The Melting Pot Of Hmong Culture

In the melting pot of cultures in the United States, Hmong people are among the most misunderstood and enigmatic ethnic groups. Throughout history, during the most uneasy and difficult time, when Laos experienced civil war in the 1950s and 1960s, the Hmong sided with the government, fearing a communist regime would disrupt their independence. The Vietnam War resulted in the Hmong to siding with the United States to oppose Vietnamese and Laotian communists, lose a huge percent of their population, fled to Thailand to fend for themselves and migrate to the United State for the purpose of the next generation’s future and their freedom.
During the Vietnam War, the Hmong people’s independence were affected by communism and as a result they sided
When Laos fell to the communists and Americans fled Vietnam, the Hmong were left to fend for themselves as the Pathet Lao communists and North Vietnamese threatened to wipe them out. The war decimated the Hmong adult population. More than 100,000 Hmong fled Laos to Thai refugee camps, and many were killed along the way. Chang Yang was a refugee who survived a perilous swim across the Mekong River in Laos to the shores of
Hmong villages were burned and by some estimates thousands were massacred.” (The Secret War, pg 2). The new pro-Vietnam Communist government in Laos used Soviet artillery, napalm and chemical weapons against the Hmong. An estimated 10 to 25 percent of all Hmong in Laos were killed during and after the Vietnam war. By one count there were 400,000 Hmong in Laos at the beginning of the Vietnam war and only 300,000 when it was over. “In 1975, the current communist government came to power," says Jane Hamilton-Merritt, author of Tragic Mountains, a history of the Vietnam-era conflict in Laos. “It announced publicly that it intended to “wipe out” the Hmong who had allied themselves with the Royal Lao Government and the United States and therefore opposed the communist Pathet Lao soldiers and the North Vietnamese military forces operating in Laos. . . . Wiping out the targeted Hmong began in earnest in early 1976 and continues in 2004." (Source: Marc Kaufman, Smithsonian