Category: new orleans

south west

since the flight to Poland earlier this year, i’ve made a habit of the study of the company magazine on board. the advertisements and articles draw the contours of a region which SouthWest seems to target, and identify with – California, Nevada (and lots of Las Vegas ads…), Arizona, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida. this month’s issue includes a special feature on New Orleans, more than 30 pages, all geared towards getting tourists back as part of the reconstruction – the part of reconstruction that the authorities focus on: making the French Quarter ready for tourism. from an interview with hotel manager in the French Quarter, in the article ReNew Orleans: “It is OK to come to New Orleans. That’s the message I’d want to leave you with, that I’d want everyone to get. The city that you’ve always loved is still here. So if you don’t know how to help, coming here is really helpful. Come to New Orleans and have a great time. It’s OK. We want you here.”

cramped in my row with two fellow passengers from California flying east. a young guy who works at Google. with his yellow Google t-shirt and his enthousiasm, he’s a natural ambassador for the company. “What is it that attracts you,” asks our fellow traveller, who shares my google criticism (mind you, i use it all the time…) but is genuinely interested in the attraction of things. “I’ve never been in an environment with such a bunch of intelligent and creative people. I feel I’m being stimulated to think, to be creative, all of the time.” i think i get it, yes, this is how Silicon Valley works, this is the creative and dynamic side of capitalism that the Communist Manifesto invokes so magnificantly. the other travel companion turns out to be professor in Monterey. she’s a theologian, working on the intersection of women, religion and violence. (i had already spotted her taking notes for a lecture on globalization, WTO and popular protests.) we talk and talk. she did fieldwork in asia and focused on buddhism, looking into liberation movements that at some point or another use violent means. the contradictions of what she calls “militant pacifism”…

more friends

a long intense and exciting conversation with kristy today. funny how that works after months of emails; if i think about it, the last time i saw her was probably in february. and there never really was an opportunity to connect much, there merely was a recognition or promise of something possible. i suddenly remember the scene at the Katrina conference way back in January; i had just arrived and was still under some kind of shock or terror of this place. maría and i had found a little corner in the dinning hall during lunch break, and we were partly listening (and partly getting annoyed) to a picture slide show about New Orleans and Katrina. we spotted these girls talking together, and at that moment they seemed like the only other people in the room i could envision some kind of connection with. let’s go to talk to them, i said, with an urgency that smelled of survival. one of them was part of the Chavez coop and invited to me interview at their house, and kristy and sam were part of the Student Workers Coalition to Justice, and that is how we joined the group for a while. but kristy somehow disappeared from santa cruz soon after that. when her first email from beirut arrived, we learn that she had decided to live a year with her lebanese family. then there’s war, and email becomes something else. the need to write, have life-lines. the decision to leave beirut, accompanied by an unmendable need to go return. back in the U.S. she returns to New Orleans. from one kind of war zone to another; seeking an understanding of how they are connected in so many ways. a intensity of a war zone quotidian that is difficult to live with, but that also installs itself under one’s skin and seeps a vital restlessness into one’s veins. she had just come home to her parents, down in L.A., when she seriously sprawled her ankle and is forced to stay on the couch for three weeks. these moments when your body forces you to stop running around. until she can walk again and… leaves for beirut. eager to catch up with each other in San Francisco before she goes.

making friends

run into sam on the bus this morning. the encounter touches me. i don’t have many friends in this town. which i should qualify, but it’s difficult to pin it down. i don’t mean the presence of friendly (ay, the language is not helping here) people around. there’s much of that friendliness, much more than in many other places i have lived. it’s the friendliness my mum was so attached to in her golden US years. by now parts of it make maría and me smile. like: yeah, sure we’ll meet up soon when you know it’s not gonna happen (i remember it made berna cry.) but i’m talking about other economies of affinities and affections; perhaps i’m talking about falling in love, for sure i’m thinking about people travelling with you through life, about becoming part of the caravan. changing the language might help: it’s the excess of ami/e in relation to friend (and i can’t help thinking that ami/e is related to âme) that seems so lacking.

on this cold, grey and foggy morning, after months of not having seen sam, it all of a sudden strikes me that sam is closer to being a friend than i would have thought. i wonder how much it is about me being less intensively “at war” with this place (as rutvica summerizes it) or the things that have objectively, or better relationally, changed between sam and me. we didn’t have any contact these months, but other webs of connection were spun. sharon martinas and challenging white supremacy. the intimacy between sam and kristy, and my connection with kristy during her experience of the war in lebanon and the trauma of leaving beirut as she did. as we’re speaking on the bus, a different dimension of life and experiences pop up between us than before the summer. part of me still feels that it isn’t really there, it isn’t real, but clearly something is different from before, more dense, more populated.

