Creating a Space for Hmong Within Asian American Studies

• In Event: Critical Geographies of Space in Education: Hopeful Spaces Within Oppressive Places

Abstract

Asian American Studies (AAS) began as a movement in the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) and quickly became a space that privileges the experiences of Asian Americans (Umemoto, 1989) in universities across the nation. Within AAS, Asian American identities, history, knowledge, culture, and political struggles are affirmed and taught. Despite it’s grounding in liberation, Hmong undergraduates at California University (CU) are marginalized in AAS.

Even though CU is in close proximity to a large Hmong community (Pfeifer, Sullivan, Yang, and Yang, 2012), draws the largest numbers of Hmong students from the surrounding counties among universities in its system, and is billed as a regional university, it’s AAS Department does not have a space for Hmong students. The AAS course catalog lists the following classes: the Korean American Experience, the Chinese American Experience, and the Japanese American Experience. By contrast, there are no Hmong professors or courses. Hmong undergraduates constructed a space within AAS through CU’s undergraduate student teacher program (USTP) but since the course was taught by an undergraduate, the Hmong space in AAS was only temporary. Despite its Hmong population, CU does not have any permanent Hmong courses.

This paper uses Asian Critical Race Theory (AsianCrit) (Museus and Iftikar, 2013) and Massey’s (2015) theory of space as both interrelational and subject to the politics of power to examine the marginalization of Hmong undergraduate students within the AAS Department at CU. Together, these theories help to understand the marginalization of Hmong within AAS as a failure to realize the goals of the TWLF. AAS originated from TWLF, a space where third world people could learn about themselves taught by third world people (Umemoto, 1989); however, racial and ethnic hierarchies exist even in places created for liberation, like AAS.

The data for this study comes from a larger ethnographic study that focused on the experiences of Hmong undergraduate students. The data includes interviews, audio recordings and field notes of classroom observations. In this paper, I focus on interview data from three Hmong undergraduates, including the undergraduate instructor of the Hmong course on culture and language. The students’ experiences in AAS highlight a clear need to transform AAS at CU. Specifically, there is a need for a permanent Hmong space through the offering of Hmong courses and hiring of Hmong faculty.

This paper contributes to the scholarship on AAS by identifying the oppressive practices and hierarchies that marginalize Hmong university students in places that were meant to liberate them. This paper provides a way to transform AAS both at CU and as a discipline by including the voices of Hmong students.

Author

• Kaozong Nancy Mouavangsou, University of California - Davis