Immigrant labor rebuilt city after Katrina

By Peter Finney Jr.
Clarion Herald
(Photos by Frank J. Methe)

On the eve of the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, First Grace United Methodist Church on Canal Street in New Orleans witnessed a poignant outpouring of thanksgiving today for the large number of immigrant workers who helped rebuild a devastated city.

Rev. Shawn Anglim, pastor of First Grace, popped open an air conditioning duct grate in the church floor and stepped about knee-deep into the square hole.

“Ten months after the storm, when my family came to the city, like many people did, I walked into this clean, gutted sanctuary, and the white construction foreman said, ‘You should have seen those Mexicans. They crawled into this ventilation duct that runs the length of this sanctuary,’” Anglim recalled. “The foreman said, ‘They were incredible. They mucked out what the Gulf of Mexico brought in.’”

Anglim said the mostly Latino workers “came to this city, rebuilt our house of worship, rebuilt our homes, rebuilt our children’s school, rebuilt building after building, rebuilt our lives.”

“This city is as much theirs as it is anyone else’s,” Anglim said. “Today, we New Orleanians remember our immigrant sisters and brothers as fellow New Orleanians. You made us better, and from the bottom of our hearts, we say, ‘Muchas gracias.’”

Leticia Casildo, co-executive director of Familias Unidas En Accion, an organization dedicated to empowering immigrants and their families, said the work done by immigrant workers after Katrina aligned with the workers’ culture that is so dedicated to hard work.

“We came with a mission to work, to give our all,” Casildo said. “And you know what? We fell in love, and we fell in love with the city and the state.”

Sue Weishar, a policy and research fellow for the Jesuit Social Research Institute at Loyola University New Orleans, said the residents of southwest Louisiana who have lost everything in Hurricane Laura this week can “count on the labor of immigrant workers, many undocumented, who will dig homes and businesses out of the muck and rebuild neighborhoods.”

Cristi Rosales-Fajardo, who is married to an undocumented immigrant construction worker, said she was taken aback when she saw a “Rebuild New Orleans” promotional piece that did not include the pictures of any immigrant workers.

“To that I say, ‘Don’t just look for images on the internet, but you who are here today are actually seeing what it took to rebuild our city,’” she said. “It took all of us – black, brown, undocumented citizens – to rebuild the city.”

A longtime member of Pax Christi New Orleans, Kevin Cahalan, directed his thanks to the workers who were present.

“While we rebuilt our lives, you rebuilt our city,” Cahalan said. “And while we were rebuilding our lives, you were sacrificing your own, working with hazardous materials in dangerous structures, suffering resentment and, often, wage theft, arrest and deportation. Eventually, history and a grateful city will praise and applaud you.”

pfinney@clarionherald.org