A Tribe in Search of a Home

They showed up at the doorstep of this San Joaquin Valley farm town almost 20 years ago, a tiny bedraggled tribe from the highlands of Laos whose 200 families all seemed kin, half bearing the surname See.

It was hard to imagine a people more lost than the Lahu, aborigines who had lived in mountain huts and took up arms against the Communists before fleeing Laos for America.

Tribal leader Aipa Saesee, who had wandered in exile for half his life, from refugee camps in Thailand to Mormon temples in Utah, took one look at the vineyards and peach orchards of this sunbaked valley and saw a Shangri-La. Celebrating his new land, he helped start the Lahu Baptist Church of Visalia, across the street from the Walgreens.

But the Lahu’s California dream has come undone in a region beset by poverty and one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. Facing an end to the welfare payments that have sustained them and fearing a growing number of their children will be enticed by gangs, Chief Saesee is now leading a new exodus of his people, this time to the promised land of Colorado.

So far, 50 Lahu have answered his call and hundreds more, if not the entire California tribe of 1,500, are expected to follow to the high plains east of Denver, where the jobs are plentiful and the street gangs few.

“It makes me sad to leave because we have been here a long time. But with changes in welfare, we have no choice,” said the 40-year-old leader. “We have to find jobs.”

On July 4th weekend, Saesee led another small caravan of 30 Lahu on a 1,200-mile trek to Fort Morgan, Colo., a peaceful little community with a booming beef slaughterhouse and not one market that sells white rice by the 100-pound bag--standard Lahu fare. At summer’s end, Saesee expects to make the move himself, uprooting his wife and two children, ages 15 and 18.

In a small but growing way, welfare reform is pushing impoverished pockets of refugees and other longtime welfare recipients to leave California’s farm belt, parceling them out to states with better job prospects. In the past three years alone, some 20,000 Hmong refugees have left their ethnic enclaves in Fresno and Merced for manufacturing and assembly line jobs in Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Colorado, Oregon and Georgia, according to county welfare directors and community leaders.

Tulare County officials, conceding defeat in the long struggle to gain self-sufficiency for the Lahu, are working hard to relocate them to Colorado and North Carolina under a program unabashedly called MOVE. Dozens of Lahu who have never worked a day in Tulare County, where the unemployment rate hovers near 20%, are being matched with the giant meat processing plant in Fort Morgan that is hiring them on the spot.

“These are hard-working people if given a chance. They’re making over $400 a week with good benefits and the word is starting to filter back to the Lahu in Visalia,” said Karen Davidson, a coordinator for the MOVE program. “It’s going to be a gradual migration, family by family. But once they see their leader take that step, we think a whole bunch more will follow.”

Not surprisingly, there is resistance to pulling up stakes and starting anew and it mostly comes from the children, who after 15 years in this part of California are not quite Lahu but a hybrid of Lahu and the Mexican American culture that surrounds them.

Sixteen-year-old Eeboon “Toni” Saesee--the “Toni” tattooed on her left arm--said her parents have been powerless to stop her rebellion in Visalia, an adolescence filled with crank and petty crime and an out-of-wedlock birth when she was 14. She stood holding her 2-year-old son, Jose Saesee, half Lahu, half Mexican, in front of a broken-down apartment complex on the risky side of town.

“My oldest sister and youngest sister are goody-goody and my parents want me to be just like them,” she said. “Colorado is their way of trying to change me, but I can’t be what I can’t be. I’ll go ‘cause I have to go, but I’ll be back when I turn 18.”

On the second-floor landing above her, the Lahu fathers, shuffling around as if awakened from a deep slumber, were eating sunflower seeds and smoking fat water pipes and listening to the sad flutes of the old country. The whole complex was a monument to makeshift. Cardboard boxes were turned into curtains and the back seat of a van became a sofa. With the ingenuity of the poor, poverty had been stretched into a kind of comfort. And the mothers sat in a tight circle watching a seamstress embroider a jacket with beautiful hand stitch and metal studs. A young boy would wear it at Lahu New Year.

