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Originally Posted by Jim McDougall
These people were not considered integral to other Vietnamese people as they were tribal and mostly remote and rurally situated, and linguistically they spoke thier own dialects. They were often called 'moi' (=savages) by the Vietnamese population, in the manner of pejoratives such as 'hillbiilly' etc.
As the war ended finally in '75, a small number of Montagnards were brought to the US, mostly North Carolina, however I know numbers of them were in Calif.
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Great intro to the subject, Jim. Hmong are just one of a number of tribes inhabiting the Vietnam / Laos / Cambodia border areas and as you say are ethnically and therefore linguistically distinct from surrounding populations. Anthropologists have determined that some groups are related to indigenous peoples in Burma, south China, Taiwan, and even Borneo. Many of their languages had no written forms until relatively recent times.
There are a good number of Hmong living in California. There is a community in Long Beach, but most notable are those in the central valley, around Fresno, who have made a name for themselves as vegetable farmers, producing high-quality specialty crops sold at farmers' markets and to restaurants all over the state. Similar to how Vietnamese fleeing their country after 1975 got into the shrimp fishing industry in the Gulf states.