I believe in remembering a people’s truth.
I believe that writers and artists can be instrumental in creating work that serves as the conscience of our times. I believe in chronicling the personal experience to counter the “official accounts” that inevitably cultivate historical lies to silence and control, and render some people invisible, los invisibles, by disappearing them through the controlled mainstream media tentacles of misinformation.
In the Latin American tradition, I believe the poet, writer, and artist has a social responsibility, a mythic duty, to document and articulate the people’s struggle, la lucha de la gente, when they are denied effective means to have their voices heard in their fight against oppression and their many oppressors.
Since the storm, I have been reminding the citizenry of New Orleans and informing folks nationally and internationally that the post-Hurricane Katrina Big Easy, the romantic birthplace of Jazz, was rebuilt by thousands of hard working Latino immigrant workers, and most were cheated of their promised pay by ruthless local and national contractors.
They were brutalized by local police officers; languished in New Orleans Police Dept. jails without due legal process; subjected to the most abhorrent working and living conditions imaginable; some became indentured servants within hotels in the French Quarter; others were conveniently deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents after they finished many a construction job.
In June of 2009, the Southern Poverty Law Center released its research data that up to 80% of Latino laborers who aided the reconstruction of New Orleans were victims of wage theft, and the “undocumented” status of many was exploited in a city that has a long legacy of labor exploitation.
Immigrant men and women gave of their sweat, blood, and some of their lives to rebuild an ungrateful city that abused their labor—as easily and effectively as it exploited enslaved Africans when “cotton was king.”
It should come as no surprise.
My brown people, my Mestizo brothers and sisters, who are descendants of a mythic and painful oppression exacted from one century to another by the cross and sword of Spanish Colonizers, other European plunderers, and the unfettered capitalism the U.S exports, became, and still are, the new people of color to exploit to no end in this post-hurricane reconstruction epoch.
Brown became the new black in the dirty South, a soil soaked with the blood of the systematic oppression of the “colored others.” Today, in New Orleans and in many parts of the South, many African Americans still struggle to gain a very elusive state of equality in the same terrain they raised with their arduous labor from one generation to another, and I write this introduction in the wake of a series by the Times-Picayune New Orleans daily which exposes the state of Louisiana as the biggest incarcerating machine of people in the United States, with rates of imprisonment that overshadow China. It is astounding, and most behind bars are disproportionately African American.
The jailed people of color now include many incarcerated immigrants as well because making more prisons has become a huge industry in the world’s prison capital, and immigrants have been easily snared as new occupants for the big business of jails and their jailers.
Fear of incarceration has been a big factor in keeping the immigrant labor force under control for a perfect storm of labor abuse. Since most immigrants could not speak English and were fearful of reprisals by their bosses if they complained about being cheated and their inhumane housing conditions, they were the ideal workforce to brutalize in this Deep South port city that has built its wealth on slave labor—just like its fatherland.
The vicious cycle continues: Welcome to the new “Slave Labor Fiesta” of Twenty-first century USA.
*****
It was one of the first radio commentaries that explored the labor abuse
many immigrant workers were experiencing as they toiled in the rebuilding
efforts. This
book is dedicated to the thousands of Latino immigrants who gave of their
blood, sweat, and some of their lives to rebuild the flooded pueblo of New Orleans after the epic devastation caused by
the failure of the federal levee system in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a
storm that was a Pandora of water and winds that revealed a country mired in
lies and the incompetence of the Bush regime. "Dubya" and his criminal cronies abandoned the people and city of New Orleans at its most desperate hour, and this should not be forgotten.
“The city that care forgot” has
never officially cared to thank the immigrants in any way, but I remember what they have
contributed. They, the invisible, los invisibles, are a big part of the reason why the pace of the recovery has been so strong
after such unimaginable wreckage the Big Easy was post-Katrina.
I remember them. I have not forgotten. I honor their memory.
It is the dirtiest little secret
of the reconstruction of New Orleans.
It remains the
untold and most neglected story of the Big Easy recovery, but as an immigrant myself, it is my duty to speak the unspoken and chronicle the many challenges my immigrant brothers and sisters have faced in rebuilding this historic port city. Many fight to remain, but many are courageous enough to stand up and fight for their human rights! ADELANTE!
Make art that matters!
José Torres-Tama
ArteFuturo Productions
1329 Saint Roch Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70117
504.232.2968
