DEVELOPMENT-US:
Vietnamese Enclave Thrives After Katrina
Ngoc Nguyen
NEW ORLEANS, Feb 7 (IPS) - As Hurricane Katrina made landfall in August 2005, Mo Thi Nguyen, 71, fled New Orleans with family members to Dallas, Texas, where she stayed for three months.
But unlike half of the city's residents who have not returned, Mo Nguyen gradually made her way back to New Orleans East. She's now living with her son and his family in the predominantly Catholic Vietnamese American enclave known as Versailles. She explained why many like her chose to come back.
"We're old now, and no place compares to living here," said Mo Nguyen. "First, there's a lot of Vietnamese here, with our houses right next to each other. You can go to church every day. There are Vietnamese markets where you can buy or sell goods, and if your children don't take you [to town], you can get a ride from neighbours."
In January, city planners and consultants delivered a 10-year, 14-billion-dollar recovery plan for New Orleans. The plan, which still needs to be approved by the city Planning Commission and Mayor Ray Nagin, recommends spending millions to build up schools, hospitals, transportation, utilities and other areas, focusing the most resources on the most repopulated areas.
Seventeen months after Hurricane Katrina and floods devastated the city, federal and state programmes continue to be criticised for slow and inadequate response. Under Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco's "Road Home" programme, only 300 homeowners have received aid, although 100,000 applications have been submitted. The slowness of the programme is being blamed, in part, for the sluggish repopulation of the city.
To date, only half of the city's pre-Katrina population of about 444,000 have returned. But as city officials and politicians make plans to rebuild New Orleans, a Vietnamese American enclave in the city is taking control of its own community rebuilding.
The Catholic Church estimates that 85 percent of the Versailles residents have returned. Pre-Katrina, about 25,000 Vietnamese resided in Louisiana, with about half that living in New Orleans East. The community struggled to return in the months following Hurricane Katrina.
During that time, the city considered proposals to demolish whole neighbourhoods in New Orleans East to build an airport or redevelop the area into a "green space." Taking control of their own community rebuilding, Versailles residents founded a Community Development Corporation (CDC).
During last year's Tet holiday, the CDC invited volunteer designers, urban planners and architects to work with locals to draft blueprints for the community's rebuilding. It was the first time the community held focus groups to find out the needs of the elderly, youth and small business owners. The organisation is not an arm of the Catholic Church, but several church leaders are influential in the community.
Father Vien Nguyen of Mary Queen of Vietnam Church (MQVN) said the CDC is currently working on plans to develop a senior retirement community, a charter school and a community garden. In order to do this, it's looking into buying land.
"This is a 20-acre piece of land right next to the church...we want to buy this piece of property to build a community garden," said Father Nguyen, 43. "The owner wanted too much - 35,000 dollars an acreà I was willing to pay 20-25,000 dollars an acre, but he put it on sale. No one bought it yet, the list price is 1.1 million dollars, we're willing to pay 500,000 dollars."
Before Katrina, the community's elders spent most of their time tending to makeshift gardens along the banks of the Maxent Canal. Their squatter gardens spilled over with hanging vines bearing squash, banana trees and traditional herbs and spices like lemongrass.
With the proposed community garden, the CDC is trying to bring back the gardens in a permanent way. It also wants to spruce up the waterfront areas to create recreational space for walking and bicycling. Father Nguyen said he'd like to see the community put itself on the map, literally, but not as Versailles.
"We want this to be a cultural place, a point for tourism, so if you look at the map, with [a Versailles] sign you would need to have an explanation, but you see 'Viet Village,' you don't need an explanation," he told IPS.
But with the demographics of New Orleans changing, the Versailles community may not be able to remain an isolated enclave. A demand for labour has brought an influx of tens of thousands of Latino workers. The Vietnamese business district, a one-block cluster of restaurants and grocery stores, now also contains a taqueria and a check cashing office where workers can send remittances to Central America.
The church recognises the need for change, and has even discussed starting a Spanish-language mass.
"If we are going to be a wider church it will be a very strong church in New Orleans, because we are including other ethnic groups but it creates problems also - how are we going to share, the pastor is going to work harder, and we'll be dealing with three ethnic [groups] here, so I don't know how it will turn out," said Father Luke Nguyen Hung Dung, 42, of MQVN Church.
Father Luke says the church has tried to build bridges between people of different faiths, ethnicities and even generations. The first test of these intergenerational bonds came last year when the community rose up to protest the dumping of post-Katrina debris at a site less than two miles from their neighbourhood.
Mayor Ray Nagin, by executive order, ordered the dumping, but bypassed standard zoning procedures. Community members demanded the city install a liner to prevent toxins from leaching in to the ground water. The landfill was adjacent to the Bayou Sauvage Wildlife Refuge, the largest urban wildlife preserve in the nation.
The community surprised everyone, including itself, in mobilising protests against the landfill. One of the biggest, at city hall, drew enough national attention to the landfill that Mayor Nagin shut it down in August 2006, and canceled the city's contract with Waste Management, Inc.
During the community struggle against the landfill, the youth lent their language skills and know-how about how to navigate the system. The elders contributed their time and manpower.
Minh Thanh Nguyen, 21, began organising youth around the landfill issue. He invited experts to talk about the environmental impacts of the landfill, and then organised community forums, where young people shared what they learned with other community members.
Minh helped to found the Vietnamese American Young Leaders Association of New Orleans (VAYLA-NO) in May 2006 to give the youth a voice and role in the community. The organisation is not faith-based because, Minh said, the group wants to appeal to a wide an audience as possible. He said he's been pushing for a bilingual mass to make the church more relevant to the youth.
"A lot of the youth, for some reason, they're not as dedicated to faith yet," he said. "They're still developing their faith. A lot of our students are involved... they go to Sunday school and the church youth group, but they go for the culture and the chance to do different things. We don't go to mass to have fun."
(END/2007)
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