Hmong immigrants lose a secret garden

The city plans to build on land where Hmong immigrants have gardened for 13 years.

Posted at 10:17 PM on Tuesday, Sep. 30, 2008

The setting sun is an orange stamp on a rice-paper sky. A late summer breeze rustles through 10-foot sugarcane tickling the stillness. A coat with Thai embroidery hangs inside an unoccupied shed fashioned from bamboo, cornhusks and a cardboard refrigerator box.

There doesn't seem to be anyone here on this 4 1/2 acres in southeast Fresno.

But, then, a glimpse of movement through cornstalks and staked Chinese long beans leads to a small man carrying a large bucket, hand-watering plants.

He is old. He is shy. He doesn't speak English. He ducks his head at a stranger and continues watering the garden the city of Fresno is about to uproot.

Other cities such as London and San Francisco have their guerrilla gardeners -- folks who take over blighted lands and start growing things like sunflowers in front of Parliament or a vegetable garden in the Richmond district. They are usually environmental activists looking to make a point and don't mind causing a rumble.

But the last thing the Hmong immigrants who farm here were ever looking for was a fight. They've seen enough trouble in their lives.

All of Fresno's older Hmong immigrants share the same history: An agrarian tribe living in Laos, they were recruited by the CIA to fight during the Vietnam War in what later was called the Secret War. When the United States left Vietnam, and the communists took over Laos, the Hmong ran for their lives.

They fled through jungles, crossed the Mekong river, lived for years in squalid refugee camps in Thailand. Some, beginning in 1975, made it to the U.S. as war refugees. Today, Fresno's 32,000-member Hmong community is second largest in the United States.

Some of the latest generation of Hmong go to college and work in various professions. But there are still three generations living in many Hmong homes. There is still a grandparent who at heart is a farmer, just as their families were in the mountains of Laos. And many of the Hmong immigrant families living in apartments near this garden still struggle with poverty and food bills.

The garden began about 13 years ago, when a small group of older Hmong spotted the empty piece of land overgrown with huge tumbleweeds. The city had purchased the land with a community grant to build a city park that never materialized.

The Hmong dug a 5-foot pit, cleared the tumbleweeds and buried them in the pit. They sowed vegetables. They did it all by hand.

They didn't ask anyone's permission. For years, no city officials noticed there were crops instead of weeds on the far edge of town.

"You have to understand, where they come from, open land is open land -- its purpose is to feed people. They don't really understand the concept of 'city property,' " says Chukou Thao, 37, executive director of the Hmong American Farmer's Association.

Each family works three 100-foot rows in the garden. They each pay $3 a month for water to be delivered from a private irrigation company. Those three rows provide about 20 extended families vegetables year-round.

With about 20 gardeners, some 300 people eat. Somewhere along the line -- and Thao and city officials say the history is murky -- the garden came under the auspices of the California Rural Legal Association, then Metro Ministry, then the Hmong American Farmer's Association. Around 2001, CRLA landed a small state grant that allowed the farmers to add some drip irrigation, with the approval of the Parks and Recreation Department. But at no point did the city officially, in writing, approve the garden.