HMoob Sonic World Making and Refusal through Cassette Tapes

• In Event: Reclaiming Selves, Histories, Language, and Culture Through Relational Processes of (Re)membering

Abstract

This presentation explores cassette tape recordings exchanged between diasporic HMoob family members as sonic acts of world making. Between the 1980s and early 2000s, a series of cassette recordings circulated between my family, with some living in Thai refugee camps and others already resettled in the United States. These cassettes recorded greetings, updates, jokes, spiritual encouragement, and the sound of life unfolding around them. They created worlds we could enter into. They carried presence, care, instruction, and comfort across distance. They mapped relationships, anchored people in emotion and place, and reminded the listener: you are right at home.
These recordings also inform my present-day work as a HMoob language educator and extend the findings of my dissertation, which developed a critical framework for sustaining HMoob language and culture in the United States. Central to this framework is a recognition that sustaining language requires attention to multiple forms of literacy, including not only those tied to print but also oral, sonic, emotional, and embodied ways of knowing that have long carried our people across time and distance.

Rather than viewing these cassette recordings as merely convenient or incidental, they can be understood as a refusal of colonial literacy practices that privileged Romanized Popular Alphabet (RPA) writing. In choosing to speak rather than write, families resisted the idea that writing was required for connection. These sonic acts reclaimed orality as a sovereign HMoob literacy which is rooted in memory, emotion, and relationship. As McCarty and Lee (2014) remind us, culturally sustaining and revitalizing pedagogy must be grounded in Indigenous education sovereignty, where communities define the terms of their own literacies and learning. These cassette tapes embody that sovereignty.
Drawing from portraiture methodology (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) and a cultural security framework (Allender & Allender West, 2021), these recordings are understood as living archives that are intimate, intergenerational, and relational. Following Lee Maracle’s (2015) framing of story as social map and sacred governance, these tapes are both pedagogy and presence, offering a distinctly HMoob way of relating and remembering. The cassette becomes both archive and pedagogy.
These acts of sonic world making not only sustained kinship across displacement; they continue to offer a model for intergenerational education rooted in orality, emotional literacy, and cultural sovereignty. They affirm that literacy can be voiced, that care can be sounded, and that language reclamation must include the affective, informal, and embodied practices that have long carried the HMoob people.

Author

• Caroline Thao, Twin Rivers United School District