Hmong-town, USA: This year, Mee Moua became the first Hmong American elected to minnesota's state senate; her campaign was the culmination of a remarkable Hmong political mobilization in the Midwest. (Report).

After the election, stories came in droves--about an old Hmong man who went to the polls three times before he had the right documentation to vote, a Hmong woman whose supervisor never said hi to her until the night Mee Moua won. They came via aunts and uncles, via letters to the editor and cassette tapes. "She is not Mary. She is not Kathy. She is Mee Moua, the same Hmong name given to her by her parents 32 years ago... I am thrilled. I am excited. I am definitely, positively very happy. Congratulations to Mee Moua with all my heart," read one email message.

On January 29, 2002, Mee Moua received over 51 percent of the votes in a four-way race to win the special election in Senate District 67 on St. Paul, Minnesota's east side, becoming the first Hmong legislator in the United States. Overnight, she became a political star and inspiration, written about in national newspapers and magazines, appearing on national television programs and traveling across the country to share her story with others. Why was Moua able to galvanize so many people, and how did this self-professed "little Hmong girl from the mountains," defeat the St. Paul mayor's handpicked successor?

A hill tribe people from Southeast Asia, the Hmong people allied with the United States during the Vietnam War. Many lost their lives in that war, and even more drowned in the Mekong River while trying to escape Laos. According to the 2000 Census, there are approximately 170,000 Hmong living in the United States, of which about 41,800 reside in Minnesota, making it the second largest Hmong community in the country. Since 1990 the Hmong in Minnesota have increased by 150 percent. In Senate District 67, overall numbers of people of color have doubled as well, going from just 20 percent in the 1990 Census to over 40 percent in the 2000 report. The east side of St. Paul had rapidly changed in the past 10 years and it voters were ready for a different type of leadership and representation.

It all began at the local Swede Hollow Cafe on East 7th Street in the old Swedish part of St. Paul's east side, traditionally a bastion for immigrants. There Moua met with her friend and local Senate District 67B state representative Sheldon Johnson. The district's three-term state senator Randy Kelly was running for mayor of St. Paul. If Kelly won, his seat would have to be filled by a special election. But Moua and Johnson were reluctant to even think along those lines. While Kelly was also a Democrat and the homegrown candidate, he was more conservative than his challenger Jay Benanav, endorsed by the Democratic Farmer Labor party.

If Moua decided to run, it would not be the first time that a Hmong person ran for elected office. In 1991, then only 23 years old, Choua Lee won a seat on the St. Paul school board, becoming the first Hmong person in the country to hold an elected office. In the following years, Neal Thao also filed and won a school board seat. But beyond Lee and Thao, other Hmong running for city council or state representative would not be as successful.

The week before the November mayoral election, a large bulk of St. Paul voters were still undecided. Whereas Benanav got the endorsement of the teachers and AFSCME, Kelly got the endorsement of then mayor, Republican Norm Coleman, and more conservative bodies like the Chamber of Commerce and the police and peace officers' union. So when Kelly won by 400 votes, progressives in St. Paul were stunned.

Kelly's victory left vacant the state senator seat and, in late November, Mee Moua decided to run.

Becoming Stakeholders

Mee Moua was born in Laos in 1969, the oldest of four children and 70-plus first cousins. Her family fled Laos and immigrated to the United States in 1978. She grew up in the small town of Appleton, Wisconsin, where she attended Catholic school, worked as a caddy, and sang in the church choir. Described as an overachiever, Moua graduated from Brown University, going on to the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs in Texas and University of Minnesota Law School. Her opponents later tried to use her Ivy League education, graduate degrees, and career as an attorney at a prominent law firm against her, arguing that she was an elitist and an outsider because she was not born on the east side. But the Hmong community, especially the elders, embraced Moua's success. During a visit to a senior citizens' group, a blind woman came up to Moua and pressed a $5 bill into her hand. Calling Moua "my daughter," she said that she did not have much, but she wanted to help with the campaign.

Without downplaying the enormous work put into Mee Moua's campaign to mobilize the Hmong community, her campaign was, at the same time, the culmination of over two decades of evolution and constant interactions between the Hmong community and the political process.

In the 25 years since the first Hmong person arrived in Minnesota, much has changed. According to the 1990 Census, only 12 percent of Hmong living in Minnesota owned their own homes and the median income was then only $11,934 compared to $30,909 for the general population. In just 10 years, the home ownership rate in the Hmong community has jumped to almost over 50 percent. The Hmong Chamber of Commerce claims that there are over 300 to 400 Hmongowned businesses in the Twin Cities, and Asian Americans, mostly Hmong, are the largest minority group in the Sr. Paul public school system, accounting for one out of every four kindergartners. Hmong people were becoming long-term stakeholders in the general community.

