This is part two of a three-part series originally published by The Merced FOCUS.
For the first generation of Hmong Americans born in the Central Valley, growing up in the 1980s and ‘90s meant facing poverty, racism, and the pressure to blend in.
Many slipped into gangs as they tried to survive. Still, others fought to keep the culture alive by creating programs for the next generation that uplift the Hmong identity.
In south Merced, where See Lee grew up, survival meant navigating danger in neighborhoods marked by gangs.
This was the reality of the new country many Hmong American children grew up in after their parents fled Laos. Too American for their parents, too foreign for their peers, they came of age in a place that did not understand them.
Bouasvanh Lor, the head of the nonprofit Hmong Culture Camps, said many Hmong people stay within their own circle. But that behavior, Lor explained, limits learning both ways.
“I really want them to learn across cultures and see that we have more similarities than differences,” she said.
Some found a sense of belonging in gangs. Others, such as Lee, who later ran the Merced County Boys and Girls Club, found ways through. Their struggles shaped the Hmong community in the Valley as it looks today.
The “lost generation”
At school, the tension followed students into hallways and cafeterias. Kids grouped themselves by ethnicity for safety.
“I remember a lot of fights,” Lee said. “Then, I used to think they’re just troublemakers. (Now) I can see why there was a lot of fighting.”
Lee, who was born in 1982 and grew up in the ‘90s, calls some of her peers the “lost generation,” referring to the first wave of Hmong Americans born in the U.S. after resettlement who lost their way and joined gangs.
“I do feel it’s one that we’re not entirely proud of,” she said of that generation. “But for me, it’s a reality. I think, as much success as we’ve also seen, there is an equally-high level of struggles.”
A 2002 dissertation by Mai Xiong at the University of the Pacific in Stockton found that for many Hmong young people, gangs became more than street crews. They became surrogate families, offering a sense of identity and inclusion.
Lee saw it within her own community in Merced. “There was a lot of bullying that was happening,” she said. “They had a sense that they had to protect themselves somehow.”
The soundtrack of those years was not ancient songs or the queej — a traditional Hmong flute. It was punk rock and hip-hop.
“Love, sex, and drugs,” Lee said. “Our siblings began to portray those images. Everybody became Eazy-E or Dr. Dre, whoever the hip-hop person was at that time. Gangs, teen pregnancy, drugs – you name it. There was a lot of that.”
Merced County Superior Court Judge Paul Lo remembers how deep the impact of gang culture ran as the danger began to rise inside the community. “The gang mentality started to really infect our community,” he said.
Lo, who grew up just before Lee’s generation, remembers how few protective resources existed in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
“There wasn’t much help. There wasn’t much support for the community to combat all these social justice issues,” he said.
Trying to belong at home and at school
Lee was one of eight children in a three-bedroom home. Her parents worked long hours, leaving little time to bridge the growing divide between generations.
“There were a lot of struggles,” she said. “My parents were on welfare. We had limited funds, lots of hand-me-downs, lots of struggles, lots of chaos going on all the time. It was a different lifestyle … trying to juggle both Western and traditional culture.”
She felt torn between wanting to belong and wanting to succeed.
“I was really different in class,” Lee said. “I felt excluded, both from the teachers and from the general classmates.”
Lor spoke Hmong as a child. As she got older, she found her native tongue did not help her in school.
“You’re just trying to survive in the United States,” she said. “Once I got into college, I stopped speaking Hmong because I needed to learn academic language.”
Growing up felt complicated, Lee said.
“There was always a pride thing going on,” she said. “But we couldn’t show it … for fear that we weren’t accepted, or shame, or whatever it was. We couldn’t really show up and say, ‘I am Hmong.’”
In the early years of resettlement, many Hmong families avoided drawing attention to themselves. The trauma of war and years of harassment followed them into American schools and neighborhoods.
“At that time, not many people were comfortable,” said Lue Yang, who arrived in the 1970s. “They do not want to expose themselves (so) that they might be treated differently.”
