Embedded Files
Among the wider social and cultural landscapes of New Orleans that are documented publicly, the narrative connection between Vietnamese residents, labor, and the food industry frequently threads itself together. The narrative traces of Cubans in New Orleans draws attention to the musical: the syncopation found in much Cuban music became integrated into many New Orleans' musicians' interpretations of the rhythm and blues throughout the 1960s and 1970s, although I have mostly encountered evidence of this in club performances rather than in the state archives themselves. In my own family (and Cuban friends of the family) in New Orleans, employment mostly took the form of clerical or cashier jobs in groceries or department stores.
My father opened an independent law office in Mid-City in the 1980s (it had a very brief run), above a now long-disappeared Latino restaurant.
Seafood sign in St. Mary Parish, LA. Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American fishers currently represent almost two-thirds of the commercial shrimping fleet in Southeast Louisiana. Courtesy of Louisiana Sea Grant.
My grandmother, Bertila, in now-void passport photos taken in 1983, after twenty years of living in New Orleans.
My grandmother, Bertila, has worked as a secretary, small business owner, shop employee, and clinic employee in both Cuba and the United States. My grandmother’s life was unusual and complicated, and she is not eager to recall memories from before the United States, but in what she shared with me emerged a pattern of both privileges and constraints. As a young woman, she left a rural part of the island to live in the metropole of Havana. Her early life in Santiago de Cuba was largely contained within the household run by her firm and harsh stepmother. Under her stepmother’s constant demands, Bertila’s life was consumed in domestic chores, and especially preparing and cooking food for the entire family.
My grandfather, in now-void passport photos taken in 1983, after twenty years of living in New Orleans.
So, it must have been a dramatic shift to leave these circumstances to attend an “American-oriented” business academy in Havana at age fifteen: young, unmarried, living in a new neighborhood, taking classes that trained her to be a secretary in the Ministry of Health under the Batista government. She was no longer responsible for her siblings and under the constant need to follow her parents’ orders. While attending the Havana Business Academy, she met my grandfather, Osvaldo Sobrino, and was engaged and married to him when she graduated with her business degree at twenty years old. Her marriage to him would bring her to a new country, but it would also end up rerouting her into the same domestic routines that shaped her early life in Oriente.
Map of Village de L'Est in the Versailles area of New Orleans East.
Statue of the Virgin Mary outside the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church.
Mary Queen of Vietnam is a Roman Catholic church that has for decades been a center of Vietnamese-New Orleanian celebration (e.g. its yearly Tet festival in recognition of the lunar new year) and a center of mutual support following the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. Both Gentilly and New Orleans East experienced devasting infrastructural damage, flooding, and "looting" in 2005 due to their low-lying geographic situation in the city, some of the worst effects of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
In this website, I asked the question, how does a group of people feel at home when their politics are always bad? (That is, their politics are in both the country of origin and the host country keep them uneasy, and in a constant choosing of sides and allegiances, either to the state or to themselves.) Based on the materials and interviews I gathered together in this project, my answer is ambiguous regarding my limited view of the Cuban community; I do not believe my grandparents have felt at home in the United States since they arrived from Havana in 1962. Near the end of her life, my grandmother (whose migration story I primarily focused on in this project) in her exodus only found herself to have been returned to the domestic routines of a housewife, exactly those which she had attempted to escape as a young girl.
Whilst my grandmother fled the promise of collectivity in the Cuban Revolution and tried to find a new home in the individuality of the United States, the Vietnamese refugees who began arriving in larger and larger numbers after 1975 appear (both in the archives and in practice) to have constructed their own community built on collective action in the face of ostracization from the black | white racial binary of a segregated New Orleans. This constructed community-building in the Vietnamese neighborhoods of New Orleans East was crucial to the reconstruction of its infrastructure following Hurricane Katrina, after which community centered around the church was a central source of interpersonal aid in the absence of state or national aid in the face of a disaster on all scales. Catholic identity served practical purposes in addition to any religious affinity, as the structure and routine of church activities and facilities were important to many refugee families experiencing immense changes in their home environment. During Hurricane Katrina, the interconnectedness of the Vietnamese-New Orleanian community in New Orleans East (particularly those who attended churches like Mary Queen of Vietnam) allowed these residents to take account of all missing persons throughout the flooding and ensure that all individuals and families were recognized for their housing or health needs.
In so many words: it seems that people who have exited and entered produce a home in their ability to care for themselves and one another in the face of little governmental or institutional help, and develop networks of aid when needed in the face of further political violence.
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