For the first time, Cal Poly’s Hmong Student Association will take the stage at Illuminate, bringing their culture to one of the university’s biggest dance showcases.
Illuminate is a student-run Cal Poly dance showcase that features around 17 teams to represent the diverse dance styles and cultures that make up the student body.
This year, a newly established cultural club on campus, the Hmong Student Association or HSA, will be making their performance debut with two dances that feature a mix of the cultures that make up who they are, according to HSA co-president and Illuminate choreographer, Mailee Vang.
The Hmong people are an indigenous group that originated in China, near the Yellow River, according to Vang. The Hmong were persecuted by China, leaving many to settle in the mountainous areas of Laos, Vietnam and Thailand.
For co-president Vang, it was important to create a community on campus that celebrated and fostered a community for Hmong students.
“When you come to Cal Poly, and it’s a PWI, all of a sudden you kind of feel out of place,” Vang said. “And not only speaking from an Asian student’s perspective, but especially from a Hmong perspective, you meet other Asian students, and then they’re like, ‘Oh, what’s Hmong?’ They’ve never heard of it before.”
That unfamiliarity was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Hmong Student Association earlier this year. Founded by a small group of students, HSA now has about 10 regularly attending members and serves as a space for Hmong students to find one another on campus.
Vang mentioned that as the Hmong people have only been in the U.S. for about 40 to 50 years leading not many students to go far for college.
“For us to put ourselves out there is already rare, and then for us to put ourselves out there and nobody knows who we are, it’s a little bit sad,” Vang said. “You start to realize that if you don’t speak up, then nobody’s going to know who you are. You’ll die out in places where community is not.”
Performing at Illuminate is one way that the HSA is choosing to put themselves and their culture out there.
The first dance they will perform is choreographed by Vang and will be an homage to the Hmong people’s time in Thailand. It will be performed to an instrumental Thai song with parts of northern Thai music and American Thai music combined together.
The second dance is choreographed by HSA co-social chair, Ashley Yang. This piece will be a love story of two people yearning for each other and calling out for one another, according to other co–social chair, Maxine Vang. The performance will be to a modern Hmong song, where the audience will be able to hear the Hmong language and voices.
Dancers will be dressed in a mix of modern and traditional Hmong wear. The women will be wearing traditional Hmong skirts, or diam tiabs, while the men will be wearing traditional Hmong pieces on both top and bottom.
Co-social chair Maxine Vang wants their performance to emulate powerful emotion and be a representation of the Hmong community on Cal Poly’s campus.
“I want people to recognize Hmong people as a whole. I know we’re very unknown, and I kind of want everyone to learn that Hmong people exist, especially here [at Cal Poly],” Maxine said. “For this event in specific, I want other Hmong people that we haven’t met to see that we’re here. HSA is for other Hmong students who don’t know that there are people like them.”
Hmong history
For co-president Vang, the performance carries generations of history.
Vang says that for the Hmong people, they do not necessarily associate with the culture of the Hmong Chinese, known as the Hmong Miao. After leaving China and uprooting to locations all over the world, their culture has begun to change and differ.
During the Vietnam War, the Hmong people aided the Americans after being promised land for doing so. Vang mentioned that at the time, Hmong people kept to themselves and had little access to the outside world beyond their own villages.
“The way that my parents and my grandparents, and a lot of Hmong people might describe it to you is that we saw injured American soldiers and we were just there to help injured people, but we didn’t fully know what was going on,” Vang said.
After aiding the Americans, the promised land did not materialize, and many Hmong people in Vietnam were later targeted for their involvement in the war, Vang said.
The Hmong people were fleeing to refugee camps in northern Thailand, and according to Vang, the camps were being overrun to the point where they were being flown to places like the U.S., Australia and France.
“So when we talk about Hmong people, we don’t really have a land, and we’re kind of everywhere,” Vang said. “For our culture as well, we’ve been persecuted, and we’ve had to assimilate to so many different places; what’s Hmong is not necessarily always Hmong.”
Hmong people have taken bits from different cultures that reflect in things like their food, religion and even dance. They take some components of Vietnamese and Thai food, yet follow Chinese spirituality closely and believe in the water dragon.
“For our dance, it’s very much Thai and Americanized, and a little bit of Bollywood as well because that’s who we were around at the time when we were making dance,” Vang said.
This year, dancers will take the Performing Arts Center stage for a two-hour performance on Saturday, Feb. 21, with two showtimes at 12 p.m. and 6 p.m. The showcase is put on by United Movement, which is a non-audition campus dance team, according to their Instagram.