Immigration to Evacuation: Displacement in Versailles
BY Iris Kobrock
You take the Interstate-10, all the way through Orleans Parish, past where the plumes of chemical refineries unfurl into the sky. To where the houses lie flat against the horizon, where the markets smell potently of fresh seafood. All the way to Versailles, a small but intensely close-knit Vietnamese American enclave in the eastern corner of New Orleans, Louisiana. Driving through the bustling neighborhood, it’s hard to imagine these streets enveloped in murky waters, as they were just sixteen years ago. As NPR reporter Greg Allen explains in a 2007 episode of the radio program All Things Considered, just over a year after Hurricane Katrina, within a largely “vacant” city, the Vietnamese community “is back” (0:05-0:46). Journalists and scholars alike have been astounded by this neighborhood’s prompt post-storm rebound. So, how did they do it? In the vastly diverse population of New Orleans, what makes these blocks of suburbia so special? Though this is a profoundly complicated question, striking parallels between Versailles’s immigration and evacuation experiences reveal Hurricane Katrina to be, in many ways, a shadow of their past. I hope to demonstrate that, as an immigrant enclave, displacement is uniquely embedded in this neighborhood’s collective memory– and its crisis response skillset. Through their immigration experience, Versailles developed crucial mechanisms of collaboration and recovery, which helped keep this neighborhood afloat in the uncertainty of post-Katrina recovery. In other words, Versailles rebounded because, from emigration to evacuation, this community knows what it is to lose and rebuild home. So, let’s take a drive out to Versailles, and let’s imagine we aren’t newcomers; let’s imagine we, too, are evacuees, on the road to a flooded New Orleans. We’ve been gone for weeks, months maybe. Three exits, two exits, one exit down. Searching for home, somewhere in the water.
Each time Versailles has found its home across water– whether traversing a flooded city or an ocean– the Catholic Church has played a crucial role in its settlement. For instance, Susan Doe, a member of a community organization in Versailles, notes that Sunday mass was among the first sites of community resurgence post-Katrina. As Vietnamese American evacuees trickled back into New Orleans East, parishioners filled the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church, with over 2000 attendees just a few weeks after reopening (In New Orleans 1:30-1:44). Greg Allen also conveys the crucial role of the Church in community advocacy as Versailles fought for its recovery. For instance, after several disregarded requests for FEMA trailers to house community members, a “tent city” was constructed outside a local church, and media members were drawn to the scene, effectively creating pressure to respond to their needs. Just weeks later, 109 trailers were allocated to the area (In New Orleans 1:45-2:03). The Catholic Church’s centrality in Versailles’s resettlement is an echo of its involvement within the community’s initial settlement in New Orleans. Versailles’s first generation of immigrants originated almost entirely from two majority-Catholic villages in North Vietnam, and a collective religious identity sculpted their newly-founded communities (Village 5:30-5:46). In A Village Called Versailles, an S. Leo Chiang documentary depicting Versailles in the wake of Katrina, Fr. Vien Nguyen, pastor of Mary Queen of Vietnam Church, recalls that, during the exodus of Vietnamese refugees to the US, the archbishop of New Orleans visited refugee camps to encourage Vietnamese immigrants to settle in the city (6:35-6:45). This outreach, I’d argue, served as a powerful model for Fr. Vien Nguyen’s own crisis response as he reassured a once again scattered diaspora, visiting evacuation centers to spread a powerful message to displaced New Orleanians: “I will be there to wait for them” (Village 18:00-18:30). In this way, even before the floods and devastations of Katrina, Versailles had already established religious mechanisms of clustering, collaborating, and ultimately buoying up its community.
Versailles’s history also resurfaced within the evacuation centers themselves, where evacuees’ experiences, as well as the coping mechanisms they employed, conjured images of the refugee camps of the 1970s and ‘80s. In A Village Called Versailles, Vo Tran, a resident of Versailles, speaks amongst a crowd of community members, all gathered on folding chairs and blankets under the New Orleans Convention Center pavilion. Tran details how the group remained organized, despite the chaos and hardship of this shelter. Versailles evacuees slept as a group, he explains, and kept an informal record of everyone’s names, to ensure no one was left behind in this temporary refuge Tran likens to “hell on earth” (Village 17:10-17:40). In the context of history, such scenes seem like resurfaced memories. Working at a FEMA Disaster Recovery Center in Houston, Texas, volunteer and Vietnamese American immigrant Mimi Nguyen identifies shadows of her own immigratory past, remembering life in refugee camps as she watches exhausted evacuees struggle to secure food and clothing. Nguyen chokes back tears as she recalls heartbreaking conversations with community elders, for whom this desperate scene feels all too familiar– who tell her, recalling their own immigratory traumas, “now we’re going through the same things” (Village 21:24-23:30). In the 1970s and ‘80s, refugee camps were established first in the US and later in Southeast Asian countries, including the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia, to capture and restrain an influx of Vietnamese emigrants (Zhou and Bankston 6). Professors Min Zhou and Carl L. Bankston note that, within the camps, family relations were “strain[ed]” yet fortified. As families were torn apart in the tumultuous emigration process, familial relationships also gained a new centrality within these budding communities. Caught in this “strain,” Vietnamese American familial ties were knotted even tighter, as individuals bound themselves more closely to one another, stitching together a sense of home even as it “disintegrat[ed]” around them (Zhou and Bankston 6-7). Thus, Versailles stretches out across an ever-shifting diaspora, across currents of recurring migration along which generations of Vietnamese Americans have tugged their definition of “home” behind them. Hence, this neighborhood was positioned to resurface with unique strength and speed, ready to once again forge a deeply interdependent community out of displacement and disaster (Zhou and Bankston 7). Or as Vo Tran plainly puts it: “we band together, and we will leave together” (Village 17:22-17:24).
