Abstract
For many migrants and refugees, place provides a common sense of territorial identity despite these groups having roots elsewhere. Using the case of the Hmong diaspora, the following calls for a reconsideration of how place is theorized in planning and introduces the term “translocal placemaking” to better reflect new social formations and the overdetermination of locality. This relational conception of place captures the complexity of spatial and temporal relations as locales are not isolated from one another and draws attention to the various entanglements that historically shape spatial practices including the memories and ties to extralocal places.
Planners and urban designers, intentionally or unintentionally, situate their work in places despite the fact that placemaking practices are carried out by a number of social actors across different locations (Healey 2010; Healey and Upton 2010). Thus, it is important to understand how places are shaped by different individuals and groups, and the local and extralocal relations therein. We use the term “translocal placemaking” to capture this dynamic, taking into account the role of both local and extralocal policies and actions in shaping places. Translocal placemaking can be defined as practices that territorialize translocal circuits of social and material relations in space and time. A translocal understanding of place differs from how the concept is typified in planning, which is alternatively viewed as a localized “sense of place,” a bounded territory for decision making, or a phenomenological understanding of inhabitation, among others. While these describe various dimensions of place, they are constrained by the lack of attention to spatiotemporal processes such as migration, mobility, and territoriality and fail to capture how places contain ideas and practices that circulate to and from other locations.
Problematizing assumptions of place, and understandings of how the process of placemaking is tied to other places, we discuss the translocal practices of the Hmong community who originally came to the United States as refugees in the 1970s. Perhaps reflective of the Hmong’s diasporic history, their seminomadic villages, and the importance of their strong kinship structure, the Hmong word for home—tsev—does not refer to a geographic location, but one’s relationship to family and clan leadership (Miyares 1997, 216). The Hmong kinship structure has, and continues to be in diaspora, ordered through exogamous patrilineal clan affiliation. The clan structure provides a system of social reproduction “fostering a sense of group unity as a value” (Hein 2006, 69). Some scholars argue that the Hmong clan system acts as a “space challenging mechanism,” allowing for homogenous clan communities across long distances and borders, “acting against locality and nation” while organizing local social and economic relations (Trapp 2010, 210).
Historically, in the United States the Hmong were territorialized through macro-level planning policies shaping resettlement patterns. A nation-state’s resettlement programs and policies are designed to re-territorialize de-territorialized refugees, creating them as new types of citizen-subjects, in their new locales (Ong 2003). However, the Hmong’s strong clan structure has served as a deterrent against the U.S. government’s dispersal policy that scattered members of newly arrived refugee groups across the United States. 1 Resisting this policy, Hmong left their host families and original locations, engaging in secondary migrations to reconnect with other Hmong, especially where there existed a strong migration infrastructure of organizations, social welfare benefits, and refugee services. Correspondingly, a constellation of territorial communities has emerged in California and Minnesota, and on smaller scales a few locations elsewhere.
As an extreme, but paradigmatic, case (Flyvbjerg 2006), the translocal practices of the Hmong challenge assumptions of placemaking, calling for a reconsideration of how place is theorized in planning to better reflect new social formations and the overdetermination of locality. The case raises a question about the way to think about place, inhabitance, the fixity of boundaries, and what it means to dwell in place. In particular, How do diaspora groups facilitate placemaking through translocal practices and what are the implications for planning theory?
The following argues for a relational conception of place that captures the complexity of spatial and temporal relations. Locales are not isolated from each other but rather assemble different circuits of social, economic, cultural, and political practices. Drawing from theorizations of place in planning and human geography, we analyze two aspects of translocal placemaking related to the Hmong community: (1) practices that emplace group livelihood and (2) the establishment of translocal circuits for social, political, and economic purposes. In sum, we argue for a conception of place as an assemblage of circuits characterized by de-territorializations and re-territorializations of sociomaterial relations, and placemaking as a translocal process of territorializing these circuits, for a time, through emplaced practices.
The Influence of Deleuze and Guattari in Planning Theory
Relevant to this discussion, a number of scholars have drawn from the works of post-structuralist philosophers Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to theorize contemporary planning practice. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage provides a theorization of how emergent entities are forged through a territoriality that is dependent on processes of continuous material and immaterial circulations described as de-territorializations and re-territorializations (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 88). As a geographical location, places are de-territorialized when existing purposes and meanings are replaced, or re-territorialized, for new ones. Redevelopment districts, the rebranding of places, and use of eminent domain to alter preexisting land uses are some illustrations from the planning field. Similarly, the claiming of public and private spaces for the staging of cultural festivals, food vending, pop-up parks, and protests, among other events, demonstrate how places are more ephemerally de-territorialized and re-territorialized for shorter periods of time.
