New Orleans: a re-emerging Latino destination city

Abstract

Hurricane Katrina altered both New Orleans’ cultural and physical landscapes. Currently New Orleans’ Latino population is estimated to have increased nearly twofold since the city flooded in August 2005. Unlike many cities that began receiving Latino migrants during the mid-1990s, New Orleans has a sporadic history of Hispanic migration dating back to Spanish colonial rule in the late eighteenth century. Despite the somewhat hostile reception recent Latino migrants have experienced, the new wave of immigrants presents interesting possibilities for the reconstruction of ethnic and racial boundaries in New Orleans, together with an opportunity to develop a more inclusive view of Katrina-era Latino migrants. However, the paper cautions that the undocumented status of many recent Latino arrivals creates an obstacle in their journey toward acceptance. Using data from a survey of Latino workers in the city, the research explores possibilities for incorporating these new residents and the implications of succeeding or failing. Discussion focuses on the cultural significance of the ancestry of the new arrivals and how the nation's ‘broken’ immigration system is not only imposing hardships on many of the immigrants themselves but is also changing housing consumption patterns and limiting immigrants’ potential to reinvest in the communities like New Orleans.

Keywords:

• undocumented immigrants
• Latino
• New Orleans
• race
• Hurricane Katrina

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Lawrence Estaville, Fenda Akiwumi, Kenneth Orvis, Sarah Blue, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier version of this paper as well as Emerio Morejón for his assistance with the surveys. Versions of the paper were presented at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in San Francisco, April 2007, and the Third International Race, Ethnicity, and Place Conference in San Marcos, TX, November 2006. A grant from the University of Tennessee Livingston Endowment provided funding for the research.

Notes

1. The Amerindian contribution to Creole heritage in Louisiana is contested by historians. In the recently published volume, Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed-race Native American Identity, Andrew J. Jolivètte argues forcefully for the recognition of the Amerindian ancestry of the Louisiana Creole. Other researchers (see for example Dubois and Melançon 2000) downplay the contribution of Native Americans to the Louisiana Creole identity.

2. For example, New Orleans's incorporation into the US and the heightened Anglo influence there in nineteenth century (see Estaville 1988) contrasts sharply with Honduras's participation in the attempts at creating a greater Central American government and sense of Central American nationhood during that same time period