The Hmong community first became engaged in the electoral process in 1991, with Choua Lee's school board race. Soon the community began to mobilize around issues as well as candidates. Clinton's presidency ushered in two issues that the Hmong community really organized around: welfare reform and veterans' rights. Organizers called people to testify, staged rallies, or coordinated lobbying trips to Washington, D.C. This mobilization was aided by two friendly politicians in office--the late Bruce Vento, congressman in the 4th Congressional District where the majority of the Hmong in Minnesota live, and Paul Wellstone, U.S. Senator for Minnesota. Wellstone and Vento were critical in writing and, in May 2000, successfully passing the Hmong Veterans Naturalization Act, which provides an exemption from the English language requirement and special consideration for civics testing for certain refugees from Laos applying for naturalization. As a result of the legislation, over 4,000 Hmong people across the country ha ve become citizens-1,700 in the state of Minnesota.

The 1.5 Factor

When Mee Moua called all her friends active in Minnesotan politics to join her campaign team, no one returned her phone calls. Either they were too burned out from the contentious mayoral race or they opted to walt out a race that in their minds already had a handpicked successor. Everyone assumed that Kelly's right-hand man, Senate District 67A Tim Mahoney, would be elected. Without anyone willing to help, Moua called in her 70-plus first cousins.

She put together a campaign team of young Hmong professionals, all originally from the Twin Cities. Many held leadership positions at their jobs, sat on statewide and national boards, and were viewed as emerging community leaders themselves. Aside from the fact that nine were Moua's first cousins, it was an impressive group and a real reflection of the caliber of talent in the Hmong community. Moua's campaign team, in many ways, reflected what had happened to the 1.5 generation, those young Hmong children who were born either in Laos or in the refugee camps but grew up in the United States. That group of young people could straddle both Hmong and American worlds, understanding the issues of the Hmong elders, all the while possessing the vocabulary to express and respond to the unjust power dynamics they live under.

There were already hints of that culmination in 1998 when young people in the Hmong community united to form Community Action Against Racism (CAAR), a grassroots group created in response to disparaging remarks about Hmong customs made on air by a popular morning radio show host. CAAR became the first of its kind in the Hmong community, organizing press conferences and rallies to demand a public apology on-air and in the two major Twin Cities' newspapers and a public policy against racist language in broadcasts. When the station would nor agree to CAAR's demands, they successfully lobbied half a dozen corporate sponsors of the radio show to pull their ads. Eventually the radio station relented and publicly apologized.

In short, economic growth, constant interaction in the political and electoral process fueled by responsive public officials, and the maturation of the Hmong younger generation all contributed to Moua's victory. But, as in all events, nothing happens in a vacuum.

Mee Moua ran her campaign on four issues: education, affordable housing, public safety, and economic development. She successfully made the argument that all four issues are intertwined and that the state cannot expect to have a good work force if there are not good schools, and there cannot be good schools where children can learn if there are cold homes where children cannot do their homework.

In the first weeks of her campaign, she visited community centers, schools, parent teacher groups, and ethnic radio and television shows. While no one would publicly support her prior to the primary, behind the scenes, progressives, stunned by Benanav's loss, came to help door-knock and lit-drop. For three weekends in January, Moua was able to consistently mobilize over 250 volunteers to drop over 30,000 literature pieces showing people where to go and vote and what to bring with them to the polls.

In some ways, Moua's campaign was no different from other traditional campaigns: identify your base, win the primary, expand the base, get some of your opponent's voters, and then GOTV and in the process raise money, attend events, and get the media coverage. What made her victory unique was her base: poor people of color. Moua was committed to reaching out to the disenfranchised and marginalized voter and even at one point stated, to the surprise and dismay of her staff, that she did not care if she lost, as long as she was able to bring people out to the polls. After Moua's victory, the Minnesota voter file, which stores information from 1980, boasted over 5,000 Hmong names, of which over 500 names came from the Senate District 67 special election.

Since Moua's victory, Hmong people have not been viewed the same. In the span of just a couple of months, there are now three Hmong campaign managers leading senate and house-wide campaigns, the press secretary for the democratic gubernatorial candidate is Hmong, and a deputy political director for the Wellstone campaign, are Hmong. On all levels from senatorial to local county commissioners, from all across the state in small towns like Walnut Grove to suburbs like Cottage Grove and Woodbury, Hmong voters are being courted.

After her primary opponent called to concede on January 15, Mee Moua's supporters jumped up and down, crying and laughing. They ran outside of the campaign headquarters, jumped into their cars and speeded away to the victory party. Someone haphazardly pulled a hand-printed poster from the wall and frantically waved it up and down. The sign read: "Remember this movement. It will never come again. Years from now we will read about it in the history books. People will write that this was the moment the Hmong people arrived."

Pakou Hang is a community organizer with Progressive Minnesota. She was deputy political director with the Paul Wellstone Campaign.