These illustrations show that the constant, “natural,” flows of objects and ideas manifest an assemblage in a state of becoming, as opposed to static being. The content and expression of an assemblage is subject to change and transformation that both operate within the assemblage and beyond to other assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 504–5). The interplay between local and regional policies that effect ideas and practices across and between multiple scales, for example, climate action planning, is one example. Thus, assemblages are a way to think about how disparate things and people come together for a time but that such moments of relationship are never static and are constantly effected by forces beyond the immediate assemblage.
Within planning, Jean Hillier has been the most prolific scholar of post-structuralist planning, emphasizing Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology/imagery of rhizome, characterized by decentered multiplicity and networks, as inspiration for her conception of “multiplanar spatial planning” that introduces a relational approach to the contingent qualities of place, time, and actant behaviors (Hillier 2007, 2008, 2011a). Hillier has also explored the Deleuzean concepts of becoming and immanence (Hillier 2005), and used Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage in developing a method of “cartographically tracing” ideas utilized in justifying planning interventions/decision making (Hillier 2009, 2011b), and to theorize civic engagement (Hillier and Van Wezemael 2007). For example, in analyzing an art installation on a beach in northwest England, Hillier (2011b) develops a methodology that reveals multiple assemblages at play in one location—an economic assemblage of government, development, and resident groups focused on urban regeneration; and a risk and safety assemblage composed of government and environmental groups concerned about negative impacts.
Similarly, Van Wezemael (2008) argues that the concept of assemblage provides an ontological basis for analyzing new modes of relational networked governances, seeing assemblage as at best conceptualizing, and mapping, the relations between actors, that is, the assemblage, without lapsing into “oversimplified” and “essentialist images” like “urban governance” (180). Lagendijk and Boertjes (2013) explore an assemblage composed of “local creativity and capacity-building” in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, as interconnected with the global “circulation of ideas and practices” of Light Rail as a planning concept (290–91). While not referring to assemblage explicitly, Wood (2009) also sees Deleuze and Guattari’s deterritorialization and reterritorialization as means to understand how planning discourse informs particular development projects, specifically how urban development works by deterritorializing existing desires and then reterritorializing new ones as a way to reframe planning goals and strategies (203). For example, the discursive framing of sites as “blighted” and the marshaling of data for such purposes is one way in which planners often sway citizen opinions about what constitutes “nuisance” on one hand and “highest and best use” on the other.
Perhaps most important for our discussion, a number of scholars outside the field of planning have begun to discuss place and translocality from a Deleuzoguattarian perspective. 2 The work of Kim Dovey (2010), in particular, surveys concepts employed by Deleuze and Guattari to derive a definition of place as assemblage that “cannot be reduced to an essence nor a social construction” (p. 17) and “can be identified with the axis of territorialization” (23). Relatedly, Dovey, Woodcock, and Wood (2009) informatively survey differing approaches to theorizing place and present a case study of a Melbourne neighborhood’s regulation of “urban character.” Moving across the ideas of Harvey and Massey, to Heidegger and Bourdieu, to stress the importance of thinking about urban character and place as immanent rather than transcendent, assemblage is positioned as being a “useful conceptual framework” that “connects the ‘feel + form’ and the ‘social + physical’ dimensions of place” (2611). Similarly, McFarlane uses the term “translocal assemblages” to describes the spatiotemporal nature of social movements to signify how place-based movements are composed of (1) an exchange of “ideas, knowledge, practices, materials, and resources across sites”; (2) “more than just connections between sites” that take into account historical formations; and (3) “performance and events” and “are not simply a spatial category, output, or resultant formation” (2009, 561–62). 3 McFarlane’s contribution draws connections between a Deleuze and Guattari–inspired discussion of assemblages, how they manifest translocally, and the implications for reconceptualizing power and agency.
In sum, planning scholars have begun to incorporate poststructuralist philosophy into contemporary theory in different ways. The concept of assemblage has been particularly useful in describing the relational, contingent, and temporal aspects of planning activities. However, the use of the concept has often failed to problematize matters of place beyond issues of livability or locale. By contrast, a few scholars outside of planning consider how conceptualizing place as an assemblage allows room to incorporate physical and social dimensions simultaneously, which has implication for issues of agency and power. To problematize the way place is conceptualized within the planning field and discuss how some planning and geography scholars have more presciently discussed the significance of mobility and migration vis-à-vis placemaking, we now turn to a brief review of this literature.
