Popular characterizations of Hmong Americans have essentialized and portrayed the group as culturally distinct.1 For instance, Ann Fadiman’s widely acclaimed book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down cast Hmong in the United States as a culturally situated group, while the Clint Eastwood-directed feature film Gran Torino ascribed its Hmong American characters with a specific and fixed class-based identity. These reductive representations largely run counter to the stereotype of Asian American success, which also obscures the ethnic and cultural visibility of Hmong Americans. The manufacturing of the Asian American success story assumes a cultural and social homogeneity among Asian American ethnicities as well as structural parity with whites.2 As a result, Hmong Americans must navigate not only racialized discourses about Hmongness, but also reconcile their identity with reductive understandings of the Asian American identity. The Hmong American struggle for visibility and self-construction is a tenuous process in which race and ethnicity are in tension. This study explores how Hmong American university students perform identity—race and ethnicity—in a campus cultural show. My analysis illustrates how students worked constructively towards self-determination—that is, beyond ascribed narratives of being both Asian American and Hmong American. As such, their performances work to reshape race and contest racial formations or racial stereotypes that marginalize Asian American groups collectively. I argue that the campus cultural show both embodies struggles for legitimacy and exposes contradictions found in and beyond the university facing Hmong Americans, namely, the racial images of Asian

中文翻译：

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表演种族和民族

美国人对苗族的流行特征已经本质化并将该群体描绘成具有文化差异的群体。 1 例如，安·法迪曼广受赞誉的书《精神抓住你和你倒下》将美国苗族塑造成一个具有文化地位的群体，而克林特·伊斯特伍德执导的故事片 Gran Torino 赋予其苗族美国角色以特定且固定的基于阶级的身份。这些简化的表述在很大程度上与亚裔美国人成功的刻板印象背道而驰，这也掩盖了苗族美国人的种族和文化知名度。亚裔美国人成功故事的制造假设了亚裔美国人种族之间的文化和社会同质性以及与白人的结构平等。 2 因此，苗族美国人不仅必须驾驭关于苗族的种族化话语，但也要调和他们的身份与对亚裔美国人身份的简化理解。美国苗族争取知名度和自我建设的斗争是一个种族和族裔处于紧张状态的脆弱过程。这项研究探讨了美国苗族大学生如何在校园文化表演中表现出身份——种族和民族。我的分析说明了学生如何建设性地努力实现自决——也就是说，超越既是亚裔美国人又是苗裔美国人的归因叙述。因此，他们的表演致力于重塑种族，并对抗将亚裔美国人群体集体边缘化的种族形成或种族刻板印象。我认为校园文化秀既体现了合法性的斗争，也暴露了苗族美国人面临的大学内外的矛盾，即，