During its secret war in Laos (1961–1975), the United States recruited proxy soldiers among the Hmong people. Following the war, many of these Hmong soldiers migrated to the United States with refugee status. In History on the Run Ma Vang examines the experiences of Hmong refugees in the United States to theorize refugee histories and secrecy, in particular those of the Hmong. Vang conceptualizes these histories as fugitive histories, as they move and are carried by people who move. Charting the incomplete archives of the war made secret through redacted US state documents, ethnography, film, and literature, Vang shows how Hmong refugees tell their stories in ways that exist separately from narratives of U.S. empire and that cannot be traditionally archived. In so doing, Vang outlines a methodology for writing histories that foreground refugee epistemologies despite systematic attempts to silence those histories.

Ma Vang is Assistant Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced, and coeditor of Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. The Lost Bag and the Refugee Archive  1
1. Secrecy as Knowledge  27
2. Missing Things: State Secrets and U.S. Cold War Policy toward Laos  57
3. The Refugee Soldier: A Critique of Recognition and Citizenship in the Hmong Veterans' Naturalization Act of 1997  93
4. The Terrorist Ally: The Case against General Vang Pao  117
5. The Refugee Grandmother: Silence as Presence in The Latehomecomer and Gran Torino  145
Epilogue. Geographic Stories for Refugee Return  179
Notes  189
Bibliography  231
Index  251