Locating Place in Planning
A focus on place in the planning field has been frequently oriented toward solving aesthetic, technical, or policy-related problems. While the specific foci are varied, these have ranged from urban design concerns with character and imageability and the normative search for “good city form” (Southworth 1985; Talen and Ellis 2002), to appropriate methods and techniques to improve assessment, decision-making, and pedagogical approaches (Arefi and Triantafillou 2005; Mehta 2007; Passon, Levi, and del Rio 2002; Talen and Coffindaffer 1999), to the identification of ideal geographical boundaries for urban and regional development programs, strategies, and assessments to optimize resource distribution (Arefi 2003; Bolton 1992; Spencer 2005). Despite increased attention to the idea “place matters,” many such framings are constrained by the lack of attention to place from a relational perspective and, in particular, spatiotemporal processes at different scales.
The idea of placemaking emerged within the planning field as a practice of urban design to address transformations to urban environments during the 1970s and 1980s (Aravot 2002, 204). Development projects during this era, gentrification and the “Disneyfication of space,” for example, were seen as creating new built environments that produced place as a commodity engendering feelings of estrangement and alienation (Aravot 2002, 202). The production of placelessness was interpreted as evoking a “yearning for place . . . the palpable physicality of cities and the everyday need for social contact” (Friedmann 2010, 150), and design was understood as having built this “horror of placelessness” (Friedmann 2010, 152) as a means of enhancing consumption behavior. Thus, the belief was that more “authentic” placemaking could be employed to rebuild a genuine “sense of place” through a different approach to urbanism (Aravot 2002, 206). Correspondingly, the understanding of place has since focused most explicitly on physical and aesthetic dimensions of the built environment. The form of the built environment is understood to embody and transmit a “sense of place,” and placemaking is the process by which meaning is produced through form and is derived from knowledge of place historically embedded within a locale (Shibley, Schneekloth, and Hovey 2003).
More recent studies highlight the importance of placemaking to solve specific problems. A “Green Health approach” capable of reducing health epidemics such as obesity through urban form (Botchwey, Trowbridge, and Fisher 2014) or “creative placemaking” that shapes “the physical and social character of a neighborhood, town, city, or region around the arts and cultural activities” (Markusen 2013, 292) are examples. However, these tend to locate specific planning problems mostly within the built environment and placemaking through urban and community design as the primary solution.
Also prevalent within the planning literature is the representation of place as bounded or inward while presenting desirable placemaking practices as a means of place maintenance. Schneekloth and Shibley (1995) situate the practice of placemaking as focusing on “place and the people-in-place as the basic unit—the frame through which any intervention occurs” (p. 6). Both Schneekloth and Shibley’s seminal work and the placemaking literature in planning that has followed views placemaking as manipulating the built environment for a variety of social and economic purposes. 4 Further, the literature represents place linked to the “outside world” only through macro-structures (globalization, for example) that deteriorate a preestablished “sense of place” in favor of a meaningless placelessness. For example, Friedmann (2010) celebrates the “art of placemaking” as seeking to preserve the “centered” and “inwardness” of place from the unmooring of time-space compression and class-based celebrations of speed, movement, and power, which according to him mistakenly underpin more relational understandings of place (156–59). Friedmann concedes that “places are open to the world” but associates that openness with change over long periods of time as opposed to being assembled within their everyday becoming (Friedmann 2010, 156–57). Both explicitly and more often implicitly, placemaking within the planning field is typically expressed as a practice of preserving or facilitating a desirably bounded and necessarily local notion of place and community. 5
The most significant contribution within the planning literature that contrasts with a bounded “sense of place” comes from a focus on transnationalism. Related to the topic of this article, transnational placemaking can be described as placemaking across national borders, often for economic reasons (Guarnizo and Smith 1999; Smith 2001). Transnational placemaking is translocal in nature inasmuch as the term describes placemaking activities in both sending and receiving regions. The flow of migrants across national borders enables transnational placemaking through kinship and friendship ties, resulting in the reproduction of people and place. One example shows how immigrants recruited to work in a rural Illinois meatpacking plant reinvigorated local institutions, residences, and commercial districts to form multiracial communities (Miraftab 2011). This migration process is also multidirectional, as immigrants often provide material support through hometown associations and remittances to improve infrastructure and buildings in sending regions (Sandoval 2012). Others studies highlight that transnational mobility also includes circulations of populations between metropolitan regions and among primary and secondary cities (Simone 2011). Complicit in this form of placemaking include the state, employees, and even other immigrants in both sending and receiving locales that are dependent on undocumented individuals and unauthorized communities (Sandoval 2013).
