The Hmong in French Guiana

The Hmong, the mountain tribe that waged a CIA backed guerrilla war against the Communist Pathet Lao in Laos in the 1960s and 1970s, were settled around the world, including French Guiana. The New York Times reports:

Made into cold-war castoffs when the Communists won that proxy war in 1975, more than 100,000 Hmong (pronounced MONG) refugees were resettled around the world in places like St. Paul; Fresno, Calif.; Thailand; France; Australia; and — quietly, but successfully — this former prison colony on South America’s northeastern hump.

Since arriving more than 30 years ago, the Hmong, who account for only about 1.5 percent of French Guiana’s 210,000 people, have thrived. Once penniless, the refugees and their families produce up to 80 percent of the fruit and vegetables sold in this overseas French department, which must import other food at a high cost from mainland France or Brazil.

Long viewed as outcasts in Laos and other parts of Southeast Asia, the Hmong here are known for their success, on display in their large homes with new Peugeot and Toyota pickup trucks parked outside. Their nearly homogenous enclaves in Cacao and two other villages, Javouhey and Régina, are unlike anywhere else on this continent.

Walking Cacao’s dirt roads one hears mostly Hmong, interspersed with a bit of French. Some women wear sarongs. Merchants sell tapestries depicting the saga that led them to this jungle, after treks in the mid-1970s to Thai refugee camps from their mountain homeland in Laos, a former French colony.

The first Hmong arrived from France in 1977 and were greeted with protests from the Creoles, an ethnic group descended from African slaves, who chafed at what was viewed as preferential treatment for a new ethnic group in an impoverished area. French authorities initially gave each Hmong a few dozen francs a day on which to survive.

The settlers pooled those payments to buy fertilizer and tractors. Slowly, after years of labor, the Hmong became self-sufficient. They now grow large quantities of previously scarce vegetables, like lettuce, and tropical varieties of fruit like cupuaçu, which is oblong, has a white pulp and is found in the Amazon basin.