On the road of lament, with few possessions left and family members still missing, the estimated 200,000 Katrina survivors who had relocated to Houston were suddenly forced to mobilize once again, this time fleeing Hurricane Rita.
Many were America’s most vulnerable: the poor, the elderly, the sick, the disabled.
Such migrations of the nation’s disenfranchised are expected to increase in the near future, conjuring visions from America’s worst nightmares.
“We could see some portions of roving, semi-nomadic populations,” says Roderick Harrison, a sociologist at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, D.C.
“The last images we have of that are the hobos during the Great Depression, hopping freight trains from place to place.
“Hoovervilles, the shantytowns of the Depression, might be the closest thing in our history to what could happen if we are not able to absorb some portion of these populations quickly.”
It’s the classic story of forced migration, from the Dust Bowl to the South Asian tsunami.
American citizens, bereft and dispossessed, must somehow rally the energy and resources to rebuild shattered lives.
People like Margie LaMartz, 49, a schoolteacher from Orleans Parish, accustomed to being self-sufficient, are suddenly stripped of control. Like many Katrina survivors, herded onto planes in a swirl of confusion, she lost even the power of choice.
“No one told us (where we were going) until we were strapped in,” she says, watching CNN with other evacuees in the cafeteria at the Lowry campus.
Two weeks after Katrina hit, an estimated 388,000 people like LaMartz had been relocated to 36 states, one of the largest migrations in American history. Historians, sociologists and cultural anthropologists are now exploring how communities across America will be affected by an influx of large migrant populations.
They’re probing the past, reflecting on the present, projecting into the future.
“What is the relationship between economics and cultural preservation, and what does this mean to cities like Denver?” says Ella Maria Ray, chair of the Department of Anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
“How will we start to witness not just a New Orleans diaspora, but a new kind of Southern diaspora?”
This massive migration conjures cultural dispersions throughout history, from both the Jewish and the African diaspora to the Trail of Tears, when the Cherokee Nation was forced out of its homeland by the government.
“It’s an iconic disaster,” says Alvin Poussaint, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and co-author of “Lay My Burden Down: Unraveling Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis Among African-Americans.”
The closest comparison, he says, is the drought that ended in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
“People lost everything. Sick and dying, they had to migrate to places where they could survive and make a living. The idea of starting all over again was a theme of that as well.”
For Ralph Mann, professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the strongest parallel is
the Great Migration, when nearly 1 million African-Americans moved from south to north early in the 20th century.
“Many jobs were advertised after World War I,” he says, “and the climax came in 1927 when the great Mississippi flood destroyed some of New Orleans and a lot of cotton and sugar production on both sides of the river.”
That flood displaced about 700,000 people. Nearly 47 percent were African-Americans, who were then interned in 154 relief “concentration camps” where they were forced to work, says Anthony Oliver-Smith, a professor of anthropology at the University of Florida.
From the earliest days in America, the poor – both black and white – have been disproportionately affected by natural disasters that resulted in forced migrations.
“The relationship between poverty and disaster that has been emphasized in recent days is not unique to New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina,” writes scholar Matthew Mulcahy, author of the forthcoming book “Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean,” in an essay for the Social Science Research Council.
“The history of hurricanes in what can be called the Greater Caribbean – the islands of the West Indies and the states along the southern Atlantic and Gulf coasts – offers repeated evidence that the poor have often felt the effects of hurricanes most severely.”
While some middle-class New Orleanians already have bought new homes in new cities, their less well-off neighbors are camped out in strange new cities, struggling to cope.
“We have a difficult enough time taking care of the needy in our society under normal circumstances,” says sociologist Harrison.
“If this does become a periodic problem, taking care of the needs of the more vulnerable people as they are dispersed and thrown around will become a real challenge to developing policies.
“Part of the problem … is there isn’t much political will to acknowledge that this might be a recurring problem.”
If neo-Hoovervilles sound like a bizarre theory, consider that anthropologist Oliver-Smith, who specializes in disasters and displaced people, predicts the number and scale of forced migrations will likely increase in the near future.
He cites a nexus of “emerging disaster trends” such as increasing poverty and population density, and a growing number of hazards with the potential to create technological disasters like Chernobyl.
For now, Houston – which has received the largest number of evacuees – is the test case for communitiesthat must integrate the nation’s migrant citizens.
“It’s certainly going to shape the workforce, and whatever the issues are in Houston, whether around poverty or around class,” says Poussaint. “There’s a high percentage of Latinos – how is all that going to play out with the new immigrants?
“If schools are overcrowded and overburdened, feelings of generosity may turn to feelings of being put upon. If (the displaced) are in any way associated with an increase in crime, it could lead to stereotypes and anger toward them.”
In Denver, anthropologist Ray believes that a holistic approach to cultural migration requires more than just a social or economic perspective. “Maybe we also need a spiritual lens,” she says.
What are we going to learn, for example, about human resiliency?
“As a museum anthropologist, I’m interested in what happens when you lose all of your objects that you’ve imbued with the spirit of your everyday experience.
“What happens to the power of these objects, the essence of them, when they’re gone and you’re left holding in your hands the hands of your children, your family and the life of your new community?”
She believes the migration offers Denver the opportunity to learn about weaving and reweaving community. “We’ll get to see to the depths of our hospitality,” she says.
At Lowry, LaMartz emphasizes that she has indeed been overwhelmed by the kindness bestowed upon her by Coloradans.
“But it still remains that I’m 49 years old, and I have no control,” she says. “It’s like being pushed into a black hole.”
Staff writer Colleen O’Connor can be reached at 303-820-1083 or at coconnor@denverpost.com.
