1. Escape On A Stolen School Bus After Levees Breached

As a performance artist, published playwright, and interdisciplinary troublemaker, I channel my intrinsic immigrant courage and dare to remember in a culture often submerged in amnesia and cyber misinformation.

Nearly 20 years ago, I remember escaping the post-Katrina chaos three days after the levees breached on a stolen Jefferson Parish School Board bus. With us on the bus was the iconic composer, singer, and native musical genius son, Allen Toussaint, riding out of the social storm that followed the natural tempest.

While it may sound like a contrived narrative, this is a true story, and I lived it. I even wrote a full one-man play and performance about it titled The Cone of Uncertainty: New Orleans After Katrina.” I toured The Cone nationally and internationally to cities across the Atlantic such as London, Liverpool, and Aberystwyth, Wales—at the university there and the renowned Centre for Performance Research.

Yes, I escaped New Orleans – my beloved “Babylon by the Bayou” – on a stolen school bus, which was operated by a Yin Yang duo of heroic pirates rescuing African American families. Like thousands that could not afford to evacuate and without a vehicle at the time, I was trapped in my darlin’ New Orleans, but the fates intervened and offered an improbable escape. I fled our drowning town apocalyptically abandoned by “Dubya” and incompetent cronies of his corrupt Republican administration.

Let’s dare to remember that Bush Jr. sold us a War in Iraq built on lies and “weapons of mass distraction.” We, melanin people of power, we must dare to remember. 

As a poet, it’s best for me to share some verse that addresses my post-storm trauma, and what I observed from a despicable government response that killed a thousand-plus people in New Orleans. We were abandoned by the “criminal negligence” of Bush Jr., and no one ever went to jail.

Why? Because there is “never any justice served by white privileged men in power” and their cadre of criminals, and they unjustly let our people drown for the whole world to view on national and international TV. 

However, I wrote to remember, and poetry is my first measure to chronicle my immigrant experience and “Living la Vida Loca” in GrinGoLandia.

2. I wrote to remember
in the immediate days after Katrina
our people were dying in the toxic floodwaters
Let’s not forget Bush was on vacation
visited Arizona Senator McCain for his birthday
played air guitar with country singer Mark Willis
and our people were dying in our darlin’ New Orleans
I wrote to remember
Let’s not forget
Dick Cheney was fly-fishing on holiday
and our people were dying in our darlin’ New Orleans
I wrote to remember
Let’s not forget
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
at a Broadway play called Spamalot
and New Yorkers collectively booed from their seats
because our people were dying in our darlin’ New Orleans
I wrote to remember
later she went shopping for Ferragamo thousand-dollar shoes
and the saleswoman chastised her for criminal negligence
because our people were dying in our darlin’ New Orleans
I wrote to remember
that Chertoff, head of Homeland Security, declared
We are extremely pleased with the response
that every element of the federal government
all of our federal partners, have made to this terrible tragedy
But our people were dying still in our darlin’ New Orleans
I wrote to remember
he lied without warrant while body count mounted
Let’s not forget
nefarious spin-master Karl Rove
pimped media blame to city government
and Louisiana for disastrous federal fallout
because our people were dying
in the flooded streets of our darlin’ New Orleans
I wrote to remember 

3. The Dirtiest Little Secret of the Post-Katrina Reconstruction

During an era of raging anti-immigrant hysteria, the dirtiest little secret of the post-Katrina reconstruction is that hundreds upon hundreds of Latin American immigrants have been vital to the epic rebirth of New Orleans in the near 20 years since Katrina’s floodwaters crippled our Crescent City—bringing us to the edge of her deathbed.

The bus our brave buccaneers commandeered delivered us to an illuminated and dry Baton Rouge airport—as midnight merged into an early morning of Thursday, September 1, 2005. We were catapulted into a dream reality with lights and electricity from a world, which had become a living nightmare only 80 miles away.

I returned a month later on October 1, 2005, and was witness to a remarkable and unexpected sight. I remember seeing hundreds of Latin American immigrant workers covering all neighborhoods of the devastated Big Easy. They resembled a locust of reconstruction angels engaged in the heroic recovery. Immigrant reconstruction workers were on hundreds of rooftops laying down many miles of plastic blue tarps, to cover water damages and begin the rebuilding.

They rebuilt churches, schools, hospitals, residential homes, and government buildings. They removed dead bodies and human waste from the Superdome, and repaired many hotels that were at risk of being condemned as uninhabitable health risks. In doing so, they were essential in igniting the damaged engines of the city’s viable tourist industry 

It has been our valiant Latin American immigrant people, many of them “undocumented,” that have aided the resurrection of New Orleans—since Ms. Bad Thing, Katrina herself, exposed the weakness of poorly built and under-funded federal levees that breached easily in her crosshairs.

