It was a New Year celebration, Hmong style at El Dorado Park this weekend.

The Southeast Asian ethnic group continued its two-day celebration Sunday with traditional food, music, dance and a fashion show.

This year’s 38th annual Hmong New Year Festival honored elder was Dixie Swift, co-founder of the Homeland Cultural Center in Central Long Beach. The center has served as a space where the Hmong community has been able to pass down its traditions to the next generation over the decades.

“From January to December, every Sunday, these youth take dance classes to prepare for this New Year Festival,” said Gorlia Xiong, director of the Hmong “Qeej not Gangs” program at the center.

“My duty as a director is to preserve our culture and pass it down to the youth,” Xiong said. “it’s important that everyone knows how to identify what their culture is and how to preserve it. I preserve it through teaching dance.”

For the Hmong, the tradition of the New Year celebration comes from only having a one- or two-week break from farming, and coming together to celebrate before returning back to work.

“The only true holiday is the New Year because farmers worked year-round,” said festival organizer Joey Xiong of the Hmong Association of Long Beach.

The most distinguishable part of the Hmong New Year celebration is pov pob, a ball throwing game where young single people line up across from each other and toss a tennis ball back and forth.

“The ball toss is a traditional courting game where young singles meet and greet each other for the first time. Most everyone meets that way,” said Darlene Lee, vice director of the New Year Festival. “Since the Hmong worked on the farm all year long this was the one day they had a chance to get out and celebrate and so they used this as a time to find their mates.”

Lee grew up in Long Beach and met her husband during the New Year festival at El Dorado Park during the ball toss. This year they are celebrating 28 years of marriage.

Wang Leng Xiong, president of the Hmong Association, said during a speech at the festival how proud he was that his children are not ashamed to go out in public with their friends wearing Hmong clothes. He credited the programs at Homeland as the reason.

“Each year this festival is about the mixing of people and culture, the elders, and the younger generation getting together without fear and without shame, to feel that they are Hmong,” he said.

There are about 50 Hmong families currently living in Long Beach, he noted.

“My family, we lost our hometown, our land, our farm, everything we had and had to leave the country,” Wang Leng Xiong recalled. “Returning to my roots and seeing people that share the connection I have to this celebration takes me back in time and makes me feel so happy.”