The history of the Hmong migration as refugees from Laos to the United States reveals a situation whereby the Hmong have been confronted with various political, economic, religious, and social forces that have dramatically shaped their lives. Over the past 35 years, the Denver Hmong’s exposure to cosmopolitan urban centres and rural ways of life in Colorado have continued to influence and develop the character and practices of the community. Within this social and cultural milieu, numerous and contentious views regarding health, community, family, and the reproduction of family have remained entangled within the moral and ethical foundations of Christian faiths and traditional shamanic practices. Furthermore, these perspectives of community and family are enmeshed within a Hmong ethos of continuity that is derived from historical strategies and experiences from Laos and the refugee camps of Thailand. Within the Denver Hmong community, the moral foundations of spiritual practices and a pronounced emphasis on continuity have continued to uphold the idea of family as a central tenant to being Hmong. In doing so, this has further emphasised various degrees of entanglement and mutual reliance within and between families and individuals. As a result, significant pressure has been placed on younger Hmong to strengthen the networks of family, extended family, and community by reproducing and forming families of their own. The production and reproduction of family has in turn drawn into focus generational tensions concerning ideas of family, education, gender, expectations of behaviour, and approaches to health and healing. In consideration of these points, this thesis examines how people within the Denver Hmong community negotiate, maintain, and contest the intersection of these matters while constructing and maintaining the central tenants of Hmong life and a Hmong continuity through the reciprocal reproductive qualities of the social, the spiritual and symbolic, and the biological.

Based on fourteen-months of multi-sited, ethnographic fieldwork that compares two Hmong communities in Vang Vieng, Laos, and Sacramento, California in the United States, my doctoral thesis examines how the Hmong diaspora is constituted in the absence of a territorial ethnic homeland. Although scholars claim that the Hmong originated in the southwestern part of China, many Hmong are uncertain about their origins and have lost their connections to the ancestral homeland. This thesis suggests we examine diasporas as a dialectical process involving both transnational continuity and national differentiation. Despite their further migratory dispersal after the Vietnam War, Hmong in Laos and the United States have actively created a transnational diasporic community by maintaining their cultural practices across national borders, particularly in the domains of kinship practices and spiritual rituals. At the same time, diasporic Hmong have also created partial 'homes' in the nation-states where they reside. Therefore, their ethnic traditions and perceptions are transformed according to different national contexts, such as local socioeconomic conditions, state policies, and access to economic capital. This results in cultural differences within the diaspora. In addition, Hmong in different countries disagree about their relative position in the diaspora in relation to each other, leading to discursive fragmentation. As a result, diasporas are refracted through different national affiliations. Nonetheless, the sense of national belonging among diasporic Hmong remains partial because they continue to experience social, economic, and ethnic marginalization as an ethnic minority group in both Laos and the United States, which causes them to maintain a diasporic affiliation to Hmong scattered in other countries as an alternative source of ethnic belonging. In this sense, the Hmong are constantly positioned 'in-between' the diaspora and the nation-state.