Constructing New Orleans, Constructing Race: A Population History of New Orleans

Abstract

How do we understand the racial and ethnic recomposition of New Orleans's diminished population in the year following Hurricane Katrina? Optimists viewing the influx of Latino migrants see in it a revival of the multicultural past of New Orleans, while skeptics suspect that delays in government assistance for residents to return to the city are an attempt to keep out low-income blacks and make the city whiter and wealthier. The shifts in the population of New Orleans are familiar to sociologists and economists who study labor-market demand for low-skill, inexpensive, and flexible workers. The low-prestige jobs they do are reserved for those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, most often immigrants or members of stigmatized minorities.1 The sociodemographic characteristics of workers building and rebuilding the city shift only when social and market forces combine to make one group less expensive and more flexible than the other. I use this sociological insight to analyze New Orleans's population history and the way race has been socially constructed and reconstructed there.