Every bit of open ground surrounding Toni and her son sprouted vegetables planted with seeds from an old country she never knew--bitter melon, Thai hot pepper, lemon grass and basil. Her mother, Mailae, didn’t know if the seeds of cilantro drying in the 100-degree sun would take in the cold of Colorado, but she is certain of one thing. Her middle daughter’s life depends on the move.

“I always try to teach her and follow her around but sometimes I don’t see the bad thing until it’s too late,” she said. “In my country, I could beat her and she would listen, but in the United States they call the police and put parents in jail. I have no power here. Maybe Colorado will be better. There are jobs and not too many friends around.”

Traveling Through Time to America

For those on the outside who have watched the Lahu struggle, their journey across time is one of the great immigrant sagas never told. One day they were growing opium and maize and wringing the necks of chickens in an elaborate village dance to placate the mountain gods, and the next day, transported in a flying tube, they were trying to figure out how to flush toilets and navigate supermarkets and discern what the white powder wrapped in plastic in their daughter’s purse could mean.

“The Lahu were taken right out of the 17th or 18th century. In that one jet trip to America, they traveled 400 years,” said Somkith Souryasack, a Tulare County health and human services supervisor who has worked closely with the Lahu.

One of the world’s ancient tribes, the Lahu actually trace their roots to the Tibetan Plateau and China, where their clannish ways made them an object of ridicule and backlash centuries ago. The Lahu splintered into many smaller groups, hundreds of thousands staying behind in China and hundreds of thousands more beginning a long exodus across the Mekong River into the Golden Triangle of Burma, Laos and Thailand.

In the early 1900s, American Baptist missionaries in Burma made Christians out of whole villages of Lahu that practiced a blend of Buddhism and animism, a belief in spirits whose moods explained life’s twists and turns.

In the mountains of Laos, however, the Lahu men continued to practice polygamy and marry girls as young as 11, fathering an average of seven children. It was the shaman and chief who reigned supreme, and Aipa Saesee grew up in a sort of privilege, with his uncle the village chief and his father known as the “chief of knives” for his blade-making acumen.

Then the Vietnam War hit and the Lahu joined their fellow mountain tribesmen, the Hmong, in a losing battle against Communist forces. They fled their homes en masse in 1975, and Saesee spent the next five years stuck in the nether world of a refugee camp in Thailand that was every bit as backward as his village. He met his wife, Elaine, there, and eventually the Mormon Church came calling, offering a new life in Salt Lake City.

Saesee arrived with 12 other families in the spring of 1980. There was no snow on the ground and the Mormons couldn’t have been more generous, handing out free beds, clothing, help with housing and toys for the kids. But some church members were less than patient with the Lahu’s insistence on keeping a few of their old ways, and Saesee and the others bolted to a nearby Baptist Church.

“We liked Utah but that first winter was very harsh and the next winter was no better,” he recalled. “We knew the Hmong had gone to Central California because it felt more like Laos, and we decided to join them.”

What the Lahu didn’t realize was that the San Joaquin Valley already housed too many poor and unskilled people, and entry-level jobs existed almost entirely in the fields under the hot sun. Pruners and pickers and packers the Lahu were not. Farmers preferred veteran hands from Mexico who worked fast and didn’t need any training.

Lao See, 34, who came straight to Visalia from Thailand in 1993, laughed heartily when asked about his work record in California agriculture. “One day,” he said, shaking his head at the brutal memory. “One day in the fields.”

For the Lahu, welfare became a way of life that didn’t demand any belt-tightening. They pooled resources and family members could survive on very little, a bowl of rice and a piece of chicken. What they couldn’t buy at the grocery store they grew in the margins between apartment complexes, using colorful straw mats propped up by sticks to create shade for the more delicate vegetables.

