The Trauma of Bearing Witness to Brutal Cultural Deportation of My Immigrant People by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities in their Tricentennial Anthology

More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Excerpt from Letter from a Birmingham Jail

This Deep South sultry port city of New Orleans has been my muse and adopted home since 1984, and three days after Hurricane Katrina exposed the weakness of poorly built and under-funded federal levees that breached in her cross-hairs, I escaped my beloved Babylon by the Bayou on a stolen school bus operated by a Yin Yang duo of heroic buccaneers. 

They were rescuing African American families, and I was on the same bus the iconic composer, singer, and native son, Allen Toussaint, rode out of the social storm that followed the natural tempest.

The Jefferson Parish School Board Bus our good pirates commandeered delivered us to an illuminated and dry Baton Rouge Airport as midnight merged into a new Thursday of September 1, 2005.  We were catapulted into a dream reality with lights and electricity from a world that had become a living nightmare only eighty miles away.  

I had to flee a U.S. city in peril—not via the efforts of “authorized personnel”, or the many invisible “FEMA armies of compassion”, who were AWOL, absent without leave a week after Katrina hit—but via a pirated vehicle operating the kind of rescue mission only imagined in a Hollywood South film version of “Hotel Rwanda”. 

When recalling what happened, it plays out like an improbable contrived screenplay, but we were delivered to the welcoming arms of Andrei and Laura Codrescu. In their petite vehicle, they ushered our traumatized bodies to the safety of their home. They offered us priceless refuge, scrambled eggs, and internet access. 

From there, I wrote my first post-Katrina essay titled Hurricane Katrina and the Chaos of New Orleans in Her Aftermath. This piece was distributed widely and published on various internet sites, and with the support of writer friends such as Ariel Dorfman and Guillermo Gomez-Peña, the piece went international. 

It was the first account by a Latino writer who had survived the storm. I was a real life media-branded "refugee". I had not witnessed the storm on TV, but had actually escaped a city submerged in social chaos and despair. This essay was also distributed widely through the support of the National Performance Network (NPN) and its presenters. 

Shortly thereafter, Leo Garcia, the ED of Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, CA extended an invitation to me, as an artist in exile, and he encouraged me to transform that essay and others that followed into a performance piece called The Cone of Uncertainty: New Orleans after Katrina. With an NPN residency grant and Leo's support, I debuted The Cone in November 2005 at Highways in California, two months after my harrowing escape, and it was the first piece staged across the country actually written, performed, and conceived by a storm refugee.

In the thirteen years since, I have dedicated much of my writings to documenting the contributions of my Latin American immigrant people who have been invaluable to the rebirth of New Orleans, and from 2006 to 2011, I contributed radio commentaries to NPR's Latino USA that explored the human rights violations immigrants have been subjected to while rebuilding a once devastated and flooded city. Maria Hinojosa, the award-winning journalist and host of Latino USA, introduced many of these commentaries that aired nationally. 

These writings have been transformed into a total of three performances, two solos and the Taco Truck Theater ensemble show. My life experiences inform my work, and when I returned a month later on October 1, 2005, I was witness to a remarkable and unexpected site: Thousands of Latin American immigrant workers were covering all neighborhoods of the devastated Crescent City—like a locust of reconstruction angels engaged in the epic recovery. 

They were on thousands of rooftops laying down hundreds of miles of plastic blue tarps to cover water damages. They were on every construction site across the city.

Immediately, I began documenting their stories through informal Spanish language conversations on the streets, and trying to understand how they managed to inhabit a city that had been under a state of Martial law—where you couldn't get in or out.

They were smuggled in on purpose to assist with the massive rebuilding efforts, and because of the undocumented status of most, they became victims of wage theft at the hands of ruthless contractors. They suffered random police brutality; deplorable working and housing conditions; and human rights violations at the hands of abusive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agents.

Communicating in Spanish, I developed trust and relationships with this imported Latin American labor force, and began filming interviews. Later, I photographed the public protests reconstruction workers staged with the Congress of Day Laborers / El Congreso de Jornaleros—especially every May 1 for International Workers’ Day.

Congreso activists have exposed a myriad of human rights abuses and health risks reconstruction workers have been subjected to in the toxic waters of the flooded city. They have exposed the disappearances of immigrants in local jails while others are held indefinitely to profit a city that thrives on the incarceration of Black and Brown people as one its big businesses.

In 2018 the city celebrated its Tricentennial of European existence since a slave-owning-Choctaw-Native People-killing French Colonizer arrived to “discover” an area that was already populated by numerous indigenous tribes that included the Atakapa, Chitimacha, Choctaw, Caddo, Houma, Natchez, and Tunica people.

All of whom the celebrated Bienville began killing, and spilling their blood into the Mississippi River. Unabashedly and unashamed city elders continue to frame near genocide and extermination of our Native People as European discovery.

Bienvenidos / welcome to the slave-port Catholic city often called the Big Easy, but generally know as New Orleans. Let's dare to remember that New Orleans has a brutal history as a major slave port that its French "discoverer" supported, as did the Spanish, and the profitable U.S. Slave Trade. 

The commerce that made New Orleans the wealthiest city in the Union by 1850 was an abhorrent but profitable flesh-selling business of African people. Before the black liquid gold of oil, before the celebrated tourism industry, and before the expansive commerce of private prisons in a Louisiana state that incarcerates more people than the entire country of China, the port city spawned a brutal business trading human flesh for profit and personal possession to build the U.S. Empire for two hundred years through the Mississippi’s once pristine waterways.

This is the most difficult truth that will not be told to the tourists who come for many of the cities big festivities such as the upcoming 2019 Mardi Gras and Jazz Festival. Exposing such a bloody legacy may not be the best for business, and like the rest of the United States of Amnesia, New Orleans peddles in forgetting its tortured history.    
 
