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Free at Last: Post-Katrina New Orleans and the Future of Conspiracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 August 2010

ALLISON GRAHAM
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Abstract

In the first year following Hurricane Katrina and the breaking of the New Orleans levees, the New Orleans-based Alliance of Guest Workers for Dignity and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of eighty-two workers from South and Central America who were stranded in the city. By 2008, the consequences of the regional reliance on slavecatchers began attracting global attention, most notably in the case of the eighty-nine Indian workers at Signal International's Pasacagoula, Mississippi shipyard. This essay explores the invocation of the American civil rights movement in contemporary transcultural dramas and the fact that another “universal” movement has been marching alongside new protesters, and demonstrates that the Free Trade movement in the US has been not only the cause of many current civil rights struggles, but also the beneficiary of the older struggle's very definition of its “cause.” New laborers in the Deep South – Latin Americans and Asians – find themselves not just homeless, but placeless post-Katrina. Black Americans who were shipped out of the city in 2005 to provide a “cleansed” urban area open to new demographics now find themselves in permanent exile, as placeless as their replacements.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 3: Hurricane Katrina: Five Years After , August 2010 , pp. 601 - 611
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 “People Putting Food First #110,” 14 March 2008, at www.foodfirst.org/en/node/2080, last accessed 16 April 2010.

2 “Guest Workers Charge Racial Exploitation, File Federal Suit against Luxury Hotel Chain,” 16 Aug. 2006, at www.neworleansindymedia.org/news/2006/08/8452.php, emphasis added.

3 See neworleans.indymedia.org/news/2008/03/12261_comment.php#12262, last accessed 10 Sept. 2009.

4 Ibid.

5 Robert Lovato, “Juan Crow in Georgia,” www.thenation.com/doc/20080526/lovato, originally published 8 May 2008. Last accessed 10 Sept. 2009.

6 Ibid.

7 Paul Chan, “Waiting for Godot: An Artist's Statement,” at www.creativetime.org/programs/archives. Last accessed 10 Sept. 2009.

8 John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 425.

9 John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (New York: Pantheon, 2007), 42.

10 Brian Beutler, “In the Lawless Post-Katrina Cleanup, Construction Companies Are Preying on Workers,” www.alternet.org/Katrina/56958, originally published 16 July 2007. Last accessed 16 April 2010.

11 Mark Schleifstein, “Corps Off Hook for N.O. Canal Lapses,” Times-Picayune, 30 Jan. 2008, at www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/01. Last accessed 10 Sept. 2009.

12 Barry.

13 See, for example, Ann Rodgers, “Homeland Security Won't Let Red Cross Deliver Food,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 3 Sept. 2005, www.post-gazette.com/pg05246/565143-84.stm.

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