"If I can't crab, what am I going to do? I'm 70 years old. This is the only way I know how to make a living." (link)
Raise your hand if you've ever heard a décima. If not, let this play in the background while you're reading...
Our conversations about the Gulf Coast deal a lot with environmental impact, with the science behind the disaster, and with the way it effects humans on political, economic, and biological axes. One are that doesn't get explored quite as much is the notion of cultural ecology, or the way that a particular society shapes itself around its physical environment. When an environment is threatened, so may be the culture integrated within it.
As a case study, we're going to use the Isleños of Louisiana, a small community that's not very well known outside the area, but who've been directly impacted by our country's two biggest catastrophes of the last decade.
The story begins in the late 18th century, in the Canary Islands, a Spanish colony since 1496. The settlers, or Canarios, begin emigrating to the New World in large numbers, particularly to Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and other Spanish-speaking territories throughout Central and South America.
How'd they end up in Louisiana? After the Seven Years' War, formerly French Louisiana became a Spanish colony until it was ceded back to Napoleon Bonaparte in 1800. For a brief period of less than 40 years, the Spanish worked to give the area a distinctive non-French stamp that can still be seen today: from the Spanish-style architecture of New Orleans' "French" Quarter to the names of towns, streets, and government buildings. And part of this plan was the encouragement of (not quite voluntary) settlements by Canary Islands emigres. These came from land grants by then-governor Bernardo de Galvez, whose namesake was honored by renaming the whole area St. Bernard Parish (where I grew up, incidentally.)
Now, the Canary Islands are a small but beautiful group of volcanic island in the Atlantic, humid, warm, and capped with mountains. In contrast, the Isleños who settled downriver from New Orleans found themselves in a very different environment, indeed:
In the Mississippi Delta, the Canarios were assigned land. Every family received no more than a rifle, a few animals and some seeds - true to the motto "búscate la vida", "eke out a living". The emigrants had to manage in totally unfamiliar living conditions: the ground beneath their feet was no longer volcanic and thus fertile, but a swampy terrain that first needed draining. Instead of little lizards, they now had to deal with crocodiles; the mild climate of the Canarian Islands changed places with cold winters and extremely hot summers, followed by hurricanes and mosquitoes. And as if that wasn’t enough already, diseases and epidemic plagues like smallpox and cholera also came along with their drastic life change.
With regular flooding, disease, and isolation, the fact that they survived at all is a small miracle. Over time, the marshlands ceased to be a just a new home, but began to reshape the Louisiana Isleños along unique lines: décimas exist throughout former Spanish colonies, but you won't hear décimas about crabbing anywhere else.
Isleño populations in places like Venezuela and Puerto Rico were much larger, and established a definitive presence in their new territories. In Louisiana, the smaller community was more isolated, more insulated, and had little contact with the French- or English-speaking communities just upriver. For nearly two hundred years, the language stayed intact as the customs began to reflect their new environment. Fishing and hunting became more than just an economy but an active lifestyle.
That's how it used to be, at least. Times change, and young people of my generation are much less likely to speak the patois than their grandparents: they're living further inland, mixing with other groups, and becoming part of the greater New Orleans gumbo of cultures. You have to go far outside of town to find Isleño communities, and the most important ones lay right in the cross-hairs of three major disasters: one slow and gradual, two sudden.
Let's focus on the town of Delacroix (yes, that Delacroix - although it's correctly but improbably pronounced DEH-la-cro):
There was a time when Delacroix was a thriving community of 700 fishers and trappers, surrounded by forests of oak, maple and sycamore trees. Now barely a sliver remains as the marsh continues to succumb to subsidence and hurricanes. [Seriously, y'all - click on that link to see what they're talking about]
That's the slow and gradual disaster: coastal erosion has been destroying the area bit by bit, an environmental catastrophe that's well-known locally but hard to direct national attention towards. Who cares about a few miles of marshland a year? But you destroy the land, you force families off that land, and a culture based on life in the marshes can no longer sustain itself:
Then came 2005. When Delacroix was obliterated by Hurricane Katrina, we saw firsthand the cost of deteriorating marshlands, the danger of losing our protective buffer. Flooding had destroyed their towns before (most infamously in 1927, yes that 1927, in a story waaaay too long for this diary), but the dwindling populations made the rebuilding effort after Katrina that much harder. Our media coverage focused predominantly on urban areas, but the remaining population of Delacroix had a much larger decision to make: whether to rebuild not just homes, but an entire way of life.
And now 2010. What do you do when the buildings are fine, but - for a community built around fishing - there's no longer any fishing due to toxic sludge in the water? What happens to a culture whose identity is dependent on the marshes that are disappearing, on the fishing that's threatened? When Delacroix became one of BP's centers for cleanup operations, that was the question on everyone's minds.
Of course these aren't unrelated issues: the marsh deterioration was accelerated in large part by drilling, as oil fetches better long-term investments than fishing and game. The bare skeleton of Louisiana's coastal marshes has prevented larger swaths of oil from inundating Delacroix and other marshland fisheries - just stray pockets of oil being reported - but the fishermen who live and work in the area need more than just their immediate waters to sustain themselves. As BP packs up and calls their cleanup effort a success, the Isleño communities are left wondering about their uncertain future. This is where we are now, and we're praying that these small pockets hold.
Not everyone is so optimistic.
Just this month the Times Picayune published a four-part series on Delacroix, and I highly recommend reading all of it. You'll get a sense of how inextricably connected this way of life has been with the environment around it, and how the loss of one signals the inevitable loss of the other. The language, music, and lifestyle of the Louisiana Isleños may disappear with the marshes, while choking in dispersant-contaminated water.
Tony Hayward isn't the only person who'd like his life back.
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If you're interested in volunteering in the Gulf Coast, you don't have to drive down with a mop in hand: check out Pam LaPier's awesome How To Help In The Gulf, which includes links to hundreds of organizations that can use support, money, and volunteers.
The St. Bernard Project, a rebuilding project that began after Katrina, is helping people in the parish cope with the effects of the spill, as well.
You could always adopt a fisherman.
And so much more.
Let's have another décima to send us off.
update: in the comments, luckydog suggests another way to help:
..from the Gulf Restoration Network
For the 5th anniversary of Katrina, can you host a fun, easy movie screening in your community to help celebrate and defend the Gulf?
And if you're interested in the best cooking this side of Hopedale, might I recommend the Los Isleños Cookbook?
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Gulf Recovery Blogathon Calendar (All times Pacific)
Wednesday August 11
1pm noweasels
2pm boatsie
3pm Daniel Kessler (Greenpeace)
4pm mogmaar
5pm Patriot Daily
6pm Project Gulf Impact
Thursday August 12
1pm pico
2pm Fishgrease
3pm citisven
4pm Bill Mckibben
5pm oke
6pm Project Gulf Impact
7pm JekyllnHyde
Friday August 13
1pm La Feminista
2pm Pam La Pier
3pm rb137
4pm Meteor Blades
5pm Laurence Lewis
6pm Project Gulf Impact
