An Afternoon in New Orleans:These are some impressions of a stranger, a visiting observer that knows very little about New Orleans as it is or as it was before or after Katrina. It reflects the prejudices of such a strange observer, one that can barely distinguish between what has improved or been left undone since the summer of 2005. This visitor made the trip last Saturday with Rick Lowe of Houston’s Project Row Houses (www.projectrowhouses.org), an artistic community project based in the city’s Third Ward.Probably the most surprising thing is that the path into New Orleans along 1-10 East and Canal looks about the same as it did two years ago, before Katrina: a steady stream of cars glide in and out of the city with no delay and the view from one of those cars is about the same as that of any U.S. city. This first impression is an optical illusion; and even though sight is still the most easily deceived sense, it cannot be so easily deceived if taken to the Ninth and Lower Ninth Wards.The part of Lower Ninth Ward bordering a long stretch of formerly broken levees is not full of demolished or burnt houses, although the occasional home sits atop an upside-down truck. Instead, it looks as if no neighborhood ever existed there. Overgrown grass blurs the lines between formerly demarcated land plots. It doesn’t look like a former war zone or battlefield: again, it looks like nothing ever existed there, certainly not people. The Ninth Ward and other neighborhoods that are slowly being re-inhabited by their Black residents look mostly empty, but in some beautiful brick housing projects, children run happily, with the adults, including the insane, disabled and elderly, slowly milling around, or just sitting outside waiting, either for death, or nothing at all. These adults are the true sole-survivors, the heroic veterans of a war with Nature and a great Exodus.Maybe these are the ones that never left.In one section of the Lower Ninth, Holy Cross, teens and pre-teens broke out the huge, old, gold band trumpet and began a fifty-strong, impromptu parade through the streets with song and dance, the symbol of a youth in resistance to this world, whether anyone cared to look or not…what else is there to do on a Saturday afternoon? One of the schools that they might have gone to looked like a large, tattered barracks, gated-closed, but with a new, bright blue banner ironically announcing “Welcome Back Students!â€Some streets, through the Ninth in particular, show rows of houses where people are obviously living, sometimes with a white FEMA trailer parked in the lawn, and all tattooed with a spray-painted X and hieroglyphs crowding each angle: the soldier the inspected it, the date inspected, and at the bottom, the number found dead, usually a “0â€, but sometimes a number like “2†or “3.†In some non-residential areas in this neighborhood around local stores, people congregated, passed back and forth, or were just posted up against the wall, waiting. Toward construction sites, Mexican, Salvadoran and other Central American immigrants walked to work in paint-spattered work clothes and hard hats, even with a girlfriend, to rebuild some part of a building. Maybe the angry, arrogant sounding announcement of one worker “¡Somos nosotros que estamos construyendo la ciudad!†is not so inaccurate. In nicer neighborhoods, some white people were standing in or by their houses, as if taking a survey, apparently to inspect them, but usually not to spend the night.Whites filled the French Quarter, with nothing unusual except fewer people for a Saturday evening, the restaurants especially overcrowded, displaying beady eyes of desperate anxiety. Café du Monde was as usual a frenzy, packed to capacity, with powdered sugar floating and covering the ground. Probably nothing is cooler than French braids to match the gangsterized, baggy, saggin’ version of the French bakery uniforms on the Black teen workers there. In the French Quarter, it felt like standing on the starboard of giant galley that had been sunk, the water now evaporated, but leaving the salty sea air to invade every crevice, along with a light stench. Should we be breathing here? Apparently its ok, compared to what it must have been to breath immediately after Katrina.The most visibly cruel part about New Orleans today is that plenty of new and old, but all perfectly inhabitable public housing projects are either gated-off or for blocks totally deserted. Its almost shocking that no large-scale rebellion, squatter settlement or even a series of small insurrections have forced these places into homes for the people wandering aimlessly through the streets of NOLA or for the others exiled and dispersed in their own country. The city appears to be operating at a minimal level, but after a war, with rows of khaki hummers to prove it. Sometime in the future, New Orleans’s Black residents might return to reconstitute the city’s largest demographic group. But where will they, or anyone, live or work? Most people from the city can’t pay the rent, three times higher than before Katrina: high demand + low supply = high rent prices.If “George Bush doesn’t care about Black peopleâ€, he and his administration apparently care even less about Black people in New Orleans, or any working people there, including the new Spanish-speaking immigrants. Whatever the pace of construction, it is clearly not enough, and the federal government is only visible through a few military vans and FEMA trailers. In fact, almost no entity, government or otherwise appears urgent to solve the multiple, overlapping environmental, land, economic and social crises or the contradiction between available public housing and hungry, desperate, marooned New Orleanians.Within one week, the anniversaries of the New York and New Orleans disasters were commemorated. The New York disaster has been cultivated with urgent, opportunistic, highly politicized attention, and has justified a “War on Terrorâ€, including the annihilation and occupation of major portions of the Muslim world. The New Orleans disaster has attracted no similar government or business response. The U.S. ruling class, with its state and business, has proven itself highly qualified for war and destruction, but totally incompetent at rescue and construction. This ruling class has most clearly shown that it is criminal, illegitimate, reckless and incapable of justice. Its not just that George W. Bush doesn’t care about Black people, he doesn’t care about America, the place of one hundred New Orleans. And its not just Bush, its capitalism’s business and government that is literally uninterested in these most urgent problems of this America. But before this indifference, will New Orleans achieve redemption or apartheid?Miles Vincent RodrÃguez September 12, 2006, Houston, Texas
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