Ecologies, Economies, and Resilience: State Restoration Imaginaries & Vietnamese/American Fishing Futures in Southeast Louisiana

Abstract

This project lies at the intersection of Asian American studies, critical refugee studies, environmental injustice and racism, and engages community-level interventions into restoration policy and practice in Southeast Louisiana. Over the last 15 years, coastal land loss and vulnerability to disaster has been at the center of how government officials, residents, and everyone in between talk about coastal Louisiana’s future. Significantly, where residents are often told these environmental ills are ‘natural’ and thus difficult to apprehend, their origins are quite clear. Land subsidence (or sinking), which is typical of the marshland that forms Louisiana’s coast, is spurred on by federally supported oil extraction, natural gas exploration, and shipping canals, which all cut up and hasten the dissolution of the already subsiding and porous coast. Damming, leveeing, and other infrastructure management along the Mississippi River make residents even more vulnerable to climate-change-induced flooding and storms. All of these decision-maker-produced ills make the daily lives of folks who rely on the health of the Gulf and the coast not just difficult, but increasingly impossible. This is particularly the case for Vietnamese/Americans, who decision-makers continue to racialize as refugees well equipped at surviving upheaval. As a result of this refugee racialization, Vietnamese/Americans are at once rendered more ‘resilient’ to the above disasters and erased from mitigation and support efforts as resilient refugees, or exemplary survivors of disaster who, in addition to their particular aptitude for assimilating U.S. culture and values into their families and communities, are adept at incorporating disaster policy and coastal regulatory practices into their daily lives. In spite of this, as perpetual refugees, they may never be fully “American.”