When transnational mobility is severed, however, translocality takes on a different character, changing notions of belonging and how economic, political, and cultural relations are reconstituted and produced. Moreover, transnational placemaking is a moment in time, but by no means the only expression of translocal placemaking. Others include placemaking across regions and cities within sovereign boundaries as well as former transnational migrants that have settled in receiving regions. These examples do not suggest the loss of transnational identities as the memories of sending regions often remain with many migrant communities, resulting in hybrid forms of place attachment in receiving locations (Main 2012; Main and Sandoval 2014). While the planning literature on transnationalism has contributed to a better understanding about the ties and linkages of locales to macro-processes across sovereign borders, there is much work to be done in analyzing place-to-place relations, which are not necessarily characterized as transnational.
In contrast to transnationalism, studies of translocality describe the flows of peoples, ideas, and resources in situ. The everyday use of public transport, streets, and parks, for example, ties together a constellation of other spaces within and beyond the city (Datta 2011, 75). Geographers Brickell and Datta (2011) highlight the importance of “translocal micro-reproduction” that is not exclusively transnational, nor economic, but is bound to different locales within national boundaries signified by a range of social, familial, cultural, and we would argue, spatial practices. The practice of translocal placemaking also takes into account the often instability of the local places where participation is limited or nonexistent for many groups because of a lack power. It is in this light that Page (2011) describes the “fear of small distances” as a survival strategy for marginalized groups that are socially and economically excluded in local settings. As such, translocal encounters, in the case of many migrant and refugee communities, create a sense extraterritorial belonging and solidarity defined by kinship and cultural ties. However, translocality is mutually constituted by a group’s imagination and material symbols, which create connections between locations (Blunt and Dowling 2006; Brickell and Datta 2011). In other words, the use of visual materials and other material objects enable the symbolic and affective bridging between locations as well as a heightened sense of home even when the possibility of return is nonexistent.
These perspectives shed light on the limits to current theorizations of place and placemaking in planning and the need to complement, but go beyond, transnational perspectives. Attention to spatial-temporal processes at different scales that transcend a global/local logic or a geographically fixed “sense of place” is a starting point. The topic of translocality also suggests a relational understanding of place and a view of placemaking as a historically contingent process of local and extralocal forces rather than a solution to narrowly defined aesthetic, technical, or policy-related problems.
Translocal Placemaking: A Case of the Hmong Diaspora
Perspectives on both transnational and translocal geographies problematize conventional definitions of place as static, bounded or essentialized. What can be gleaned from these recent theorizations? First is attention to the territorializing effects in particular locales and the impact of multiscalar policies and actions that determine mobility, settlement, and resettlement patterns. Second is how space is re-territorialized through emplaced practices that span geographies and scales. By “emplaced practices,” we mean the material becoming of place, for a time, as an assemblage of de-territorializations and re-territorializations circulating across space. Third is conceptualizing place as an assemblage of circuits—of people, ideas, resources, labor, etc.—that negotiate between local and extralocal processes and draw together local circumstance with external political and economic forces. 6 We use the term “circuits of solidarity” to describe the circulation of activities and ideas designed to reproduce and further group livelihood and identity through collective action and organization across particular locations. 7 Translocal placemaking also brings into focus questions of agency shaped by social, cultural, and economic practices that travel from one location to another and back again. The importance of translocal placemaking in planning discourse is that it draws attention to the various entanglements that historically shape spatial practices, including, but not limited to, the memories and ties to extralocal places.
The following presents some of the findings of a larger qualitative study of Hmong translocal placemaking. 8 The data were gathered through in-depth and semi-structured interviews, informal unstructured interviews, direct observations, and secondary research conducted between 2010 and 2013. Direct observation complemented interviews by providing insight into the characteristics of the events and attendees, and how material and discursive extralocal relations materially crystalized in and across place. Particular emphasis was given to the identification and understanding of translocal relations.