The old system of trying to wean the Lahu off welfare by offering English classes and vocational training was an almost complete failure, according to county officials. Between 80% and 90% of the Lahu were on the public dole, some for as long as 15 years, recycling in and out of adult school classes. It got to the point where Lahu children raised on welfare were themselves having children and applying for aid.

Now welfare reform, with its strict work requirements and two-year limit on parents receiving aid, is changing everything. “The clock is ticking and some Lahu are reaching their 24-month limit,” said Davidson, who helps administer the welfare-to-work program through the county office of education.

More than 26,000 square feet of an old grocery store building have been converted to the task of teaching sewing and rudimentary job skills to the Lahu and other longtime welfare recipients, and then finding them jobs. County officials are not ashamed to say that this effort is more and more directed toward matching them with employers in other states.

Relocated to Several States

A big United States map on the wall of Davidson’s office tells much of the story, scores of blue pins representing each family successfully relocated, clusters of pins around Charlotte, N.C., Fort Smith, Ark., Schuyler, Neb., and now Fort Morgan, Colo.

“Some of the families come in and don’t even know the communities they are going to,” Davidson said. “So we show them the map and all the highways.”

Whether welfare reform is prompting other ethnic groups or individuals to leave California in large numbers is a question too early to answer, scholars and bureaucrats say. It has only been since January 1998 that California counties began in earnest to impose welfare limits.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if welfare reform is causing people to move,” said Frank Mecca, head of the County Welfare Directors Assn. of California. “But as far as whole groups moving en masse, I don’t know if this is an interesting Laotian story or something broader than that.”

Chief Saesee scouted the Dallas-Forth Worth area in 1997 and almost had the tribe persuaded to move to Texas until the TV news reported a fall of hurricanes and a summer of tornadoes. Through his friends in the Hmong community, he heard about Fort Morgan and decided to take a look.

The quiet community of 12,000, three-quarters white and one-quarter Latino, is along the South Platte River an hour east of Denver. Yes, Saesee told his people, there is the occasional blizzard and hailstorm and the town boasts but a single Asian restaurant, a Chinese one at that. No, Fort Morgan has never heard of the Lahu, and the one big yearly event is the Glen Miller Festival in honor of the great bandleader who was born there.

On the other hand, Saesee told them, townsfolk can’t remember the last murder, and the meat packing plant is hiring men and women for jobs from slaughter to packaging, all at good wages.

“I cannot make the families move, but I told them that I am moving my family and there is nothing left for us here,” the tribal leader said. “The families that have already moved call me every day. ‘When are you coming? The money is good, the community has no traffic, no graffiti, no gangs.’ ”

In Visalia, the Lahu community is divided evenly among three churches, one Baptist, one Pentecostal, one Catholic. A few elders who rival Saesee have yet to support the move, and it may be that the community becomes even more fractured, with some relatives going to Colorado and others finding work and staying here.

Eechu “Jennifer” See, 15, says she will miss her boyfriend, a Mexican immigrant, but she is looking forward to Colorado as a way to distance herself from a life of gangs and drugs. “I want to go so I can start working,” she said, adding that there aren’t any jobs in Visalia and that she might try to persuade her boyfriend to join them.

The bedrooms were filled with half-packed boxes, and her father, a tiny man with a perpetual pain in his stomach, sat a foot off the ground on a rattan stool just big enough for his backside. He was hunched over a boombox, listening to music from his homeland. Jennifer said her father is sick from shame, the once proud head of a household now reduced to hearing the world translated through children he no longer trusts.

“Maybe Colorado will be better,” the old man muttered, scratching his head. “Better for life and future.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

More Moves

Members of a hill tribe from Laos have been on the move since fleeing their homeland in 1975 when the Vietnam War spilled across the border. The Lahu lived in a refugee camp in Thailand until 1980, when they were relocated to Salt Lake City (1). The harsh winters drove them to Visalia, Calif. (2), in the early 1980s, where they survived on welfare. Recent changes in welfare and fear of gangs are prompting them to move to Fort Morgan, Colo. (3), where there are jobs.