Parallels in Plight: Finding Commonalities in African American and Latino Experiences in Post-Katrina New Orleans

Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast region on August 29, 2005 and caused extensive damage throughout the affected areas. In New Orleans, flooding due to levee breaches compounded the damage and created a need for a sizable labor force to clean up and rebuild the city. Non-local Latinos overwhelmingly responded to this call and began to arrive in New Orleans in the weeks after the storm. This influx sparked new tensions between New Orleans\u27 traditional low-income African American community and the new group of low-income and often undocumented Latinos. Despite these tensions, both African Americans and Latinos faced considerable and similar injustices in post-Katrina New Orleans. These injustices did not affect Latinos and African Americans in identical ways, but both constitute serious threats to the abilities of the two minority communities to succeed in post-Katrina New Orleans. This work attempts to document three specific scenarios of injustice and disadvantage—labor, housing, and criminal justice that constitute some of the issues most pressing to the Latino and African American communities in post-Katrina New Orleans