In Laos, Hmong people had already learned the danger of standing out.
“If they wear Hmong clothes, the Lao people bully them, harass them,” Yang said.
Hmong people, Lor said, are fast learners who integrate fairly easily into other cultures.
“It could be a good and a bad thing,” she said. “We’re nomadic, and we’re also very indigenous. We don’t have a country to ourselves. We assimilate fairly easily.”
Assimilation became a defense strategy. Many hid their identity because they did not know the language well enough to defend themselves.
“They want to hide their identity,” Yang said. “They’re not ready to expose who they are… to make people feel more comfortable.”
But that silence has started to shift.
“There is that sense of pride, and openness to display that pride now, in all of our wares and our music and everything,” Lee said.
Traditions and spiritual life
Before gangs, before school tension, and before resettlement, identity lived inside something older.
In Hmong culture, there are 18 clans, each based on a person’s last name. When Hmong women marry, they take their husband’s last name and join his clan. People of the same clan cannot marry each other.
“The clan name is very important,” Yang said. “In Merced, it’s Xiong Clan and Moua. In Fresno, the majority is Vang and then Yang.”
Each clan serves as a social anchor. It guides weddings, funerals, conflict resolution, and family bonds. In many ways, clans were the original structure of belonging for Hmong youth before they ever entered American schools.
Many clans follow a shaman who guides their spiritual life and leads ceremonies for marriages and funerals. Others who converted to Christianity practice what Yang called the mainstream faith.
“When you get sick, the shaman comes to provide spiritual services for you,” Yang said. “When you die … they have someone who specializes in guiding your spirit to meet with your great-grandparents.”
Traditional Hmong belief teaches that after death, the soul must return to its birthplace. At funerals, the txiv xaiv, or soul chanter, leads the deceased back through the places they lived, ending at their birthplace.
This journey is tied to the burial of the placenta, which is placed beneath the home where the child was born. Boys are connected to the central pillar of the home, and girls are connected to the space beneath the parents’ bed.
Later, that placenta is considered a symbolic jacket the spirit must recover. Upon death, the soul returns to these sacred places, puts on the placental jacket, and then continues to the spirit world to reunite with ancestors. This ritual protects the bond between the living and the dead.
“We believe that when you die, you have to go back to where you’re from,” Yang said.
Yang is Christian, but he still honors the traditional beliefs he grew up with. He explained that some families use animal sacrifices to call on an ancestor’s spirit to bless a person who is sick.
“I believe in Christ,” he said. “I believe that when I die, I will be with Him in heaven. If you maintain your own culture, you have to be with your clan. You have to learn how to sacrifice an animal to your ancestral spirit.”
For Yang, passing down this knowledge is not optional.
“If the father (is) a good leader, (he knows) all types of rituals and ceremonies,” he said. “The son (has) to know everything that he knows.”
Practices and language at risk
But that transmission of traditional beliefs is breaking. Language barriers make it harder for elders to teach the next generation.
Yang calls it a communication gap.
“When I talk to my children, I cannot completely speak in Hmong,” he said. “I have to speak Hmong and English for them to understand.”
Yang has eight children and sees a clear divide.
“They (do) not fully speak Hmong,” he said, “but they speak almost Hmong.”
Yang described the difference as a cultural split between “Hmong American” children, who hold some traditions, and “American Hmong” children, who are more immersed in American life.
He worries about what will remain.
“I think pretty soon, maybe (in) one more generation, our culture will be completely lost,” he said.
The fading knowledge of the Hmong language and culture may be occurring outside of American assimilation. Lor witnessed a global loss of language during a 2013 visit to a refugee camp in Thailand.
“I get up there, I see all these people in Hmong clothes,” Lor said. “Then all of a sudden, I don’t hear them speaking Hmong at all. It’s all Thai.”
