Lan Xang Village: Place-making in Louisiana's Iberia Parish

Abstract

Lan Xang Village:Place-making in Louisiana's Iberia Parish Davorn Sisavath (bio) In the wheelhouse, Papoose scans the two-way radio, and we overhear fishermen speaking Cajun English and French. We hear the twang of Texas oil workers heading out to offshore platforms and the exotic language of exiled Vietnamese shrimpers who've fished these waters since the 1975 fall of Saigon, drawn to America's own elaborate version of the Mekong Delta. Completing the ethnic gumbo are French-speaking Houma Indians, driven by European settlers over the centuries to the farthest ends of the bayou country where they now survive as expert fishermen.1 This passage from journalist Mike Tidwell's Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast (2003)—a regional and ecological history tracing the environmental losses occurring in Louisiana's Mississippi Delta—introduces the history of the Cajun coast and those who live along the bayous, including Texas oil workers, Vietnamese fisherfolk, Houma Indians, and Cajuns. It simultaneously sheds light on the socially and spatially uneven ways some stories are muted while others appear front-and-center.2 In fact, across Acadiana, nearly 15 percent of residents are Black, and in some parishes such as Iberia, Black residents make up at least 30 percent of the total population.3 [End Page 77] In Iberia Parish and Lafourche Parish, Latinx residents make up 4.3 percent and 4.4 percent. Building on Carl Bankston III's and Phanat Xanamane's scholarship on the stories of one such frequently overlooked group—a Lao community of about 400 people on the northern edge of New Iberia, the largest city in Louisiana's Iberia Parish—this article explores how place-making plays an integral role in belonging and experience for immigrants and refugees. Although this article focuses on how Lao immigrants negotiate their spatial practices and experiences in Louisiana, I also deliberately use data about Vietnamese and Cambodians and apply it to the Lao community under examination. This reflects both in terms of very little scholarship examining Lao immigrants in the region and as subjects of U.S. militarism and imperialism, Southeast Asian refugees experienced similar, yet different processes of displacement and resettlement to America. Set against Louisiana's coastal south landscape and local distinctiveness, Lan Xang village is home to refugees from Laos who resettled with sponsorship from the Catholic Diocese in the 1970s and 1980s, and through secondary migration after learning of federally funded job training made available. Like many newly arrived Southeast Asian refugees in the Gulf Coast, Lao refugees landed job opportunities produced by the oil boom, while others filled the demand for unskilled labor in peeling shrimp, shucking oysters, picking peppers at the Tabasco factory, and working in food processing and textile mills. As Bankston writes, "Laotians began moving into Iberia Parish during the early 1980s, the peak period of Lao resettlement in the United States. Their concentration in this area was a consequence of secondary migration in search of job opportunities.... Those who arrived in New Iberia came with little capital, often relying on the help of friends and relatives, and on the public assistance made available under the provisions of the U.S. Refugee Act of 1980."4 Today, the small community off Melancon Road consists of three residential streets and a main avenue. At the heart of Lan Xang village, a Buddhist temple serves as an ordination hall where monks are ordained, and a sanctuary and gathering center for the community. In their efforts to belong and stay, I suggest place-making practices by Lao refugees in Lan Xang village make visible their multiple displacements but also make evidence of their collective process to belong and endow their place with value and attachments in New Iberia. This practice can be seen in places where temples serve as the center of the community such as Morganton, North Carolina and Willington, Connecticut. I approach place-making as work-in-progress and as an active space imbued with purpose, identity, and meaning whose final form is always contested. This approach acknowledges the complex relationships between people and place, and the stories created and shared. In "Space and Place," Yi...