4. Hard Living in the Big Easy for Undocumented Workers

For five years, from 2006 to 2011, I contributed radio commentaries to NPR’s Latino USA. Maria Hinojosa, the award-winning journalist, often introduced those commentaries, which explored many challenges of life in the immediate months and years after the storm. As I explained, immigrants were subjected to myriad human rights violations while rebuilding a once critically crippled city. 

To me, the commentaries carried an urgency, because of what I was seeing. As I wrote then: “For me, the most painful aspect of these post-Katrina years is to witness that New Orleans, where I have cultivated my artistic voice, has been cruel to my many Latino immigrant brothers and sisters who were brought in for the rebuilding.”

I love New Orleans, but the “city that care forgot” has not cared much about the most valuable and dedicated work force that aided its speedy recovery.

For the past two decades, I have dedicated much of my life and creative art practices to telling this story across the country and internationally. Via radio magic, the Latino USA commentaries on NPR offered me access to an audience of millions across the land. My first commentary aired during Mardi Gras 2006 recounting a cold night while the infamous Krewe Du Vieux rolled with their forever irreverence, and I addressed the importance of our communities being able to costume, parade, and dance in the streets to collectively exorcise our trauma.

With Cuban collaborator and brilliant filmmaker friend, William Sabourin O’Reilly, we also used the recording for a short film titled “Mardi Gras as a Public Healing Ritual for Wounded New Orleans.” Our short ran at national and international film festivals in a series called “Below Sea Level Stories,” organized by celebrated multimedia artist and filmmaker Courtney Egan. We were the only Latinos featured. 

Immigrants here have endured random brutality by local police; wage theft at the hands of ruthless local and national contractors; and brutal deportations by ICE agents.

I’ve filmed interviews with workers about wage theft trauma and horrendous working conditions, but the most traumatic moment has been to witness our people and their histories wiped out by white scholars with unquestioned power. 

In 2018, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities published New Orleans & the World: 1718–2018 Tricentennial Anthology. In their post-Katrina Chapter titled “Renewal,” our immigrant people were culturally deported out of their myopic perspective on New Orleans current history. 

There was not one Latinx writer included in this coffeetable book that has been highly celebrated, but not one local journalist has ever questioned the LEH on why Latin American immigrants were disappeared in their anthology. I’ve written to its director and editors, but there has been deafening silence and pure privilege of “white denial on exhibition.”

Yes, people of color and Brown immigrants especially can be easily written out of history by a powerful state arts agency with a moniker that needs to be rebranded as the Louisiana Endowment for the (IN)humanities. My emails and letters to local arts organizations about this egregious disappearance of an immigrant people have also been met with collective silence. It’s a prime example of how powerless our Latin American immigrant community really is here. Our numbers have grown, but we can be easily disappeared by white scholars that still control the narrative. 

Our immigrant people have given their blood, labor, and love to rebuild a city that has often turned a blind eye to their suffering. From 2010 to 2019, I photographed and filmed the public protests of the Congress of Day Laborers, the immigrant activist group, which exposed the violations that immigrant reconstruction workers and their families were subjected to.

These black and white photographs are the inspiration for the large paintings that will be on view for a KATRINA @ 20 exhibition at CANOA, or Caribbean And New Orleanian Arts, which was founded by the dynamic duo of Tomas Montoya and Jebney Lewis as the first community arts space dedicated to serving the Cuban, Honduran, Puerto Rican, and diverse Latin American communities of New Orleans.

I entitled the Katrina@ 20 exhibition “NO PAPERS! NO FEAR!” after the defiant mantra that “undocumented” workers chant in their public protests. 

This art show serves as a visual-history chronicle, picturing the immigrant workers that labored to reconstruct a once-damaged metropolis. As a commemoration to their contributions to revive New Orleans post-Katrina, our prime directive is to honor the Latin American workers. 

On view will be large diptych paintings of acrylics on canvas that were  created at the Joan Mitchell Center during a four-month studio residency I was awarded. I had not painted in many moons, but I was inspired by working at the center’s regal studios on Bayou Road and immediately began working on a large 48-inch x 72-inch canvas.

José Torres-Tama is an Ecuadorian-born interdisciplinary provocateur of Quechua descent. He is an award-winning performance and visual artist; published playwright and poet; photographer and journalist; arts educator with the Ogden Museum of Southern Art; and director of ArteFuturo Productions in New Orleans. His radical Taco Truck Theater ensemble on wheels project exploring the anti-immigrant hysteria received a prestigious MapFund Grant from this New York Arts Agency. Among other awards, he has received a Louisiana Theater Fellowship; two NEFA Project Development Awards; three National Performance Network Creation Fund Awards, and an NEA Regional Project Award.

The KATRINA @ 20 arts project, which opens Saturday, Aug. 9 and runs through Oct. 24, is a collaboration between Torres-Tama’s ArteFuturo Productions entity and CANOA. CANOA is located at 4210 St. Claude Ave. in Bywater.

More info can be found at torrestama.com.