\u201cWe Came to Rebuild New Orleans: Stories of the Hurricane Katrina Volunteers\u201d by Christopher E. Manning, LSU Press, 308 pages, and \u201cRebuilding New Orleans: Immigrant Laborers and Street Food Vendors in the Post-Katrina Era\u201d by Sarah Fouts, the University of North Carolina Press, 216 pages.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But as two new books show, the onerous and arguably ongoing road to recovery deeply affected the lives of New Orleans\u2019s first-line rebuilders.<\/p>\n
In \u201cWe Came to Rebuild New Orleans,\u201d Christopher E. Manning focuses on the stories of seven long-term recovery leaders\u00a0\u2014 part of a larger oral history project he conducted between 2008 and 2013 while a history professor at Loyola University Chicago\u00a0\u2014 and a drop in the ocean of volunteers who racked up over 100 million service hours in the 15 years following Katrina.<\/p>\n
Many of the volunteers, Manning\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cWe Came to Rebuild New Orleans: Stories of the Hurricane Katrina Volunteers\u201d by Christopher E. Manning, LSU Press, 308 pages.<\/p>\n
PROVIDED PHOTO<\/p>\n
\u201cYou had to do it on your own,\u201d says Jay Welch, a longtime New Orleans attorney specializing in free legal aid. \u201cYou had to take the individual initiative, and that\u2019s how it happened. It was the American people. It wasn\u2019t the government.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet, this inescapable spirit of self-reliance caused myriad problems.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cchaotic waste,\u201d an atmosphere defined by the ethos: \u201cEveryone go everywhere, and do whatever you want.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe just played in the mud all day and danced all night,” she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Christopher E. Manning, author of\u00a0\u201cWe Came to Rebuild New Orleans: Stories of the Hurricane Katrina Volunteers.”<\/p>\n
PROVIDED PHOTO<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In the book\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
In \u201cRebuilding New Orleans,\u201d 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\u2019s Spanish-speaking immigrant community increased from 4% to 9%.<\/p>\n
A decade before New Orleans instituted its sanctuary city policies, municipal leaders were openly hostile.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cRebuilding New Orleans: Immigrant Laborers and Street Food Vendors in the Post-Katrina Era\u201d by Sarah Fouts, the University of North Carolina Press, 216 pages.<\/p>\n
PROVIDED PHOTO<\/p>\n
\u201cHow do I ensure that New Orleans is not overrun by Mexican workers?\u201d Mayor Ray Nagin asked a group of local business people a month after the storm.<\/p>\n
Oliver Thomas, the perennial City Council member and current mayoral candidate, concurred in a Times-Picayune interview.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The ICE-NOPD collaboration only ended in 2016, as part of a federal consent decree.<\/p>\n
El Congreso de Jornaleros (Congress of Day Laborers), among other groups, rallied in support \u2014 organizing workers across racial lines, fighting worker exploitation (three-quarters of undocumented workers experienced wage theft) and helping immigrant business owners navigate the city\u2019s byzantine permitting process (City Hall\u2019s \u201cOne-Stop Shop\u201d website for licenses largely remains unavailable in Spanish).<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Sarah Fouts, author of\u00a0\u201cRebuilding New Orleans: Immigrant Laborers and Street Food Vendors in the Post-Katrina Era.”<\/p>\n
PROVIDED PHOTO<\/p>\n
The strength of Fouts\u2019s analysis, like Manning\u2019s, is in the intimate portraits of lives that were, she writes, \u201chidden 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 \u2014 displacement due to rampant redevelopment \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
In a city that lionizes multi-ethnic dishes like gumbo and po-boys, these entrepreneurs also, Fouts writes, \u201ccontribute to the cultural panache of New Orleans.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rien Fertel is the author of four books, including, most recently, \u201cBrown Pelican.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWe Came to Rebuild New Orleans: Stories of the Hurricane Katrina Volunteers\u201d by Christopher E. Manning, LSU Press,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8902,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[489,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-8901","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}