The Messianic Figure and the Political State Broker: Competing Paradigms of Transpacific Hmong American Leadership

Following historical analyses comparing the relation between the Hmong messianic figure and the Hmong political state broker and their positionality to the state, this paper considers the dialectic of these two figures as a single site of examination for interpreting Hmong diasporic and Hmong American history. This paper contends that the political state broker’s assassination of the messianic figure reveals their competing leadership along the porousness of political and religious Hmong American identity. Subsequently, the paradigm of the political state broker continues to discipline the transnational political and religious imaginations of contemporary Hmong Americans. How this takes form domestically across various religious Hmong American communities will be the site of future research.