“I’m a Wisconsin girl through and through with an agricultural background, but yet I’ve learned a lot about Wisconsin’s farming industry that I had not known before. “Being involved with this project has been a valuable experience,” says Stephanie Hoff, who worked with the LWS project. In all, the project’s leaders aimed to relate people across the state by highlighting connections to farming and the land, throughout history. Throughout the project, the LWS team hoped participants, either at the exhibits or the dinners, would identify common interests and discuss shared community visions, drawing on personal experiences in farming, on the land, or with food. Interviews gathered eventually will be archived and made available to the general public. Most of the nine stops so far on the exhibit’s tour lasted three weeks, and five included a community engagement event with farm-to-table dinners and conversations. With the information gathered through countless hours, the team created a traveling exhibit that featured the stories, histories, artifacts, images, and sounds of six culturally and regionally distinct farms. Getting to know them, befriend them, work with them, and truly learn with them – those are the most rewarding moments.” “But those same people are the reason that LWS was so worthwhile. We’ve been coordinating with faculty, staff, and students on four campuses, as well as communities across the state,” explains Reeves. “Being a part of the Lands We Share initiative has been the most challenging effort our program has undertaken logistically. Troy Reeves, Head of the UW –Madison Archives’ Oral History program and co-principal investigator, was brought in for his expansive expertise in gathering and processing oral history.

LWS is a collaboration of four University of Wisconsin campuses (Whitewater, Oshkosh, Milwaukee, and Madison). Now the project’s exhibit is on display in Madison, and the project will wrap up with a gala, including presentation and panel, on May 16.įocusing on the intersection of farming, land, race, and ethnicity in the state, this initiative of the Wisconsin Farms Oral History Project set out with a goal of bringing people from diverse backgrounds together people often separated despite living and working in the same towns or regions. Courtesy of Ken Virden/ LWS teamįor more than a year, the project team for The Lands We Share (LWS) effort has traveled the state meeting, talking to, and gathering stories from those who know Wisconsin intimately.

This new understanding redefines concepts of Hmong homogeneity and characterizes ordinary Hmong migrants not as passive victims but as dynamic actors who have exercised much power over their political and social destinies.A farmer is interviewed as part of the Lands We Share project. Her critique of previous representations of the Hmong community provides the sociological underpinnings for a bold reassessment of Hmong history in the greater context of globalization. Combining participant observation and archival research with personal experience, Vang constructs a nuanced and complex portrait of the more than 130,000 Hmong people who came to the United States as political refugees beginning in the mid-1970s. Vang depicts Hmong experiences in Asia and examines aspects of community building in America to reveal how new Hmong identities have been formed and how they have challenged popular assumptions about race and ethnicity in multicultural America.

The first scholarly work to come from inside the Hmong community, Hmong America documents Chia Youyee Vang's own migration from Laos to Minnesota at age nine and the transformations she has witnessed in Hmong communities throughout the migration and settlement processes.

May tchia vang