sam’s news. a whole bunch of them, connected to the Student Workers Coalition for Justice, went (back) to New Orleans this summer. they met up again with sharon while she was there. they keep going back to New Orleans, and continue to make plans to do so – i share my plans to go as well. then there’s the disintegration of the Student Workers Coalition for Justice. sam decided to join Rainbow theatre, a people of color theatre project, which means she can’t continue the Student Workers Coalition for Justice. kristy will be back in Beirut. and they are not the only ones who can’t make it this year. (she asks about me, and i tell her that i’m going to the Brown Berets meetings now, which also coincide on that same thursday evening…) oh, campus politics crumble a bit…

cws 3

a particularly intimate session of our challenging white supremacy meetings with Sharon. just maría and me. we end up not talking about the texts but about difficult discussions with our political sisters and friends about the war, israel/palestine, israeli apartheid & the misuses of anti-semitism, how jews became “white” in the U.S. (with comparisons of how irish and italians became white), about the global action day against death penalty for homosexuality in iran, about tendencies within our feminist and lgbt movements not to address white privilege that end up making us complicit with white supremacist and imperialist geopolitics.

and how to do daily life in santa cruz with its sharp division between is very white character and the invisible latino labour of cleaning, care, manual labour… which is the back-bone of this town, and how to use “gate-keeping” positions – when you’re part of white privilege but for some reason have a position or connection or skill that you can use for the benefit of empowering those who don’t have white privilege, and in general how to become an ally.

and then there was New Orleans. i had spoken to Sharon on the phone just when she got back from New Orleans, and this beautiful and both fragile & powerful woman who will turn 70 later this year, said that she had only one word to capture the experience: life transforming. that her life and her way of political organizing would never be the same. this evening she shared many stories and analyses. things we had already learned about through the Reflections on Katrina conference and the events organized by the Student Workers Coalition for Justice earlier this year. but Sharon’s stories, characterized by great analytical and political sharpness and generosity, made it so much more tangible. the systematic ethnic cleansing, the amazing grassroots organizing, the complexities of the terrain in which to organize.

imagining her. she had been yearning to go back to New Orleans ever since the hurricane and the political respons hit the city, but she couldn’t because she lives with pain and needs to swim twice a day to manage the pain. she would need a swimming pool in the city to open. and the white privilege workshops she helped to organize for people from the Bay area going to reconstruct the most destoyed neighborhoods in New Orleans had added to an awareness of how to go and enter such a vexed place. then came, in the same week, an invitation from a community and organization leaders in New Orleans for a weekend of reflection on the solidarity work thusfar, and the news that a swimming pool had re-opened. a week later she left to New Orleans.

she arrived to the hotel where she had been a guest for many years, which was one of the few hotels in the french quarter of town that was up and running, and still had most of its same staff, mostly black people. happy to be supporting local business, and not to stay in the church where the Common Ground Collective volunteers were housed. the contradiction: the keys of the church were given only on the condition that only volunteers could stay there, no residents. (Sharon called this space “the colony”) but of course the contradictions don’t stop. after seeing familiar faces and hugging familiar bodies, her attention got caught by all the hugh tall men with very short hair in the hotel. then she starts seeing the uniforms. Blackwater, the private security firm, infamous for its actions in Iraq. from the one war zone to the other, operating in New Orleans under the Department of Homeland security. the hotel was one of it’s headquarters, one of the reasons it managed to stay in business. the image of the breakfast room with petite Sharon in her Free Palestine Tshirt (“i have no plain Tshirt…”) among all those bulldozers in uniform…

it had been lingering on mind and on our way back to Santa Cruz i take a decision: i want to go and do solidarity work in New Orleans.

ethnic cleansing

If people displaced by hurricane Katrina would not be able to return to damaged neighborhoods, the city of New Orleans might lose up to 80% of its Black population, according to a sociological study made public on 26 January.

While the television images circulating around the world showed the deeply racialized social stratification of who was affected by the flooding and who had to flee, i’m only starting to understand to what extent the rescue operations and the subsequent plans to rebuild the city are infused with a strong impulse to “cleanse” the place. (the policy of demolishing damaged neighborhoods in which not enough residents are rebuilding their houses, the restricted access of former residents to the city, etc. etc.)

Next week the Student Worker Coalition for Justice (Maria and me have started going to their meetings) organize an awareness raising week on what is happening in New Orleans. I’ll write you more about it next week.

