[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Keeping family and kin safe and together is at the core of Hmong kinship.Established roles and expectations are important, but they can bend if needed.This newly established, small tsev neeg (house family) left in 1991, about the same time the refugee camps were closing down in Thailand.At the time of our interview, the grandmother, her grandson and his wife and their children were living in a trailer park on the outskirts of a small city in Western Wisconsin.In order to immigrate to the United States, Hmong refugee families had to have the financial support of a third party.Five types of sponsorship were available to refugees: by an individual U.S.citizen, family, church group, voluntary agency, or a relative already living in the U.S.(Koltyk 1998).I asked a multitude of questions about sponsorship to determine if there were any reoccurring patterns of support.Did Hmong friends with citizenship ever sponsoracquaintances? Did people rely more on the wife’s side of the family or the husband’s for support?Churches and non-profit organizations typically sponsoredrefugees who sought asylum in the early days of resettlement.Relatives already in the host country often sponsored families who immigrated later.Officially, the role of a sponsor is “to assist a new refugee in becoming a productive member of a host society” (Tran70Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees1991:537).Temporarily, refugees are dependent on the sponsor both economically and socially.Kinship ties—consanguinial, affinal, and sometimes both, wereused by Hmong refugees to establish lines of support.To illustrate this fact, I compiled a partial list of responses I received when I asked the question—who sponsored you?--- “My stepfather, his brother sponsored us, he’s inCalifornia.”---“ My wife’s brother.”--- “My dad’s older sister.”--- “My dad has a sister that lives there [in Wausau,Wisconsin] and so she sponsored us.”-- “When we came to the United States, Toua Lor was thesponsor of our family.His last name is the same as my lastname.In Hmong we could call us kwvtij [cousin-brother] too,but he kind of has a relationship to my wife because my wife’smother is his sister.”---“I think it was my grandpa’s brother, one of my greatuncles.”--- “So my wife’s family came to the United States and theysponsored my family.”It is worth reemphasizing that even distant ties to consanguinal and affinal kin aided Hmong refugees’ passage to the United States.Most of the people I spoke with said they knew their sponsoring relatives back in Laos.No one in this study identified friends, associates, or fictive kin (family friends, god-parents, etc.) as sponsors.Churches and non-profit agencies played a significant role because they helped sponsor thousands of refugee Hmong families.Without a doubt, these“outside” sources of support were critical for refugee families.The assistance provided by non-Hmong agencies and individuals isappreciated and acknowledged to this day by members of the Hmong community.Even so, I am confident in saying non-Hmong sources of support are viewed as temporary and conditional because Hmongpeople generally believe they need to rely on each other to make things work out.In the vast majority of cases I studied, people relied on kin first and then the wider community.In Chapter 4, I will discuss indicators of changing attitudes regarding reliance on kin, and theRupture and Resilience71influence of organizations in the Hmong community, but at this point in the Hmong refugee experience, most turned to a time-honored system of social relationships based on descent and marriage.Once a family decided to relocate to the United States, thepaperwork process began.Applications including names andbiographical data of all family members were compiled, which required a good deal of guessing, since Hmong traditionally don’t register specific birth dates and marriage dates.Next, the U.S.embassy and Immigration and Naturalization Service reviewed and either rejected or approved the refugees’ applications for resettlement.Myunderstanding is that applicants needed to prove they, or other family members, were involved in the war on the side of the Americans.Those who were eligible to arrive in the U.S.as refugees but had no sponsors were referred to local VOLAGs to find sponsors [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]