Elizabeth Fussell

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Elizabeth Fussell | Constructing New Orleans, Constructing Race: A Population History of New Orleans | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Constructing New Orleans, Constructing Race: A Population History of New Orleans

How do we understand the racial and ethnic recomposition of New Orleans's diminished population in the year following Hurricane Katrina? Optimists viewing the influx of Latino migrants see in it a revival of the multicultural past of New Orleans, while skeptics suspect that delays in government assistance for residents to return to the city are an attempt to keep out low-income blacks and make the city whiter and wealthier. The shifts in the population of New Orleans are familiar to sociologists and economists who study labor-market demand for low-skill, inexpensive, and flexible workers. The low-prestige jobs they do are reserved for those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, most often immigrants or members of stigmatized minorities.¹ The sociodemographic characteristics of workers building and rebuilding the city shift only when social and market forces combine to make one group less expensive and more flexible than the other. I use this sociological insight to analyze New Orleans's population history and the way race has been socially constructed and reconstructed there.

The population history of New Orleans falls into three distinct periods. In the first, from the city's founding until the end of the nineteenth century (1718–1899), migration-driven population growth provided the city with the labor of African slaves, their descendants, and the Irish and Italian migrants who replaced them. The second period (1900–2005) was characterized by slower growth, driven by births and longer life expectancy rather than net in-migration, and the consolidation of a biracial society. The last period (2005–present) began after New Orleans's population vacated the city in the wake of Katrina, pre-Katrina residents selectively returned to the city, and an influx of largely undocumented Latino migrant workers arrived. The incorporation of that last group into New Orleans's society will depend on the continued demand for low-wage construction and service workers, the degree to which the federal and state governments facilitate the return of the pre-Katrina population that made up the previously majority-black labor force, and the enforcement of anti-immigrant policies such as employer sanctions and deportations of undocumented workers—all factors that affect the construction of a low-wage, low-skill, and disposable labor force. (See figure 1.)

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