Living Blue in the Red States

19. The World Loves New Orleans, but America Has Not Come to Its Rescue

281 19. The World Loves New Orleans, but America Has Not Come to Its Rescue Mona Lisa Saloy Before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was laced with tropical greens—ferns, banana trees, palms of every sort, rugged grasses like St. Augustine or crab, and ornamental grasses like monkey or blue sliver, plus enormous oaks and evergreens tall and bushy, swamp cypress hanging with grey moss. The city was punctuated with begonia and bougainvillea from pinks to purples, with azaleas painted every color from passionate reds to pinks to purples and even yellows.There were roses of every imaginable size, shape, and shade, and towering, flowering magnolia trees, or shorter crepe myrtles lining sidewalks in a parade of color from white to beet red, from pale pink to bright fuchsia. Post-Katrina flooding killed everything. Every blade of grass, all the magnolias, more than half the stately oak trees, every bush, every banana tree in sight is dead in at least half the city. The historic Vieux Carre, the French Quarter, built—as instructed by the native Houma people—along the Mississippi crescent, was virtually untouched , like the Garden District and Uptown neighborhoods where life continues as it did before the storm; downtown New Orleans past Canal Street remains devastated, many places still without electricity or phone service: homes are broken or abandoned, like the ghost towns of the old West. The United States of America poured forth massive economic aid to tsunami victims in Asia, to 9/11 families of New York’s twin towers’ tragedy; yet ten months after Katrina’s destruction , the American character is absent from New Orleans. New Orleans, beloved by the country and the world for its architecture, culture, history and music, now stagnates “with three-fourths of its 282 | Mona Lisa Saloy homes uninhabitable, with 8 million tons of debris stacked or strewn in yards and streets.”1 America prides itself on being a benevolent land of the free, its arms open to the tired and huddled masses; yet it now ignores its own treasured, unique city, New Orleans. New Orleans was the New York of the nineteenth century, perhaps the most important port-of-call, and its international population re- flects its enterprises, its travelers. Of course there was the steady flux of French, Spanish and Italian, but the Irish were the first English speakers, and the resulting accent is a Brooklyn-sounding brogue. Many people know of the importation of slaves from the Caribbean, and after that the continuing stream of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Hondurans , and so on. But how many know that for centuries the New Orleans area boasted the oldest Filipino settlement in America? (It is only in the last decade of the twentieth century that scholarship documents Filipinos landing earlier, specifically in Morro Bay along the central California coast.)2 Anyone living just over the Orleans Parish line, in St. Bernard, is aware of this historic community and knows that Filipinos gave us dried shrimp and had houses on sticks, just like in the Philippines, until hurricanes broke them down. Filipino “Manila Men,” who jumped galleons while fleeing Spanish domination , were fierce warriors and later intermarried and remained a permanent part of the panorama of cultures in the swamplands just below the Crescent City.3 After Hurricane Katrina, some two hundred Filipino families evacuated to the Houston area, and others moved inland closer to places like Violet, where I have extended family. Despite this great—and sometimes unacknowledged—diversity , New Orleans is often characterized by the media as “sin city.” Whole Mardi Gras montages focus on tourists baring their breasts on Bourbon Street and drunks performing debased acts. In reality, every neighborhood in New Orleans is littered with churches. Many are Catholic, but the large variety of houses of worship include Baptist , Presbyterian, and Greek Orthodox churches, a Jewish Temple and Synagogue, and a strong Muslim presence. True, there are more small neighborhood bars than grocery stores, but it might surprise folks that New Orleans is and has always been a city of families, great families; it is those people who create and continue the many cul- The World Loves New Orleans | 283 tural traditions—the food and music—that repeat visitors and convention goers celebrate and enjoy. And before Katrina New Orleans was “the busiest port in the world. Sixty percent of our grain exports, 20 percent of all exports, 40 percent of our natural gas...