This dissertation examines the political participation and political incorporation of Hmong American communities across three states--California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin--between 1980 and 2012. This study asks two main questions: First, given Hmong Americans' particular contexts of exit and contexts of reception, how and to what extent have Hmong former refugees and their U.S.-born children been incorporated into the U.S. political system? Second, how do broader political contexts or homeland circumstances shape Hmong American politics and the state's treatment of Hmong in the U.S. and abroad?

I address these questions through two historical analyses of Hmong Americans' non-electoral and electoral participation and two detailed case studies of Hmong Americans' social movements. The first historical analysis focuses on Hmong Americans' protest events from 1980 to 2011. Through news media reports and relevant archival materials, I examine 84 Hmong American protests, their contents, and their consequences on public policies and mobilizers' organizational capacity. My findings show that during the past three decades, Hmong Americans' patterns of protest participation are oriented toward both the host society and the homeland. Homeland-oriented protests, rather than declining in frequency, have occurred at a rate almost equal to domestic-oriented protests. The findings also show that Hmong Americans' engagement in protest activities, regardless of domestic or international orientations, has helped them nurture their civic sense and strengthen their organizational capacity. Specifically, protest mobilization has offered ample opportunities for Hmong Americans to develop younger leaders, form new civic organizations, and cultivate a broad alliance system. Protest mobilization has also helped Hmong to refine methods for building collective identity and building collective consensus through the use of common protest symbols such as the uniformed Hmong veteran and master frames such as the military service frame.

My second historical analysis focuses on Hmong Americans' electoral participation across three U.S. states--California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin--between 1990 and 2012. I find evidence that Hmong Americans have achieved greater descriptive representation in Minnesota and Wisconsin compared to California. This difference in the level of descriptive representation appears to be due to differences in state and local political contexts. But a significant relative ethnic population size and the presence of ethnic collective mobilization are common to places with higher levels of descriptive representation.

The first extended case study examines two interrelated social movements of the early to late-1990s: Hmong Americans' multi-site movements against the benefit ineligibility provisions in the federal Welfare Reform Act of 1996 and their movements in support of the Hmong Veterans' Naturalization Act since 1990. This study reveals that framing plays a crucial role in the success of protest/social movements. In both the movements against Welfare Reform and for naturalization provisions, `ordinary' Hmong social actors were able to construct and their institutional allies were able to make effective use of a specific collective action frame--the military-service frame--to bring about benefits and naturalization accommodations in existing state policies specifically for Hmong veterans. I argue that the state's dominant ideology and its foreign policy interests influenced its positive reception of the military-service frame.

The second extended case study builds on the first case study to the extent that it examines in detail the contentious, interactive processes of social problem construction that underlie two other Hmong American movements for greater political inclusion. However, this second case differs from the first in that its central focus is on understanding how intra-ethnic conflict affects competing groups' ability to construct social problems and subsequently their ability to make claims upon the state--a state that is usually highly suspicious of ethnic movements for political inclusion. Drawing on interviews and primary written sources, I examine a Hmong American-led social movement that sought to incorporate Hmong history into the social science curriculum of California's public schools and the emotionally intense ethnic counter-movement that arose to meet it. My findings suggest that the mass media play crucial roles in creating cultural opportunities for the emergence of certain social problems and in (de)legitimizing such social problems. Although the California State Legislature showed deference to the military service frame and was willing to give token recognition to a broad, informal, quasi-racial category such as Southeast Asians, it trivialized and refused to hear the claims of an ethnolinguistic group regarding institutionally-produced language material inequity.

I conclude that the collective mobilization of endogenous and exogenous resources in response to perceived political opportunities has been the key mechanism through which Hmong Americans have been able to participate in the U.S. political system. Hmong Americans' degree of political incorporation is a byproduct of the interplay between Hmong-led mobilization and the responses of the state.