. From 1993 to 2004, the number of Protestant followers among these communities increased sharply. Today, the mountainous northern area of Vietnam is home to 300,000 Hmong Protestants of various denominations. This study, based on textual analysis, participant observations, in-depth interviews, and field trips, seeks to explore the Hmong conversion to Protestantism. The focus is on issues relating to the growth of Protestantism and Protestant influence on the Hmong people from 1987 (widely understood to be the beginning of Protestantism in the Hmong community) to the present day.

In this article, I show how the Hmong religion can provide the basis of a novel version of non-human-centered environmentalism. I do this by outlining some of the core doctrines in the Hmong religion and showing what they imply about the value of nature. I then situate the view that is implied by these doctrines into the traditional Western environmental ethics literature on the value of nature. In particular, I argue that the Hmong religion provides a view in environmental ethics that is non-anthropocentric, individualistic, non-egalitarian, and non-biocentric.

Produced in a historiographical spirit, this literature review traces trends in the depiction of Hmong Americansnot in popular representations such as newspapers or public perception, but in the American academic discourse itself. By adopting a thematic approach, it evidences the curious chronological development of which aspects of Hmong studies were treated in which way from the 1980s until the present. To this extent, the paper argues that while the 1980s and 1990s saw a heavy emphasis on social scientific studies of Hmong family ties and clan structure which, while careful and mostly sensitive in their treatment, nevertheless on occasion construct the Hmong as either irreconcilably or undesirably different(sections I and II). It then proceeds to crystallise the significant treatment of education with respect to the Hmong, which, produced in particular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, presented powerful cases of forced assimilation through the lens of Hmong Americans themselves(section III). A brief fourth section focuses on the marginal role ascribed to economic problems encountered by the Hmong, treated as almost inevitable.Crucially, the fifth section proceeds to problematise more recent feminist critiques.The argument presented here is that their central drawback lies in the appropriation and overriding of Hmong voices for a particular project.This construction of Hmong voices, finally, is on the retreat in most recent studies which, centred on horticulture, music, rituals and medicine –to name but a few –attempt to elucidate the Hmong American experience through the lens of the protagonists themselves. This is an important step, and one which must be pursued further.

Immigration studies have increasingly focused on how immigrant adaptation to their new homelands is influenced by the social structures in the sending society, particularly its economy. Less scholarly research has focused on the ways that the cultural make-up of immigrant homelands influences their adaptation to life in a new country. In Ethnic Origins, Jeremy Hein investigates the role of religion, family, and other cultural factors on immigrant incorporation into American society by comparing the experiences of two little-known immigrant groups living in four different American cities not commonly regarded as immigrant gateways. Ethnic Origins provides an in-depth look at Hmong and Khmer refugees—people who left Asia as a result of failed U.S. foreign policy in their countries. These groups share low socio-economic status, but are vastly different in their norms, values, and histories. Hein compares their experience in two small towns—Rochester, Minnesota and Eau Claire, Wisconsin—and in two big cities—Chicago and Milwaukee—and examines how each group adjusted to these different settings. The two groups encountered both community hospitality and narrow-minded hatred in the small towns, contrasting sharply with the cold anonymity of the urban pecking order in the larger cities. Hein finds that for each group, their ethnic background was more important in shaping adaptation patterns than the place in which they settled. Hein shows how, in both the cities and towns, the Hmong’s sharply drawn ethnic boundaries and minority status in their native land left them with less affinity for U.S. citizenship or “Asian American” panethnicity than the Khmer, whose ethnic boundary is more porous. Their differing ethnic backgrounds also influenced their reactions to prejudice and discrimination. The Hmong, with a strong group identity, perceived greater social inequality and supported collective political action to redress wrongs more than the individualistic Khmer, who tended to view personal hardship as a solitary misfortune, rather than part of a larger-scale injustice. Examining two unique immigrant groups in communities where immigrants have not traditionally settled, Ethnic Origins vividly illustrates the factors that shape immigrants’ response to American society and suggests a need to refine prevailing theories of immigration. Hein’s book is at once a novel look at a little-known segment of America’s melting pot and a significant contribution to research on Asian immigration to the United States.

Background Recent studies have shed light on the unique linguistic and genetic characteristics of Hmong-Mien speakers. However, the underlying genetic structure and admixture events that shape their genetic diversity remain inadequately elucidated. Results Here, we co-analyzed newly generated genome-wide data from 164 individuals in Guizhou Province with published data from geographically proximate HM speakers using both allele frequency-based and haplotype-based methods. We unveiled fine-scale genetic substructure within HM speakers in southwest China, emphasizing distinct genetic differentiation between the Miao and Yao branches. Notably, Guangxi GaoHuaHua individuals showed close affiliation with the Yao branch, indicating a divergence time predating approximately 500 years ago. Besides, southwestern HM speakers exhibited an admixture pattern of indigenous Hmong and BaikuYao-like ancestry with minor contributions from neighboring populations like Tai-Kadai and Sino-Tibetan speakers in recent history. We finally identified the dominant paternal and diverse maternal lineages of HM speakers, implying a rich genetic tapestry and intricate historical migrations. Conclusions Our study provided new insights into the genetic formation and admixture events that significantly shaped the genomic diversity of present-day HM speakers in southwest China.

This study documents Hmong’s involvement in the Secret War in Laos, their refugee exodus from Laos to the refugee camps in Thailand, and the challenges to find third countries to take Hmong refugees. At the time, Hmong and other highlander refugees from Laos were considered unsuitable to be resettled into the United States. He provides detailed research on the adaptation of Hmong Americans to their new lives in the United States, facing discrimination and prejudice, and the advancement of Hmong Americans over the past 40 years. He presents the Hmong American community as an uprooted refugee community that grew from a small population in 1975 to more than 300,000 by the year 2015; spreading to all 50 states while becoming a diverse and complex American ethnic community. To get better insight into their diversity, complexity, and adaptation to different localities, Kou Yang uses the Hmong communities in Montana, Fresno and Denver as case studies. The progress of Hmong Americans over the past 4 decades is highlighted with a list of many achievements in education, high-tech, academia, political participation, the military and other fields. Readers of this book will gain a deeper understanding of the challenges, complex and diverse experience of the Hmong American community. They will also obtain insight into the overall experience of the Hmong, an ethnic people of Diaspora, found in Asia, the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Europe. They are like bristle-cone pines on the rock that have been exposed to all types of weather, climate and conditions, but they won't die.

This article provides a review of Mobility, Globalization and Development of the Hmong: Selected Essays of Nicholas Tapp.

Rhythmers are used in the Hmong language. However, there is no literature on them. The word rhythmer itself is not in the English dictionary; it was first observed and termed by Dr. Cho Ly in his Ph.D. dissertation (Ly, 2004). The objective of this study is to further understand the meaning of rhythmers by analyzing approximately 100 sentences with rhythmers. The rhythmers studied consisted of those taken from Dr. Ly's Ph.D. data and everyday dialogue. After observation, it was discovered that rhythmers add meaning to sentences and/or change the meaning of the sentences. In some cases, they only add rhythm to sentences and help the sentences flow better. They are not necessarily meaningless words. They are usually placed at the end or beginning of sentences or at the end of a clause. Nonetheless, they cannot be used randomly. Therefore, the rhythmers are a new part of speech.