That disturbing legacy continues to haunt her in most aspects of public accountability and local governmental responsibility to the descendants of enslaved Africans who built the empire and the wealth of this once highly renowned slave port city.   

For six months a year, New Orleans contends with what I perceive to be the karmic vengeance of hurricanes originating their threats in the African continental shores from where slave ships once departed centuries before with human cargo. Perhaps, these storms are amassed screams of enchained Africans incarnate as water Furies from one century to another, furious water balls of human horror from the Middle Passage, and punishment for the port city’s participation in most mortal of sins—enslavement of other sentient beings.    

Not surprising, the most neglected story of the city’s 2018 Tricentennial is the immense contributions Latin American immigrants have made to our epic reconstruction in the thirteen years since Hurricane Katrina. City elders have disappeared an immigrant community that has contributed their sweat, labor, and love to our reconstruction. 

This should not be surprising in a city with a history of slave labor that engages in the disappearance of that legacy on its tourist brochures. I have engaged in a variety of cultural acts of resistance to challenge this plantation narrative because our heroic immigrant people have resurrected New Orleans from its post-Katrina deathbed, and the city owes its rebirth to our Latin American community.

How does the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (LEH) and its Executive Editor Dr. Nancy Dixon (PhD) repay such contributions in their official Tricentennial anthology titled New Orleans & the World? 

With Executive Publisher, Bryan Boyles, now the ED of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, the LEH publication celebrates our contribution by brutally deporting our immigrant community from their version of history—as if we barely existed.

We have been disappeared in their high-end anthology.

When I personally called Dr. Dixon back in late February after Mardi Gras 2018, believing her to be an ally, and inquired about this egregious omission of our immigrant people in a book she had the editorial powers to decide who would be included, she responded, “the book was rushed,”

We opened our conversation with Spanish niceties because Dr, Dixon is fluent in Spanish, and I wanted to hear from her directly why this act of a brutal disappearance had occurred.

I responded, “So, Nancy, we were rushed out of this history book!” 

Frankly, I would like to see Dr. Dixon rushed out of her job as a scholar and teacher at Dillard University because her act of brutal deportation of our immigrant people is simply unacceptable, unforgivable, and exemplary of white privilege to decide who shall be forgotten.

We have been rendered invisible in the LEH’s version of this city’s three hundred-year chronicle, and Dr. Dixon and Mr. Bryan Boyles are two of the main culprits of this cultural atrocity and disappearance.

During an era of raging anti-immigrant hysteria, it is disgraceful when an organization with humanities in their moniker becomes a gatekeeper—deciding who shall be remembered and who shall be forgotten—and practically exterminates us into non-existence.

I reference Dr. King’s quote at the beginning of this essay because I am sure that Dr. Dixon, Mr. Boyles, and the LEH staff consider themselves the “good people”, and their silence since I’ve been holding them accountable is as brutal as their act of deportation in an anthology that has been celebrated to no end locally by the press.

The current administration jails immigrant children in cages and their mothers are flown to detention centers hundreds of miles away, and our immigrant people have become invisible in this tourist industry-driven whitewashing of history.

The people of New Orleans know that thousands of Latin American immigrants have contributed to our rebirth and reconstruction, and they face brutal real life-threatening deportations as they try to remain in a city they have helped to rebuild post-Hurricane Katrina.

To add insult to their tenuous status, our immigrant people have been brutally deported from current history by an organization that is serving as a cultural gatekeeper, and dares to call itself the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. Their act of deporting an immigrant community that has given of their sweat, labor and love to our rebirth is simply inhumane.

They need to re-brand themselves as the Louisiana Endowment for the Inhumanities.

Latin Americans have all dealt with U.S. supported dictatorships that have disappeared our people in Chile, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and the list goes on!

It's disgraceful, unacceptable, and beyond shameful for the LEH and its editors to publish an anthology that has been distributed throughout libraries across the country, and 100 years from now, their historical deportation of our immigrant people will live as the alternative facts and lies of our post-Katrina history.

Yes, there is one page titled Little Honduras on page 33 of the LEH'S anthology in 207 pages and two other sentences that mention that Latin American workers as helping the rebuilding post-Katrina.

From a recent Facebook post Dr. Dixon immediately disappeared, she boasted that one page of inclusion, and noted that I was looking to malign her.

It never ceases to amaze me how white privilege refuses to ignore the reality they drive and how unaccountable they deem themselves to be—especially so-called white liberals who construct borders around themselves as untouchables for their sins against us.

This is not a matter of maligning for some benign oversight, as one writer put it who is included in the book, this is a historical crime against our people. Like all crimes, consequences are inevitable—especially when such an editor is being celebrated to no end because of this book by a local press core that appears to be clueless to our disappearance.

It has been hard living in the Big Easy for the immigrant community here, who struggle to remain in a city they have helped to rebuild with brutal deportations traumatizing families, and the LEH and its editor of this anthology have perpetrated and even more traumatizing act of disappearing us from history for the next 300 years.

I have been deeply committed to telling our immigrant people’s story for the past thirteen years of our post-Katrina rebirth and renaissance, and New Orleans has been my adopted since my arrival in 1984.

I will continue to scream loudly and hold the LEH accountable for their sins against our people, and for their brutal disappearance that makes them accomplices to the anti-immigrant hysteria gripping the United States of Amnesia, which seduces its citizenry to embrace forgetting.

As a socially conscious visual and performance artist, arts educator, published poet, and journalist, I am here to remember that our immigrant community rebuilt New Orleans, and I will speak truth to perverse abuse of power to my last breath in this lifetime and the next!

Ashé y Adelante y Si Se Puede!