“We Came to Rebuild New Orleans: Stories of the Hurricane Katrina Volunteers” by Christopher E. Manning, LSU Press, 308 pages, and “Rebuilding New Orleans: Immigrant Laborers and Street Food Vendors in the Post-Katrina Era” by Sarah Fouts, the University of North Carolina Press, 216 pages.
Soon after Hurricane Katrina had passed, but long before the flood waters had receded, came the deluge of do-gooders. The rebuilding of metropolitan New Orleans involved around 500 new nonprofits (in addition to well-established charities), over 1.5 million volunteers (as well as countless paid workers) and cost upward of $200 billion.
But as two new books show, the onerous and arguably ongoing road to recovery deeply affected the lives of New Orleans’s first-line rebuilders.
In “We Came to Rebuild New Orleans,” Christopher E. Manning focuses on the stories of seven long-term recovery leaders — part of a larger oral history project he conducted between 2008 and 2013 while a history professor at Loyola University Chicago — and a drop in the ocean of volunteers who racked up over 100 million service hours in the 15 years following Katrina.
Many of the volunteers, Manning’s conversations make clear, felt compelled to come to the aid of New Orleanians from a sense of civic duty after witnessing the miserable failures of the local, state and federal governments.
“We Came to Rebuild New Orleans: Stories of the Hurricane Katrina Volunteers” by Christopher E. Manning, LSU Press, 308 pages.
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“You had to do it on your own,” says Jay Welch, a longtime New Orleans attorney specializing in free legal aid. “You had to take the individual initiative, and that’s how it happened. It was the American people. It wasn’t the government.”
Yet, this inescapable spirit of self-reliance caused myriad problems.
Without any sort of centralized, coordinating network, nonprofit organizations were forced to compete for resources, attention and dollars. Multiple charities often received grants to gut and renovate the same address, leading to rebuilding tug-of-wars that delayed residents from returning home.
Adrian Manriquez, a longtime volunteer leader with Common Ground Relief and Operation Helping Hands who first arrived in early 2006, categorized the early years of recovery as an inherently disorganized system defined by “chaotic waste,” an atmosphere defined by the ethos: “Everyone go everywhere, and do whatever you want.”
That mood trickled down to many of the volunteer staffers, who were overwhelmingly White, middle-class and full of youthful, idealistic energy. The romance of working in the ruins of New Orleans attracted thousands from across the nation who came to do good and enjoy the culture of the Big Easy. Colleen Morgan, a Tulane graduate and environmental activist who returned to the city and launched Bayou Rebirth, remembers working hard and partying harder.
“We just played in the mud all day and danced all night,” she said.
Christopher E. Manning, author of “We Came to Rebuild New Orleans: Stories of the Hurricane Katrina Volunteers.”
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But several interviewees report that this laissez-faire work environment often devolved into a toxic climate that included spending donation dollars to buy booze, rampant drug abuse, burnout, a pervasive culture of hyper-masculinity, widespread sexual harassment and the unchecked egotism of a handful of named nonprofit leaders, including one Common Ground supervisor who doubled as an FBI informant.
In the book’s final chapter, Manning offers a handful of suggestions that boil down to better communication between federal and state agencies, among nonprofits, and in the tenuous ties that often exist between altruistic outsiders and locals.
In “Rebuilding New Orleans,” Sarah Fouts, a professor at the University of Maryland, tells a similar story, honing her focus on Latin American food vendors and laborers. Immigrants made up nearly half of the rebuilding personnel, while undocumented workers constituted a quarter of the entire post-Katrina labor force. Overall, New Orleans’s Spanish-speaking immigrant community increased from 4% to 9%.
A decade before New Orleans instituted its sanctuary city policies, municipal leaders were openly hostile.
“Rebuilding New Orleans: Immigrant Laborers and Street Food Vendors in the Post-Katrina Era” by Sarah Fouts, the University of North Carolina Press, 216 pages.
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“How do I ensure that New Orleans is not overrun by Mexican workers?” Mayor Ray Nagin asked a group of local business people a month after the storm.
Oliver Thomas, the perennial City Council member and current mayoral candidate, concurred in a Times-Picayune interview.
“How are we helping our restaurants that are trying to recover by having more food trucks from Texas open up? How do the tacos help gumbo?” he said.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, often coordinating with the New Orleans Police Department, targeted esquinas (the corners where day laborers looked for work) and loncheras (taco trucks) as early as March 2006, when the two organizations arrested 40 day laborers gathered at the former Lee Circle.
The ICE-NOPD collaboration only ended in 2016, as part of a federal consent decree.
El Congreso de Jornaleros (Congress of Day Laborers), among other groups, rallied in support — organizing workers across racial lines, fighting worker exploitation (three-quarters of undocumented workers experienced wage theft) and helping immigrant business owners navigate the city’s byzantine permitting process (City Hall’s “One-Stop Shop” website for licenses largely remains unavailable in Spanish).
Sarah Fouts, author of “Rebuilding New Orleans: Immigrant Laborers and Street Food Vendors in the Post-Katrina Era.”
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The strength of Fouts’s analysis, like Manning’s, is in the intimate portraits of lives that were, she writes, “hidden in plain sight”: vendors who ply baleadas and licuados among the trio of adjacent food and flea markets that operate on the West Bank; the family that owns a restaurant in Mid-City and faces the same existential threats — displacement due to rampant redevelopment — that they did back home in the coastal Honduran town of Tela; the esquina owner who feeds the police officer who writes her a parking ticket for violating the policy that required food trucks to move every half-hour.
In a city that lionizes multi-ethnic dishes like gumbo and po-boys, these entrepreneurs also, Fouts writes, “contribute to the cultural panache of New Orleans.”
Rien Fertel is the author of four books, including, most recently, “Brown Pelican.”