For the press release on the study, click below.
Continue reading “ethnic cleansing”

katrina revisited

“If anything, the stakes simply appear higher today, with Hurricane Katrina rescue and recovery efforts so thoroughly botched that critics like Mike Davis have likened them to “ethnic cleansing.” Davis was, in fact, the scheduled keynote speaker, but it was announced at the conference’s opening session that the activist author had to cancel his engagement after contracting pneumonia during a trip to New Orleans. That left comparatively mild-mannered Canadian professor Robb Shields with the unenviable task of firing up 100 or so weary academics on a rainy Saturday morning.”

An article by Bill Forman on the Katrina conference of some weeks ago (see the January 25 entry) in the Santa Cruz Metro 1-8 February.
Continue reading “katrina revisited”

reflections on katrina

Here’s an impression of some of the talks at the Reflections on Katrina Conference organized by the Center for Cultural Studies that took place here at UCSC last Saturday.

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Craig Colton elaborated on the link between vulnerability and poverty: how the poor are more vulnerable to extreme events, how drought and flood damages first felt among the poor. He gave a historical perspective on the patterns of floods in New Orleans, and the structural respons they were followed by, mainly the building of levees. He also highlighted the links between social stratification and who inhabits the higher and lower parts of the city. The rumour of intentional flooding, he mentioned, has at least one historical base in the big 1927 flooding. Jordan Flaherty, connected to Left Turn, talked about different dimensions of what kind of disaster exactely hit New Orleans. The city was not devasted by the hurricane, but the following day when the levees broke. Crowds put on buses without knowing where the buses were going; no cars allowed near 17 miles of the camps; army shooting on the people who tried to cross the bridge by foot. No matter the amount of chaos, it is clear that such kind of evacuation would have never been tolerated if the people were white and/or rich. And now people are being stopped from coming back. An official “prediction” says that 250.000 (half of the population) will be back by 2007. The truth is: there is an elaborated policy to police who is allowed back in the city. “Residents need to change their attitude before they are allowed back in,” according to one of the officials. The plan that neighborhoods will be demolished if not enough residents are rebuilding the neighborhood thus effectively ties into a plan about which neighborhoods are to be demolished. An assault on the strong traditions of community and resistance of New Orleans. The disaster industrial complex. The first public building reconstructed after the hurricane where prisons. Clyde Woods spoke of Katrina as a striptease of American humanism before the eyes of the whole world. Cracking open the discourse on racial equality, making the extent of racial division painfully visible. The media discourse on looters and savages echoes very old racist discourses – the discourse had effectively gone beyond the the coded (pacifying) language for racism. Woods also spoke of the importance of the city of New Orleans in Afro-American culture, New Orleans as a sacred and spiritual space in that respect. And the current struggle for displaced residentes of New Orleans, internal refugees, to get back to their city. “Afro-Americans never thought they would have to fight for “a right to return” within the U.S., and here we are… and it is going nowhere.” Paul Ortiz spoke about how natural disaster and capitalism work together. His contribution to the collection Hurricane Katrina. Responses and Responsibilities was partly prompted by his disturbance at the assumption that the Katrina disaster would harm the Bush administration. In fact the disasters offers major opportunities for the destruction of public goods and community and for the further privitisation. For making the poor even more poor. The state respons thus should not be considered as “a failure”, but a logic extension of Reaganism. Ortiz talked about the dominance of the ideology in which people are trained to be hostile versus any kind of goverment, leaving the American people with little tools to reclaim their goverment. Instead the reflex is: defend yourself, get your own resoures, get educated, rely on yourself… Somebody brought up the proposition in a newspaper commentary to divide spend the total sum needed for reconstruction of New Orleans into individual checks to damaged residents. Where does that leave the value of the reconstruction of a city, of community, of collective memory… In a last session about remembrance, Elizabeth Spelman talked about the relationship to the land, to physical environment through material objects, through “belongings”. Functioning as a link to the past; mediating our relationship to space. And what these considerations mean for the construction of a city: commemoration, the preservation of memories of those who inhabity the city versus the selling of memories: the reconstruction of the French quarter for tourists imaginations.

María and i were very struck by the extent of (planned, organized) “social hygiene” and ethnic cleansing operations involved in the disaster that hit the city of New Orleans… As i write this up, the Bush administration is under fire for having ignored the warning that the levees wouldn’t hold a day before Katrina hit – given that the levees broke the day after the hurricane, that adds up to the precious time of two days to try to organize… “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans, we couldn’t do it but God did,” an official said earlier. This unholly alliance between the Bush administration and (their) God doesn’t stop to get more worrisome…

A hopeful moment at the conference: a group of students announced that they would be organizing a week of thinking and action around the issues raised by Katrina, and the situation in New Orleans, in February. Kristy, Sam and María, you girls rock!

Other references to groups during the conference:
Common Ground Collective
Community Labor United
New Orleans Housing Emergency Team
Latino Outreach Project
Safe Street Strong Communities