Sacramento Hmong community celebrates New Year festival with pageants and performances

Thousands of Hmong community members gathered at Cal Expo this weekend to celebrate the Sacramento Hmong New Year festival, an annual cultural celebration in the city with the second-largest Hmong population the state.

The three-day festival included the Miss Hmong California pageant, a Hmong Idol singing competition, arts and crafts showcases, food vendors, local business vendors, and a series of talks from prominent figures in California’s Hmong community.

There are 32,000 Hmong community members in the capital — the second-largest population outside of Fresno.

And for the 18th year in a row, many of them gathered this weekend to celebrate their history and culture.

Early Saturday, the line to enter at Cal Expo stretched into the parking lot, crowded with people eager to celebrate the festivities in vibrant Hmong dresses, suits, vests and hats, all draped in silver coins and colorful beads.

“It’s just a really beautiful time to be with family, be with community, celebrate our culture and our roots, and be together,” said Sacramento City Councilwoman Mai Vang, a Sacramento native and daughter of Hmong refugees from Laos, while passing out balloons to her fellow Hmong Californians at the festival.

“This is my favorite time of year,” she said. “We’re celebrating the end of our harvest season, really just celebrating everything that we worked hard for and celebrating the new year.”

Vang said she is “incredibly blessed” to be the first Asian woman and the first Hmong woman elected to City Council. “As you can see,” she said, pointing to the hundreds of families with young children dressed in traditional Hmong clothes, “there are so many little kids here, little Mais, and I can’t wait to read about them in history books.”

Vang said events like the festival are crucial for educating young people in the community about their heritage.

So did See Lor, a children’s book author and educator who writes children’s books about Hmong history and culture in English and Hmong languages.

“I’m so glad to be back,” Lee said as she signed copies of her books. She missed last year because of COVID-19.

“It feels really good to be here. Historically, we tell our stories orally. Now that our children are growing up in this country, they learn through literature. So this is how we can preserve our identity, our culture, and our history.”