Still Waiting: Life After Katrina (review)

Based on 18 months of intensive ethnographic research, Still Waiting: Life After Katrina is the story of one African American family’s displacement after Katrina, framed through the experience of Connie Tipado, the sister who had left New Orleans to build a new life in Dallas. Her home became a place of refuge for 155 of her extended family members. Throughout the year after the storm, four women in the Tipado family are filmed giving their accounts of Katrina, evacuation, displacement, and the return home.

The family’s story is told around loss and recovery. We see the sisters and aunts and cousins losing the mementos of their youth, the possessions that make a home, and their places of residence and work. We also feel them losing contact with kin; losing direction with no clear path to “recovery”; losing their neighborhood, community, and sense of place; and losing what faith they might have had in public authorities and their own government. We come to understand that their fear is of losing everything that constitutes and sustains their culture and way of life.

However, this story is also about recovery. The focus of much of disaster research has been on social vulnerabilities. We have a lot to learn about how resilience to disasters of all kinds is built, challenged, and sustained over time. This film helps. The Tipado family recovers as much as it loses, although not in any linear way. Central to their recovery is their faith and the recreation of home through the food they prepare, symbolized by the gumbo pot simmering on the stove. In the aftermath of Katrina, they recover one another, they recover the small token so cherished when all else is rubble, and they recover their power individually and collectively as authors of their own stories. There is no silver bullet of “recovery” on display but a great many difficult and intertwined paths with no certain destination. Indeed, nothing is settled when the film winds down and this is one of the reasons I so appreciate this film—that is how disaster recovery is and feels. What happens next?

While the focus of the film is on women and family, the questions asked and answered offer a new and much-needed angle of vision on the political and environmental disaster we call “Katrina.” A strength of Still Waiting is the easy movement between the individual—a righteous laugh, a face clouded with worry, warm hugs, and the preparation and serving of food—and the society that made such a thing as Katrina possible. There are ample reminders of the political climate as it changes over the 18-month period in this family’s life. Newspaper headlines and narratives from other key informants draw us back time and again to the social inequalities of race and class (less attention is accorded to gender relations) at the heart of this storm and to layers of institutional failure in response and recovery systems. No viewer can fail to grasp the nexus of race, class and gender that is at the heart of these stories of survival.

I did want to know a bit more: What has changed in their intimate lives? What strengths do they draw from women friends or from the men in their lives? Who do they help and who helps them? I wished for more analysis from female experts in supplementary interviews to balance the many male voices of authority. I wanted to hear more, too, from their partners and fathers and uncles. How are they coping? Who made those vital decisions about relocation and how? I wondered how this family connected with women and women’s groups outside the family during this time, if at all.

When will the last chapter of struggle be written in the aftermath of the 2005 Gulf Coast hurricanes? Viewers of Still Waiting: Life After Katrina will continue to care—and for this alone...