Having pointed to a distinct resiliency in this Vietnamese American enclave, I am acutely aware of the risk of stretching my arguments into the realm of cultural generalization, ultimately oversimplifying a vastly intricate community. Mark VanLandingham, in his pursuit of the sources of Versailles’s strikingly successful hurricane response, notes an overarching hesitation to point to “culture,” a term which has somewhat fallen out of use in the anthropological world, straggling along a winding trail of sometimes reductive, sometimes outright discriminatory attempts to define it (VanLandingham 57-58). So, here I will offer a clarification: I don’t claim to have pinned down a “culture” of resilience and recovery, somehow eluding the contradictions inherent in the culture concept. In fact, I don’t claim to have illustrated a cultural identity at all. Still, it’s hard to deny that there is something special about this neighborhood. For in this era of evacuation, recovery was dubious for many communities, and some never came back. But Versailles had done it before. “I’ve fled three times,” one elder Versailles resident explains, “this is the third time… [but] this hurricane is different.” This time, he says, he was determined to return. “I consider this place my second homeland” (Village 42:22-43:08). So, instead, I’m talking about a historically founded resilience embedded within a collective past, within the “collective memory” I’ve referred to: a memory woven in the tightly wound fibers of interpersonal, familial, and religious interconnections which lace across Versailles, composing an intricate mesh of figurative neural pathways– pathways traversing entry and exodus, disaster and resurgence, land and water, ultimately knotting this community together in a complex migratory memory. Thus, I’m suggesting that Versailles’s history– of displacement and settlement, of loss and recovery– marks this vibrant enclave as a community that tumbles along the current, a community founded not only in living together, but also in moving together. I’m not concerned then with “culture” but with history, with what happens when the past mirrors the present, when you’ve weathered a long and uncertain road home before, and you’ve already mapped out your route.
Let’s imagine, along our drive to Versailles, two strips of highway, one misaligned. Perhaps a result of the storm surge, this patchwork of concrete snakes alongside the unwavering beam of its sister road. This is an opening shot of A Village Called Versailles, an unimportant shot, probably; we’re not even entirely sure where these roads lead, as they glint in and out of footage of floodwaters seeping into a tilework of homes, schools, churches (Village 00:17-00:56). Further, it may seem strange to circle back to the beginning of the documentary here, at the end of an essay, but it feels fitting. After all, Versailles’s story loops back, too. So, bear with me as I ramble on about these ambiguous roads. For in them, I see the two paths along which Versailles pursues its ever-evolving yet enduring sense of home, two paths which I’ve circled throughout my arguments: one unyielding, one in constant repair. One resilient, one bent by the current. A community at once insistently established and recurrently displaced. This may seem a contradiction, but it’s not. Within Versailles, a collective memory of displacement has in fact buttressed the foundations of home. After generations of being swept away across water– last time an ocean, this time a flood– this community is uniquely equipped to cope with displacement, to embark upon a long, storm-bent road to an increasingly uncertain destination. So, let’s rush along these strips of highway as they cut towards the city, engine whirring, wondering if the house is still standing, if the street buckled under the surge of the river– or if the church’s delicate stained glass shattered against the gust of wind, if the power outages have persisted, if the neighbors made it back. Where does the road lead us? We aren’t entirely sure anymore. In other words: home.
Works Cited
A Village Called Versailles. Directed by S. Leo Chiang. Independent Television Service, 2009.
“In New Orleans, Versailles Resurfaces.” National Public Radio, hosted by G. Allen, 27 March 2007, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9163113.
VanLandingham, Mark. Weathering Katrina : Culture and Recovery Among Vietnamese Americans. Russell Sage Foundation, 2017. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com.avoserv2.library.fordham.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=1477734&site=eds-live.
Zhou, Min and Carl L. Bankston. “Straddling Two Social Worlds: The Experience of Vietnamese Refugee Children in the United States.” ERIC Clearinghouse on Urban Education, Institute for Urban and Minority Education, 2000, https://www.learningforjustice.org/sites/default/files/kits/vac_brief_history.pdf.
About the Author
Iris Kobrock is a rising sophomore planning to major in English at Fordham University. Growing up in New Orleans, Louisiana, Iris developed a deep appreciation for the unique art, music, history, and resilience of her community. The complex vibrancy of her hometown inspired her to explore this particular New Orleans community in her essay.