After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans experienced a seismic racial shift: one-quarter of its African American population left, whites regained the majority on the city council, and thousands of Latino immigrants came in, largely from Mexico and Honduras and drawn by the prospect of reconstruction jobs and eased employment restrictions. Even as the flow of migrants slowed in the years since the hurricane, and although the newly arrived make up a small fraction of New Orleans’ population, they destabilize the city’s long-standing black-white divide, and its very image of itself. New Orleans’ experience — though spurred by disaster rather than plain economics and demographics, and based in a city whose unique culture originates in a long history of racial mixing — is a common one throughout the country. As Latinos shift and complicate the country’s racial dichotomy, writers, policy advocates and other experts visit Zócalo to explore race and immigration in post-Katrina America.

 

Keynote Speaker: Ned Sublette
Ned Sublette is the author of two books elucidating New Orleans, a city with a uniquely complex history of cultural intermingling. The World That Made New Orleans explores the city’s first century, and the forthcoming The Year Before the Flood takes up Sublette’s personal history with the city, along with the strange final year for the city as we knew it. Sublette will discuss the character and culture of New Orleans, then and now.

 

Panel One:  Is Black-Brown the new Black-White?

Moderated by Oscar Garza, Los Angeles-based journalist
News media around the country have scrutinized the relationship between African Americans and Latinos, particularly hints of economic competition and racial tension and violence. Zócalo invites a panel — including Duke political science and African American studies professor Paula McClain, Betina Cutaia Wilkinson of Louisiana State University, and USC Annenberg professor and immigration expert Roberto Suro — to focus on the relationship between the groups to see exactly where tensions lie, where cooperation exists, and how it’s changing race in America.

Panel Two: What Do Latinos Mean for Civil Rights?

Moderated by Andre Perry, Professor, University of New Orleans

Before the massive demographic shift prompted by Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was a black and white city with an African-American majority city council. Across the country, with Latino immigrants increasing in numbers and making up a key swing population, Zócalo’s panel — including Syracuse’s Jamie Winders, Stanford’s Laura López-Sanders, and urban and population geographer Anita Drever— considers whether the nation’s newest residents upset the black-white balance and what it means for the country.

 

This event is made possible by a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.