Free at Last: Post-Katrina New Orleans and the Future of Conspiracy

Abstract

In the first year following Hurricane Katrina and the breaking of the New Orleans levees, the New Orleans-based Alliance of Guest Workers for Dignity and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of eighty-two workers from South and Central America who were stranded in the city. By 2008, the consequences of the regional reliance on slavecatchers began attracting global attention, most notably in the case of the eighty-nine Indian workers at Signal International's Pasacagoula, Mississippi shipyard. This essay explores the invocation of the American civil rights movement in contemporary transcultural dramas and the fact that another “universal” movement has been marching alongside new protesters, and demonstrates that the Free Trade movement in the US has been not only the cause of many current civil rights struggles, but also the beneficiary of the older struggle's very definition of its “cause.” New laborers in the Deep South – Latin Americans and Asians – find themselves not just homeless, but placeless post-Katrina. Black Americans who were shipped out of the city in 2005 to provide a “cleansed” urban area open to new demographics now find themselves in permanent exile, as placeless as their replacements.