The Hmong’s clan structure has enabled place-to-place relations, which has further strengthened translocal ties through a number of placemaking practices. One example is a weekly farmers market in Sacramento, which facilitates economic and cultural reproduction of the Hmong through localized and emplaced practices. A self-described “Asian Market” on the site of an abandoned gas station, operating at the boundaries of local codes and regulations, has become a regular event where the Hmong have interpreted for their own purposes site-specific conditions and norms of the ubiquitous farmers market. Another example of translocal placemaking is an annual New Year’s celebration, which serves as a site of exchange among the larger diaspora community and is a vital component of Hmong-specific community and economic development, despite the absence of planners in helping to facilitate this ongoing event. Moreover, it is the social and cultural reproduction of the Hmong through ritualized and emplaced practices such as courtship, pageants, and sporting events that serve as the basis for maintaining economic relations. Both of these events rely on the Hmong’s translocal circuits to facilitate the flow of knowledge and practices, but these circuits have also built the capacity of the Sacramento Hmong community at multiple scales. In the policy arena, one example is an annual conference of Hmong farmers faced with the precariousness of small-scale farming and land tenure. By building collective ties across regional boundaries and state lines, Hmong farmers have situated their concerns between the need to engage federal and state policy makers and the continued struggle for farmer rights in local communities. These examples, described below, highlight the ways in which translocal placemaking unfolds, with or without planners, and how policy, planning, and their discrepancies shape the placemaking activities of immigrant and refugee communities.
Territorializing through Emplaced Practices and Circuits of Solidarity
Farming in the United States is often described by Hmong as a link to their past, a link to Asia and their fellow coethnics there, and important to the reproduction of a Hmong way of life in diaspora. The dream and opportunity to farm has been a significant component of the first-generation Hmong refugee American experience. The cultivation of land has been established by Hmong that find it difficult to assimilate into American culture and seek familiarity of a life they left behind in parts of Laos and Vietnam. As such, Hmong community gardens, often found on vacant or underutilized plots of land, consist of both formal and informal arrangements with property owners and nonprofit organizations. These gardens are a source of food for many low-income Hmong families and, in particular, the elderly who view community gardens as a site for daily exercise and socialization with other Hmong seniors (Figure 1).
One of the largest Hmong gardens in Sacramento, nine acres that serves forty families, was created through an informal arrangement between Hmong gardeners and an adjacent Catholic elementary school that owns the land. Gardeners pay the priest for water usage but are not charged for garden plots.
In Sacramento, a weekly farmer’s market that has been operating for more than twenty-five years illustrates that translocal circuits come together as an assemblage of emplaced practices in a site. Known as the Asian Market, it is within a block’s distance from the Central Market, Sacramento’s largest weekly farmers market that takes place under the I-50 freeway. In addition to providing a viable income for many Hmong families, the Asian Market serves a social purpose, especially for Hmong elders that visit weekly with one another. Early Sunday morning, the market begins with the manager selling live chickens from his truck, followed by approximately twenty Hmong vendors that set up tables under portable tents to sell Asian produce ranging from Thai basil and peppers to eggplants, melons, and Chinese squash (Figure 2).
The site of the Asian Market is an abandoned gas station, which is transformed into a crowded and lively market space on Sunday mornings.
The origins of the market are unclear, although a number of interviewees mentioned the lack of a weekly farmers market to serve Sacramento’s Asian community and close proximity to the Central Market as reasons. A former Sacramento city planning commissioner shared that he was approached and decided to help negotiate using the site as a farmer’s market with the property owner. What was later to be known as the Asian Market began operating in the mid-1980s as an informal market without any permits. In 2005, an off-duty health inspector noticed the selling of slaughtered chickens and subsequently notified the city to bring the market into conformance with local land use ordinances. Since then, the market has been classified as a Mobile Food Facility rather than a certified market, which enables Hmong vendors to sell what is grown from a farm, a backyard, or produce bought elsewhere, as well as live chickens. Because of the growing popularity of the Asian Market, a number of safety concerns were also raised about the use of the adjacent street, leading to further negotiations between the then city planning commissioner, vendors, and city staff to hire off-duty police officers to close the street, thus expanding the market space beyond the confines of the property.
One of the vendors, a nineteen-year-old woman, illustrates the linkage between family farming and selling of produce. She described how, as a college student, she still finds time each week to help her family farm on leased plots in several cities. On Sundays, she is one of several family members selling produce and provides a much-needed bridge between her parents in negotiating with English-speaking patrons as her parents are monolingual. She stated that her family leases small plots of land ranging in size from 5 to 10 acres and share farm equipment with other Hmong families cultivating adjacent fields. All interviewees confirmed the predominance of working multiple plots in different locations, some farming plots as small as one acre. Typical of many Hmong farmers, the vendor shared that her family travels between multiple locations on a weekly basis:
My father has land in Fresno and farms there. My parents will be there on Fridays and then they bring it back (to their home in Sacramento), and then on Saturdays they will farm land in Elk Grove, and then come to the market on Sundays.
