What Is Refugee Resilience? Reframing Survival under Environmental Sacrifice

Abstract

What Is Refugee Resilience?Reframing Survival under Environmental Sacrifice Simi Kang (bio) Introduction When Hurricane Ida struck southeast Louisiana on the sixteenth anniversary of Katrina's landfall, the region was deep in crisis. At the time, both state and community resources were already stretched thin. Severe and consistent COVID-19 spikes, decades of disaster, and a sociopolitical landscape whose bedrock of environmental racism and expendability made it nearly impossible for racialized residents to prepare for, let alone manage, yet another crisis. From my temporary home in Coast Salish territories,1 itself blanked in wildfire smoke, I tried to contact the community-based organizations (CBOs) I work with as Ida overwhelmed coast-dependent communities within and outside of the Army Corps' levee system. For four days, I couldn't reach anyone. Forced to watch Bvlbancha2,3-based media reports on the storm's violence—tabulating potential fatalities, road closures, and structural losses—I was left to hope that folks I knew and cared about were able to navigate and survive this latest 500-year storm.4 In those four days, some vulnerable coastal residents who didn't receive mandatory evacuation orders (e.g., in parts of the West Bank of Plaquemines Parish5) were forced to manage a 500-year storm with few resources.6 Others were struggling to find alternative shelter that was safe and affordable. Some, like many commercial fisherfolk, made themselves acutely vulnerable to save their businesses, staying on their boats and steering into the harsh winds. Their families could not [End Page 43] reach them to determine their safety. As cell service was restored in the days following Ida, I was told by many that, as with Katrina, no one was coming to help in hurricane's immediate aftermath.7 But even two and three weeks into power and water outages and in intense heat, federal agencies were still mostly silent along the coast. What "help" there was proved aggressively insufficient: a few hundred homes received state help putting tarps on their roofs, and base camps were erected by the National Guard to serve as temporary shelter, but, according to locals, they were used mostly for laundry because most folks didn't want to leave their homes unattended. Sandy Nguyen, the executive director of Coastal Communities Consulting, Inc. (CCC), an all-women-of-color-run nonprofit that supports Vietnamese and Cambodian American fishing-dependent families, made this clear. On a call, she told me, "The [fisherfolk] know how to deal with hurricanes... We have to do it ourselves—no one else is coming to help." After talking more about how difficult it would be to get damaged boats out of the bayous and what it would take for deckhands to find work when their bosses were dealing with repairs, Sandy got mad. She entreated, "We are resilient, Simi. But how much longer can they expect us to be resilient? You can only bend so much before you break." She was pointing to prior conversations where we discussed how the idea of resilience has been weaponized against Southeast Asian American commercial fishing families and their neighbors. If fisherfolk and other racialized residents were expected to be resilient—or to withstand disaster after disaster without reliable, timely, or sufficient support and other infrastructure to make healthy lives—now we knew it didn't just mean that no one was coming now; it meant that no one was coming in the future, either. I begin with a recent disaster and the dearth of governmental/structural support it garnered to highlight how the term "resilience" is, first, used differently by structurally underserved communities, politicians, and policymakers and, second, how the latter two deploy the term to relegate some communities to the role of "necessary sacrifice" in the longue durée disaster that constitutes southeast Louisiana. As a feminist ethnographer, I am interested in how Vietnamese American residents of southeast Louisiana are made structurally expendable at the intersections of race, environmental injustice, and immigration policy. For me, these intersections are productively animated through the racializing formation I call refugee resilience, the central conceit and analytic of this article. A deeply violent approach to disaster policy, refugee resilience demands that Vietnamese Americans...