That experience confused her, since none of the counselors spoke Hmong either, and there were only a few elders at the village who did.
“That’s kinda how it is in the United States,” Lor said. “We are barely speaking Hmong, and little kids don’t know any Hmong at all. They start off speaking English.”
What started as a trip to reconnect with her culture became an eye-opening experience about how to prevent language and cultural loss in her community.
“It was very disappointing because I went there to connect to myself,” she said. “I felt more disconnected from the language barrier. I wanted to come back and create something that could teach our young Hmong children the Hmong language and culture.”
New efforts to preserve the Hmong language and culture are sprouting in the Valley.
Especially in Fresno and Merced, families have growing access to new Hmong dual-language programs that teach students both English and Hmong while grounding them in culture and history.
Fresno Unified runs the largest system, with Hmong immersion programs at Vang Pao Elementary, Balderas Elementary, and Sequoia Middle School, where students continue language and literacy into the upper grades.
Merced County has its own option through the Merced Scholars Dual Language Academy and seasonal Hmong language and culture camps offered by MCOE and community partners.
Merced recently hosted a statewide Hmong History and Cultural Studies conference at UC Merced. The gathering last spring introduced a new K–12 Hmong curriculum developed under Assembly Bill 167, giving schools in the Valley and beyond free access to more than 50 lessons that teach Hmong history, culture, and stories of refugee migration.
Working with young people
Listening to young people helped Lee see her own past in a new way, she said.
“I used to be afraid,” she said. “When I learned about their stories, and when I got to work with the kids, (I found out) these are really good kids. I know that my brothers were good, too. Doing the work that I do is really important because I know there’s a segment of the community that’s just not seen.”
She sees the struggles of modern young people, from isolation to phone addiction.
“There’s a whole host of needs, but I think, for me, it’s that personal connection,” she said. “We’re present, but we’re not present and engaging.”
For Lee, the Hmong story shows that identity can survive – even without a country.
“I’m curious to see where that’s going to go, because the neat thing about the Hmong community that I totally love and celebrate is the fact that even without a state, we’re still one nation,” she said. “There is this pride that still is within all of us.”
The programs Lor runs at Hmong Culture Camp are open to anyone who wishes to learn about Hmong culture while appreciating their own culture.
“My main mission and goal is to teach them how to be rooted in their own culture, their own ethnicity,” she said. “I really wanted them to learn across cultures and see that we have more similarities than differences.”
The programs include year-round classes and summer sessions that teach children and families the Hmong language, traditional arts, music, dance, and customs.
The camps also introduce students to cultural practices such as storytelling, sewing, embroidery, and ceremonial traditions, while creating space for youth to build confidence, identity, and cross-cultural understanding.
A new cultural pride
Today, more young Hmong people are wearing traditional clothing at New Year celebrations and beyond.
“I think you see a lot of young folks who wear Hmong clothes,” Yang said. “Not the majority, but more than ever. They’re not ashamed to wear Hmong clothes.”
This pride comes from greater access to history and education, Yang said.
“They feel like they’re not ashamed to represent who they are,” he said. “Now (that) those young folks have been to high school, college, they have a good story about Hmong people. They learn to recognize who they are.”
Lee sees the same shift.
“Now we can do this and not get killed for it, beaten for it,” she said. “Growing up, I never wanted to wear my traditional clothing, even during the Hmong New Year. But now, it’s like every other day, someone’s wearing Hmong clothes.”
This pride, rebuilt and reclaimed, is what carries the community into the next chapter, she added.
The young people who grew up in the 1990s are now parents, educators, and community leaders. They carry the lessons of the “lost generation,” but they also face a new challenge.
Their children and grandchildren move through a world shaped by cellphones, global culture, and shrinking language ties. They are Hmong in ways their elders never imagined.
“They’re exposed to different levels of influence,” said former Fresno Councilmember Blong Xiong. “They’re more savvy in terms of politics and understanding the dynamic that we see in this country.”
