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Resilient History and the Rebuilding of a Community: The Vietnamese American Community in New Orleans East
Karen J. Leong, Christopher A. Airriess, Wei Li, Angela Chia-Chen Chen, and Verna M. Keith
| As the floodwaters have receded from New Orleans and rebuilding has begun, new stories of race relations have emerged and new histories are being written. One is the history of a predominantly Catholic Vietnamese American community located in eastern New Orleans. Before Hurricane Katrina, Vietnamese Americans constituted less than 1.5 percent of the city's population. Since Katrina, the small Vietnamese American community in eastern New Orleans has received significant press coverage due to its members' high rate of return and the rapid rebuilding of their community. This essay will explore how shared refugee experiences, the leadership role of the Catholic Church, and the historically specific circumstances of Vietnamese immigrant settlement in eastern New Orleans contributed to this community's mobilization and empowerment. Some might attribute the community's ability to recover so quickly to a strong work ethic and an innate identity—both features of the myth of Asian Americans as "model minorities." That myth is a 1950s and 1960s construction that has since been deployed to justify racist assumptions about African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians. It also obscures historical processes. This essay argues that the eastern New Orleans Vietnamese American community's response to Katrina is clearly rooted in its particular history and collective memory. As the experience of the Vietnamese American community in Village de L'Est demonstrates, history and memory are more than analytical artifacts—they are political resources.1 |
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Ever since Hurricane Katrina left a path of destruction through the central gulf states, and particularly through the city of New Orleans, popular and scholarly discourse on race and Katrina has emphasized black and white. Initial media coverage viewed the disaster through a historical lens of United States black-white relations. That is not surprising because New Orleans prior to Katrina was a majority-black city, with African Americans constituting 68 percent of the population. The city's early Afro-Creole culture had a major impact on the development of African American culture, and even today, according to the historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, New Orleans "remains, in spirit, the most African city in the United States." During the first weeks of flooding, much media attention focused on the extreme devastation endured by the Lower Ninth Ward, a primarily African American neighborhood with concentrated poverty in eastern New Orleans, and to a lesser extent on Lakeview, an affluent Euro-American neighborhood. Except in independent ethnic media, the Latinos and Asian Americans of New Orleans were largely absent from the national post-Katrina discussions about race, class, and social justice in the United States. Obviously not impacted in the same numbers as African Americans, certain subpopulations in New Orleans—immigrants from Southeast Asia, Mexico, and Central America—also endured disproportionately high rates of poverty and suffered great losses and upheaval as a result of the flooding. Although some national media outlets addressed Katrina's impact on the Vietnamese refugee shrimpers along the Gulf Coast, many people still are not aware that New Orleans was home to one of the largest concentrated settlements of Vietnamese Americans in the nation.2 |
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This particular Vietnamese American community, a legacy from the refugee resettlement beginning in the 1970s, is located in a residential suburb known as Village de L'Est in easternmost New Orleans. (See map 1.) In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the United States government relied on nongovernment and faith-based organizations to help relocate refugees from Vietnam in the United States across 821 zip codes. The Associated Catholic Charities of New Orleans, for example, relocated Vietnamese in New Orleans and found federally subsidized, low-income housing for 1,000 refugees in 1975 at the Versailles Arms Apartments. Chain migration—in which initial immigrants attract further migration of friends and family from the same place of origin—resulted in 2,000 more Vietnamese moving into the neighborhood near the apartments from their initial settlement locations. The Vietnamese population grew to nearly 5,000 by 1990.3 |
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