Text

theses

As one of the largest migrant communities in New Orleans, Hondurans played a significant role in post-Hurricane Katrina rebuilding. Many of these migrants, still working today in construction, carefully weigh risk and opportunity in pursuing livelihoods characterized by wage theft, work injury, and potential detainment and deportation. This dissertation examines how Hondurans draw upon their post-Katrina labor in rebuilding to assert grassroots political and affective claims to a city – albeit one with deep socioeconomic and racial inequalities – that many of them have come to call home after arduous migratory journeys. The transnational commodity trade from the early twentieth century on encouraged waves of emigration from the banana plantations to the port of New Orleans. These historical relations belie popular accounts of a so-called new Latinx footprint in the city attributed to a growing and often undocumented population filling the ranks of a post-Katrina labor market that had lost its displaced, largely African-American working class. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research conducted between 2011 and 2016 in the greater New Orleans area, this dissertation contributes to historically-informed, anthropological understandings of how low-wage workers embody inequalities of local labor markets such as work injury, wage theft, and potential detainment and deportation; how migrants frame labor as an ethical contribution through which they assert civic belonging; and finally, how insecurities such as crime, aggressive law enforcement, and precarious worksites are transnationally linked from migrant departure to settlement.

ETD_8625

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Deniz Daser

doi:10.7282/T3DZ0CJ6

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.