Knowledge of farming techniques, crop production, and other valuable information is circulated through kinship networks and with other Hmong at the various farmers markets that are scattered throughout the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys. According to several other interviewees, many Hmong farmers prefer to sell their produce to wholesalers, but struggle meeting wholesale quality standards and/or to adequately market their product. Establishing a relationship with a wholesaler is desired as it ensures a market for their produce. For example, one vendor stated that he regularly has a 50 percent loss of crop because of lack of buyers. Farmers markets are thus often seen as secondary options according to interviewees, as selling at farmers markets requires costly barriers of entry such as warehousing/storage (often expensive refrigeration) and transportation that are only overcome through collaborations with other Hmong. Therefore, the pooling of resources facilitates selling produce at farmers markets.
Small-scale farming and the Asian Market reproduce a Hmong way of life in diaspora while adapting it to the context of relocation. What makes the Asian Market unique is the blend of formality and informality, and the market’s material and symbolic status as a place where a Hmong way of life is combined with American Hmong way of life assembled through emplaced practices that circulate translocally. The dual nature of translocal placemaking as being both an adaptation to the local and extralocal circumstances, as well as a desired practice is evident. In this case, translocal placemaking was in part necessitated by land insecurity and poor integration with wholesale operations, further implicated by land use regulations, but also the desire by Hmong farmers and consumers from across the region to have a market (place) of their own. The site is a place where the Hmong de-territorialize what is perceived as an abandoned, unsafe, and blighted gas station; appropriate the space for their own purposes in the form of an ephemeral marketplace; and where the Hmong are re-territorialized by the practices of American land tenure relations and commodity farming. The Asian Market also illustrates the constant interplay between de-territorializations and re-territorializations as the site reverts back to an abandoned gas station after the market is dismantled each Sunday.
Another example of the Hmong’s emplaced practices, incorporating material and symbolic elements to reproduce a Hmong way of life, is the Hmong New Year’s celebration. The New Year’s celebration has been, and continues to be, the most important annual event to the Hmong. Both traditionally, and in the United States, the celebration serves as a site of de-territorialization and re-territorialization through circuits of cultural, commodity, and solidarity exchange, and reproduction between Hmong generations, families, clans, and spatially dispersed Hmong communities. Major components of the celebration in Asia were the opportunity to arrange marriages, exchange gifts, honor clan leaders and elders, and interact with distant relatives (Miyares 1997, 220). The celebration would bring together spatially separated villages, with a host village inviting Hmong from other villages to participate. Thus, many Hmong would not only take part in their own village’s celebration, but often travel to others as the Hmong New Year runs roughly from November to December, corresponding to the lunar calendar. Circuits of solidarity facilitated attendance. The emplaced practice of holding a celebration transformed villages into sites of translocal placemaking as networking, forging alliances, and cultivating channels of reciprocity were vital outcomes of the celebration—sites for the development of social capital and the dissemination of information, custom, and material culture. The Hmong have continued to hold this celebration in the United States, in some respects adapting its tradition yet remaining true to its ethos of building and sustaining Hmong community across space.
The first Hmong New Year celebration in Sacramento was held in 1980. Since its inception in Sacramento, the location has changed venues, although the event has been held at the Cal Expo Center since 2005. The event draws Hmong from across California and even the United States, from both smaller and larger enclaves alike. In California, there are nine separate Hmong New Year celebrations each year. In early 2013, the Hmong New Year Council formed as a body composed of representatives from each of California’s nine celebrations to improve and market the State’s celebrations through increased information and best practice exchange.
As in Asia, circuits of solidarity facilitate external participation and attendance, with a reciprocity that not only extends to Hmong attendees but also event organizers, volunteers, and vendors as well. As is the case with all New Year celebrations, the Sacramento event also serves as a circuit between Hmong communities in Asia and the United States, providing a market for goods imported from Asia not widely available in the United States. Each year nearly three hundred vendors operate at the Sacramento event. According to one of the members of the organizing committee, non-Sacramento vendors come from not only California but also nationwide to take part, with approximately 20 percent of the nonlocal vendors traveling from out of state. Non-Sacramento Hmong vendors use kin and clan relations to assist with lodging and to better understand which services are needed at each event. Typically beginning on Thanksgiving each year, the four-day event occupies a portion of Cal Expo’s vast fairground. Most of the event takes place outside and is organized around a main stage with several smaller stages. Vendors selling food, traditional herbal medicines, nontraditional medicines produced in Thailand, Hmong clothing, music, videos, and other goods, form a perimeter around the main stage. The vast majority of the goods advertised that they were imported from Southeast Asia, though not all were Hmong produced. One informant, in his early twenties, reported that the imported goods are very important to his parents, particularly wood from a special tree that is burned in customs.
