The event that I attended was a panel book discussion for Rebuilding New Orleans: Immigrant Laborers and Street Food Vendors in the Post-Katrina Era, an ethnography by Dr. Sarah Fouts. The event was sponsored by the Center for Teaching and Learning, and the departments of Hispanic Studies, Anthropology Studies Latin American Studies at Davidson College. 

Dr. Fouts wrote their ethnography about the work, stories, and struggles that migrants faced when arriving in the United States to reconstruct New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. Migrants were promised fair wages and stable living conditions, but were instead met with harsh working conditions and unlivable wages, and threats of deportation even though they had been recruited by companies in the United States to work for them. To speed up the recovery process, the Bush administration had lifted certain policies that would have protected these workers, and the migrant workers were heavily impacted by the lack of federal work protection policies. The American Red Cross and FEMA were in New Orleans providing food and housing, but the housing was either too expensive or unlivable, and the food that the Red Cross provided wasn’t providing enough sustenance for the hard labor that these workers were doing. The workers took it upon themselves to build grassroots coalitions to advocate for their rights, as well as work among themselves to provide food for each other that would provide sustenance for their long days. 

The author’s goals might have been to tell the story of these workers to audiences that probably would not have heard these narratives, since it is a niche group of people that most don’t think about; but at the same time, it is a similar story of many migrant workers that come to the United States in search for work and a better life and are met with challenges, and the resilience that they have to overcome those challenges. 

Dr. Fouts was successful in doing so because they wrote their book purposefully in a way where anybody at any reading level could pick up the book and understand it, making it accessible so that any and all people could read the story of these migrants. When Dr. Fouts read a section aloud to the audience, and when I read part of the book for class, it was clear that they were successful in making the language of the book easy to understand for all audiences. I appreciated this when Dr. Fouts explained it at the book talk, because it made me think about times when I have wanted to learn more about something, but the level of difficulty of the language has limited that, and this is also the case for many people. 

My perspective may be expanded because I am the daughter of Mexican immigrants and I have been raised in a household where these stories are not uncommon. My parents work with the immigrant community in my city, and we have friends that are immigrants and have had to become resilient due to challenges that they face when coming here. I recognize that this expands my perspective, and that I am used to hearing stories like the ones in Dr. Fouts’ book, so it was easier for me to process, understand, and sympathize with. I can acknowledge that there are people who have probably never read or heard about stories of migrant struggles, and that the book may have been harder to process for other people.