Post-Katrina Brazucas: Brazilian Immigrants in New Orleans by Annie McNeill Gibson (review)

New Orleans, a city not generally associated with foreign immigration, witnessed an influx of thousands of immigrants from elsewhere in the United States after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in August 2005. They arrived to take advantage of the numerous job opportunities in post-hurricane reconstruction. Sometimes referred to as “hurricane chasers,” part of a quick response labor force, most of those who flocked to the city were Latino immigrants, Brazilians among them.

Now Annie McNeill Gibson has provided us with a thoughtful overview of Brazilian immigrants who came to New Orleans, mostly from the Northeast, Georgia, and Florida, to help rebuild the city. During the peak post-hurricane years their numbers swelled to an estimated 7,000 to 9,000 but by 2010 there were still some 3,000 to 4,000 Brazilians in the city. Unlike their earlier compatriots who decamped in Boston, New York and Miami, a majority of Brazilians in New Orleans came from rural and semi-rural areas in states like Pará, Rondônia and Goías.

Brazilians essentially took advantage of the post-Katrina chaos to position themselves in the city’s reconstruction boom. Most had arrived in the U.S. only a short time earlier—within two years or less—before they headed to New Orleans; a majority were undocumented and spoke little or no English. A largely male migration during the immediate post-Katrina period when nearly all employment centered around reconstruction, Brazilian women began arriving somewhat later to cook Brazilian dishes which they sold at construction sites or to take jobs in newly re-opened hotels and restaurants. Then as the city gradually recovered, many women started house cleaning businesses much like those that have been described in Boston, Atlanta and elsewhere. As the Brazilian enclave grew, some left construction to take jobs or start small businesses that served the needs of their compatriots.

One advantage of post-Katrina New Orleans for immigrants was that because of the enormous demand for workers there, legal status was not an issue and, in any case, a majority of Brazilians who flocked to the city worked off the books. Owing to the crisis, immigration enforcement was far more lax than in other parts of the country and immigrants generally were not targeted or harassed.

Because New Orleans lacked a pre-existing Brazilian community into which these new arrivals could merge, they necessarily became more incorporated into the life of the city and were likely to learn at least some English. This contrasts with other places of Brazilian settlement—like Boston—where a large and thriving Brazilian community allowed many immigrants to remain apart from urban life and to get by almost exclusively in Portuguese. Gibson believes that another factor in Brazilians greater integration into New Orleans society in the early post-Katrina months is tied to the community’s imbalanced gender ratio. In her words, “… to create relationships with people of the opposite sex Brazilian men had to leave their enclave” to seek out American women (130).

Although New Orleans lacked a pre-existing Brazilian community, Brazilian immigrants eventually occupied their own spaces in the city, a sort of middle ground between Brazil and New Orleans. These physical enclaves included food markets, restaurants, night spots, and churches. The décor of these spaces reflected the rural origins of most of these Brazilians. As such, the Brazil many New Orleans immigrants identified with was distinct from that of their compatriots in other parts of the United States. It was a rural central west Brazil of rodeos and sertanejo music, not the Brazil of Corcovado and samba. Gibson suggests that this is probably why so few Brazilians—a mere handful over several years—participated in a popular local samba group, Casa Samba founded by an American aficionado of all things Brazilian. That is, its music and dance style were distinctly carioca and as rural residents of Brazil’s interior west, they were unfamiliar with samba music and samba...