All posts filed under: America

2018 Midterms: A breakdown of SEA state legislative candidates

Published by littlelaosontheprairie

The 2018 U.S. midterms saw the election of five Hmong candidates and one Laotian candidate to the Minnesota and the Ohioan state legislatures, respectively. More than 6,000 seats were up for reelection as 87 of the nation’s 99 state legislative chambers held regularly-scheduled elections, according to Ballotpedia. Overall, five Hmong and two Laotian candidates made it onto the general election ballot across the country. All five Hmong candidates and one Laotian candidate are Democrats. About 23 percent of the state legislative candidates nationwide are Southeast Asian. Twenty-three percent of that group are Laotian or Hmong, which means that only 5.3 percent of state legislative candidates on general election ballots are Laotian or Hmong. In Minnesota, Democratic Farmer-Labor House District 59A incumbent Fue Lee won reelection, and DFL challengers Samantha Vang, Tou Xiong, Khaly Her, and Jay Xiong all emerged victorious on Nov. 6. The lone Laotian Republican candidate for a state legislative seat, Yele-Mis Yang, lost his bid for Minnesota House District 42B. After weeks of ballot processing, Democrat Tina Maharath was finally declared the …

Dreams and Declarations in Diaspora

Published by Bryan Thao Worra

This week we’re celebrating Independence Day in the United States; when Americans signed the Declaration of Independence and setting in motion a journey of 242 years so far to be a people, a country of its own in the world. They threw off the shackles of monarchy beginning with the now classic preamble: “When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” Today, two centuries later, so many take that sentence and what follows for granted, and we rarely consider what it means to us personally, and how and why we benefited from such a bold sentiment. That people could be civil, that they would still be a part of civilized society, but …