Equally important to translocally reproducing economic relations of the Hmong, the celebration also serves as a means of bridging and reproducing culture and custom as young and old wear traditional Hmong clothing. A beauty pageant, traditional and contemporary dancing, and other forms of social activities and entertainment structure each day of the event. Photo booths allow people to get their pictures taken in front of Southeast Asia landscapes of karst mountains, forest, and rivers (Figure 3). Other scenes depict images of past struggles and events. One de-territorializing scene shows a reverent General Vang Pao leading the Hmong out of the highland regions of Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand via military aircraft to the United States. 9 These and other scenes illustrate how translocality is imagined given that many Hmong have not returned to their historical homeland since relocation and, in some cases, have never set foot there. However, it is the materially emplaced practices enacted through the New Year’s event that facilitates social, cultural, and economic reproduction.
Many Hmong maintain translocal relationships through visual objects such as photographs showing imagined landscapes of homeland.
The Hmong have also built an extralocal “sense of place” in the community and economic development realm that have had implications in the policy arena. One event that has facilitated translocal placemaking has been the Annual National Farm Conference in Fresno, California, organized by the National Hmong American Farmers, Inc. (NHAF). From the first conference in 2003, which drew attendees from Oregon, Washington, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Arkansas, and across California, to the most recent conference, the event has served as a means of transcending locale-specific Hmong community to build and disseminate knowledge and practices translocally. A senior official in NHAF, and the event’s organizer, shared that an explicit goal of the 2013 conference was to facilitate the attendance of Hmong farmers from the major Hmong farm regions in California and from Hmong enclaves across the United States. Hmong farmers across the country face similar challenges and the conference was intended to serve as a conduit of assistance via the circulation of knowledges to disparate locales. The event was also designed to build circuits of solidarity across racial and ethnic farming communities through the inclusion of prominent African American, Latino, and Filipino farming representatives. Importantly, the event incorporated both farmers and policy makers in the transference of social, economic, and political knowledge and practices across territory and jurisdiction.
Specific understandings of threats to current and future generations of Hmong farmers also emerged as sources of solidarity through circulating narratives of being “targeted” by county and municipal planning through farming and land use regulations. Many of the speakers focused on explaining farming codes, encouraging learning, and keeping up-to-date with regulations and compliance to avoid enforcement issues. Such efforts served as a means of enabling the territorialization of particular placemaking practices translocally across Hmong communities. One interviewee, a farmer from the Twin Cities region of Minnesota, shared that a noise reduction law had been passed in his township, in his view, unfairly targeting Hmong farmers for being “too noisy.” These and other stories provided group awareness and created translocal affinities as individual and local struggles were linked to the extralocal. Solidarity across the Hmong community to other minority farming communities was a significant theme of the event. One of the farmer’s efforts to organize Hmong poultry workers across North Carolina was highlighted as an exemplar of extralocal organizing and best practice of community development through translocal placemaking.
Overall, the conference served as a liminal site for the articulation and dissemination of information, knowledges, and practices between communities that see themselves as united in solidarity yet separated by space. The conference was designed to de-territorialize emplaced practices and knowledges, and re-territorialize them for the entirety of Hmong locales. Existing placemaking practices were shared, new ones were suggested, and both were contextualized as being embedded within the wider social phenomenon of Hmong community across the U.S. The reproduction of culture was apparent through the inclusion of material artifacts, symbolic acts, and transcendent narratives of the role of farming to the Hmong. Material and immaterial conditions of locality were spoken of as being relationally enmeshed and codetermined with the extralocal. From the inclusion of particular individuals that served as dissemination mechanisms to the emphasis on certain solidarities, the conference challenged traditional views of place as being a containerized space bounding discrete identities, experiences, relations, and understandings. Translocally negotiated place materialized from the mobility of ideas across geographies.
