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This year marks 50 years of Hmong refugee resettlement and immigration to Minnesota. MPR News will feature Hmong Minnesotans in a variety of careers through the month of May as part of our “ChangeMakers” series. This series highlights Minnesotans from diverse and often underrepresented backgrounds who are making an impact.
Nelsie Yang was just 24 years old in 2019 when she won a seat on the St. Paul City Council representing St. Paul’s east side — becoming the youngest woman and first-ever Hmong woman on the council.
Five years later, Yang is in her second term on the council. She recently spoke with MPR producer Gretchen Brown about her journey to elected office and what drives her work.
What interested you in politics and political organizing?
Growing up, I would not actually think I’d be here at all. I came from a family where we weren’t politically involved. My parents, they’re Hmong refugees. We grew up in a low-income household, and even though we were poor, in my heart, I just felt like we were never poor when it came to love, when it came to giving back.
I always saw my parents showing up for families, especially families in need, and that carries through every part of who I am, and I believe that's why I’m here today.
What mentors or other figures have been instrumental in your journey? It sounds like your parents showed you the example of helping others.
Oh, yes, definitely, my parents. There’s also somebody who I always think of when I think of my mentors, and that is a woman by the name of Linda Yang. When I was in seventh grade, she came to my junior high school and started her very first youth after-school program called “CLIMB,” and it still exists to this day.
This program has really changed my life, from being somebody who really lived into a lot of the limiting beliefs that I always heard about women, overall, and especially Hmong women.
And you know, there’s an even added layer of just struggle and difficulty, but and also oppression that Hmong women have lived through generationally. I grew up being really quiet and just always afraid to speak my mind, but there was always this passion in my heart that knew that I had a greater purpose.
What I learned so much and discovered about myself through the mentorship from Linda is that in order to really be the best version of myself, it meant that I had to really unleash myself from these limiting beliefs and to actually like live into the Nelsie that I believed and envisioned I could be.
This work, clearly, is coming from a very personal place. Is there a weight to that, and how do you handle the pressure?
The work is very personal. When I think about before I ever started doing political work, I asked my parents how much they were earning hourly at their workplace — they worked at their workplace for over 20 years — and to hear that they weren’t even getting $15 an hour just really broke my heart.
To know that so many people were also experiencing the same things that my parents did, and that it could have led to very similar situations and hardships that my family went through, [such as] our home foreclosure.
That really fuels me to do this work that I'm doing in making a difference in our communities and shaping policy and championing working class families so that they don’t have to go through the things that my family and I have gone through. I’m always very grounded in why I’m here, and I can’t lose sight of that.
You talk about having big dreams for St. Paul and for the east side and for equity. Can you expand on those?
I mean, this is a community that is so hard working, so filled with love, and it is a working-class community. And on top of that, there are just so many deep layers of struggle, especially economic struggle, that our folks are going through.
And so when I think about what I want in terms of thriving east side, it really is for us to have a business quarter that is booming, that is revitalized. And then same thing for our residents too, that people don’t get displaced, that if they decide to raise a family here and want to be here for generations, that they can do that.
And so there’s just so many added layers of injustice that communities here have experienced, but that we're fighting to ensure that we change and that we bring equity to our communities here and really bring them what they have deserved for so long.
English (US) ·