The TEDxOilSpill Expedition team started the day in the Gretna, LA IHOP and ate with the sense that we’d probably not be eating for a long time. Although the IHOP wait staff didn’t recognize it, we were also in a hurry and the urgency came from the need to boogie west out to Biloxi, Mississippi and attend a rally for Vietnamese shrimpers.
Not many Americans realize that the Greater New Orleans area, stretching from New Orleans to Biloxi, is home to the second largest concentration of Vietnamese in this country, behind the Bay Area. I remember as a graduate student at Tulane working among a huge community of Catholic Vietnamese immigrants in New Orleans east. They farmed the levees and held an enormous vegetable market on Sundays following 6AM mass. Women in conical bamboo hats squatted curbside and worked big plugs of betel nut between cheek and gum spitting a gooey red slime that stained their teeth and toes. The bargaining for cheap eggplant was only in Vietnamese, and was in that loud staccato that bounced through the narrow walls of the market.
Different place, same feel at the rally. About 50% of these coastal Vietnamese families are shrimpers first and foremost and, like all the other shrimpers in the Gulf, this spill has completely and violently yanked their rugs from beneath them. Today in Biloxi, Mississippi they were demanding four things from their Mississippian Congressmen: language access, health care for oil spill workers, jobs and debt relief.
