Resilient History and the Rebuilding of a Community: The Vietnamese American Community in New Orleans East

Abstract

As the floodwaters have receded from New Orleans and rebuilding has begun, new sto-ries of race relations have emerged and new histories are being written. One is the his-tory of a predominantly Catholic Vietnamese American community located in eastern New Orleans. Before Hurricane Katrina, Vietnamese Americans constituted less than 1.5 percent of the city’s population. Since Katrina, the small Vietnamese American com-munity in eastern New Orleans has received significant press coverage due to its mem-bers’ high rate of return and the rapid rebuilding of their community. This essay will explore how shared refugee experiences, the leadership role of the Catholic Church, and the historically specific circumstances of Vietnamese immigrant settlement in eastern New Orleans contributed to this community’s mobilization and empowerment. Some might attribute the community’s ability to recover so quickly to a strong work ethic and an innate identity—both features of the myth of Asian Americans as “model minorities.” That myth is a 1950s and 1960s construction that has since been deployed to justify racist assumptions about African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians. It also obscures historical processes. This essay argues that the eastern New Orleans Vietnamese American community’s response to Katrina is clearly rooted in its particular history and collective memory. As the experience of the Vietnamese American community in Village de L’Est demonstrates, history and memory are more than analytical artifacts—they are political resources.