Racial Divide or Racial Grids?

In May of 2011, I attended the Association for Asian American Studies conference, which was held in New Orleans as part of many scholarly associations' attempts to help in rebuilding the city. One of the most memorable experiences during my stay was my initial acquaintance with several Filipino migrant workers in various restaurants who were recruited into the city's service industry to replace workers who had been displaced by the disaster and had not returned. In part, these Filipino workers were cheaper and more strategic substitutes for those displaced by Katrina.

While some of these workers were grateful to be in the United States earning salaries higher than those available in their homelands, they were at the same time nervous about the contractual limits of their stay. The people I chatted with wanted to stay in the United States and find better jobs with higher pay—especially since many of them were college graduates. But they also realized that with the increased immigration surveillance and the narrow strictures of their contracts, they are really subject to intermittent employment and a precarious existence.

While I was having these informal encounters outside of the conference, several panels devoted to topics centered on Southeast Asian and specifically Vietnamese American predicaments in post-Katrina New Orleans were taking place. These panels were eye-opening experiences, for in conjunction with my casual encounters in the city, they made clear that Southeast Asians were important in the city as displaced residents of immigrant and racialized neighborhoods and as crucial workers in the fishing/shrimping industry.

These experiences, together with an emerging scholarly literature on Asian Americans in the South and in New Orleans (see, for example, Karen J. Leong et al. Reference Leong, Airriess, Li, Chen and Keith2007), complicate our understanding of the New Orleans racial landscape. Nicole Trujillo-Pagán's discussion of Latino workers in The Neoliberal Deluge unravels the black-and-white divide that has permeated racial discourse and destabilizes the black nationalist responses by politicians such as Mayor Ray Nagin. But the case of Asian Americans requires more than a merely additive approach to the racial mix. Instead, it underscores the ambivalent and fraught racial and ethnic complexities of the city and the state of Louisiana, and raises important questions with implications for future policies and practices:

What do Southeast Asians and other Asian Americans bring to the table so as to speak to a post-Katrina New Orleans and Louisiana? What does Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor and second-generation Asian American, bring to the debate around the still murky racial and class politics in the state and city known for racial apartheids and rigid class stratification? What does “casual” intermittent labor, like that documented by Trujillo-Pagán, expose in terms of the purportedly democratic character of post-Katrina reconstruction?

Sex and the Good Times in New Orleans

“Laissez les bon temps rouler.” Let the good times roll is a dictum that characterizes New Orleans in the mainstream American imagination. Emanating from a Mardi Gras image of the city, this saying evokes the ways in which the city has been seen, rightly or wrongly, as a socially liberal space for non-normative behavior, including that of queer sexualities and genders. Such mythic notions of urban temporality are not evoked or engaged by any of the New Orleans scholarship after Katrina. But the mythic and queer dimensions of New Orleans ought to be central to our scholarly efforts to analyze the rebuilding of the city.

What would it mean to include the queers, the debauched, the delinquents, and the so-called dregs of society as part of thinking about a post-Katrina New Orleans? While people might think that I am pursuing a kind of nostalgia-tinged gesture toward marginality, I would submit that these “queer” figures, non-normative and recalcitrant subjects, are part and parcel of the historical and everyday life of the city. Indeed, they have been and are still victims of neoliberal policies, often in ways that are obscured by dominant frames. As some of the essays in the anthology (e.g., by Paul Passavant, Adrienne Dixson, Cedric Johnson, John Arena, and Barbara L. Allen) astutely argue, many of the so-called ameliorative rebuilding projects from “humanitarian-corporate complexes” often, wittingly or unwittingly, disregard the very marginalized people they initially purport to help. In other words, the projects aimed at a philanthropic and “sustainable” make-over of New Orleans mostly reinscribe the very discourses that caused the social disaster around Katrina.

It is crucial, then, to take seriously the issue of sexuality and queerness/non-normativity not as an empty gesture toward a mythic history but as a consideration of the ways in which alternative solutions can be constructed through the lives of people who have always been seen as marginal to the mainstream. What would a drag queen, a sex worker, a homeless person, or a debauched drunk have to do with reconceptualizing such projects? Cathy Cohen, in her magisterial Reference Cohen1997 essay “Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens,” calls for an intersectional framework in understanding power inequalities, especially around sexuality, race, and class. She argues that people's sexual, racial, gender, and class positionalities in relation to power structures shape and limit their life chances and also, in turn, racialize, sexualize, and economically situate them. If the humanitarian-corporate “solutions” have failed despite many allusions to notions of the “grass roots” and have reenforced the pathologies of marginalized people inherent in many neoliberal discourses, then we should explicitly utilize or deploy the lives of these marginal people as the fulcrum in order to mobilize new democratic ways of reenergizing the social body and body politics of New Orleans.

We should take Cohen's argument seriously and utilize these marginal lives explicitly in the creation of new policies that foster robust street life and open public space, and that fully recognize the civil and political rights of all denizens of the city and the state, regardless of their sexual orientations or identities. Doing so would amplify the anthology's underlying mission, which is to “encourage democratic planning that represents the needs and interests of women, minorities, workers, and the poor, the very groups who have been disempowered and dispossessed by neoliberalization” (Johnson, pp. xl–xli). It would also enhance the struggle to animate and empower more expansive and more vital political visions of a post-Katrina New Orleans.