Conclusion
The practices of the Hmong challenge how place is described in planning discourse and demonstrate a need to strengthen theories of placemaking to account for the overdetermination of locality and the multiple de-territorializing and re-territorializing practices that produce assemblages in space and time. The examples of translocality described present an alternative view of placemaking and how struggles over place materialize the intersection of global, national, and local forces, along with contests over past, present, and future imaginaries. Settlement policies, the regulation of farming, zoning codes, and permits are some examples of how both the extralocal and local state, including planning, shapes the material struggles and spatial practices of diaspora groups and migrant communities more broadly.
De-territorializing Planning
One implication for planning is a relational and multiscalar view of place sensitized to both local and extralocal contexts, and the acknowledgement that places are assemblages of circuits and flows of cultural, economic, and political practices near and far. A practical import of this observation is the identification of translocal circuits as the space where community, not just economic, assets can be identified, expanding the possibilities for place-based capacity building. In the example of the Hmong, this includes a strong kinship communication infrastructure, organizations adept at coordinating cultural and political events, and reciprocity among Hmong farmers in sharing knowledge, labor, and equipment. This is important as translocal circuits provide the means by which families and individuals secure the necessities of life and, therefore, address an important goal of planning in promoting material and social well-being.
Another implication is the need for more tactical and creative forms of planning that challenge normative assumptions about land use incompatibility, “order” in the built environment, and the regulations that shape these subjectivities. Planners should learn from translocal placemaking practices and be equally creative in the use of planning codes, their discrepancies, and the creation of regulations that allow for flexibility and multiple interpretations. As the example of the Asian Market illustrates, this includes the capacity to quickly de-territorialize land use categorizations and zoning classifications to allow a new “sense of place” to flourish in a time frame capable of re-territorializing ephemeral, if unsupported, community mobilizations. Planning interventions that move beyond such constraints do not necessarily entail a complete departure from existing regulations, but rather focuses on the unintended consequences of policy and the creative reinterpretations of regulations to reconfigure and re-territorialize sociospatial relations in a place.
Negotiating Cultures of Practice
The translocal placemaking practices of the Hmong also demonstrate that planning often constrains rather than enables through policies and regulation. More often than not, planners are limited by their own experiences and biases, which preclude them to see beyond the physical spaces of regulation and enforcement. However, the examples discussed reveal fleeting moments that facilitate placemaking through the transference of knowledge and practices as well as negotiations of policies and regulations—as evident when a city planning commissioner stepped in and enabled the flourishing of a Hmong marketplace or when novel responses to county and municipal farming codes were shared among farmers and policy makers.
Navigating between the constraints of regulation and local circumstance has implications for how planners negotiate between different understandings and experiences, as places are also assemblages of different cultures. As broadly defined cultural brokers, planners can function as intermediaries to navigate and negotiate between policies, practices, and with diverse groups that seek to order their coexistence in a place from different perspectives. 10 This is not to suggest a goal of weak consensus or compromise between different cultural communities, but rather to create new spaces where recognition, respect, and trust can be enlarged. This is the type of boundary-crossing practice that Hmong farmers demonstrated in organizing a conference to build solidarity across racial and ethnic farming communities as well as with policy makers.
Planners need to be adept in facilitating dialogue and agreement between participants, as well as finding common ground between technical understandings of planning and the specific placemaking practices of communities. In addition to technocratic expertise, planners need to adjust their mindsets and skill sets toward community and cultural forms of knowledge. Planners should strive to learn the placemaking practices of the communities they serve to better enable, through policy and land use regulation, all groups in ordering their coexistence in place and time. Translocal placemaking offers planners the opportunity for new forms of engagement and participative (as well as tactical) interventions, which can foster cross-cultural dialogue and exchange, knowledge of particular histories, and alternative forms of belonging essential to democracy. Emplacing ourselves with others engenders a relational understanding that bridges between different cultures and identities as well as regions and cities—creating new forms of solidarities and spaces for political action, especially in the policy arena. Imagining organizational and institutional designs to support translocal placemaking and the livelihoods therein, brokering between marginalized groups and the local and extralocal state in terms of policy and regulation, and developing strategies linked to the political and economic struggles of marginalized groups are some of the ethical imperatives that translocal placemaking offers to planning. Such acts are most relevant for planning which aims to address the challenges faced by diaspora and migrant communities, but also in supporting other communities of solidarity that transcend geographical and cultural boundaries.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Stacy Harwood and Stephen Wheeler for providing timely comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript as well as the JPER reviewers for their critical feedback. We would also like to acknowledge members of the Hmong community for sharing their personal stories of struggle, hope, and perseverance.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The USDA Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service (Hatch project no. CA-D*-END-7717-H).