Dear reader,

This past weekend I had the opportunity to give a presentation to a general audience about our organization and the context under which it was created.  The presentation was well received and it sparked further questions from the audience, which informs me that we need to continue dialoguing about who we are and what makes up our story.  The presentation I have below is not THE story about Latinos in the New Orleans area, obviously, but it is a story.  It is a story among many stories that we need to create ourselves, as members of this community.  No one will tell our story better than us.  So I encourage you to not only read what I prepared for the NOLA Speaks event, but to add to this story by replying to this entry and sharing your story as a Latino or Latina.

NOLA Speaks Presentation,  October 25, 2008

On August 25, 2005, there was a Latino community in the New Orleans area that was busy thinking about the same issues that anyone else in this community was thinking about–the upcoming Saints season, the start of the school year, the return of high school football, and the possibility that the latest storm in the Gulf might not even come to New Orleans.  We were and are business owners, college students, lawyers, doctors, journalists, radio personalities, mechanics, hotel workers, laborers and more.  In those days we, as a community, barely recognized a need to worry about thousands of Latino men and women who didn’t speak English. Most of us were already 2nd generation and well assimilated.  We didn’t have day labor sites all over town.  In fact, a casual observer might have said that Latinos didn’t live in the New Orleans area.

Despite our seeming invisibility, the Latino community was already present in the area and reflected this region’s demographics—folks from all walks of life, professional and poor, fluent in English and U.S. culture as well as newly arrived with no knowledge of the English language.  We were living quiet lives, growing slowly in numbers, in Boutte, Mandeville, Marrero, Metairie, Belle Chasse, and elsewhere.  Before the storm, mainstream media didn’t speak about Latino issues.  Immigration wasn’t even a topic on the radar of the Louisiana State Legislature.  Before the storm, New Orleans and its metro area was mired in a black-white dialogue.  The Vietnamese, the Hispanics, the Brazilians—we were barely thought about, barely afterthoughts.

Then the storm hit. We were scattered to the wind, same as everyone else.  Not long after we returned, and by this I mean the locals, we began to notice more and more Latino men walking the streets.  Later we saw women and children, as well.  Like everyone else, we noticed that abandoned spaces and once-dangerous streets were now occupied by Latino workers.  You could see them in Central City, in New Orleans East, in Treme.  They were everywhere, located in places that had no recent experiences with Latinos. Suddenly our community became relevant.  To many, we became the HOT issue, second only to displaced residents and a slow recovery.

The migration of immigrant workers to our area brought attention to the plight of these people, who in many ways are our cousins, our brothers, our uncles and mothers.  This migration attracted sharks and cool, detached national observers.  The researchers came to inquire, to poke, and to prod.  Private contractors with government contracts came to exploit.  New businesses sprang up to serve these people.  New businesses sprang up to cheat these people.  ICE moved into the neighborhood with a vengeance.  So did hatred, fear and prejudice.  As parish planning wrapped up for 2007 across the region, despite our newfound relevance, Latinos were still little more than an afterthought.

Puentes was created to address our community’s needs in this changing landscape.  With immensely modest means, Puentes was initiated so that it could help make Latinos truly relevant in the recovering New Orleans area.  Don’t get me wrong.  It’s not as if we didn’t have sufficient local Latino leaders.  We had, and still have, plenty of them.  Despite their many efforts, we continue to find ourselves with little to no voice at decision-making tables.  For thirty years prior to Katrina, and in the eighteen months after Katrina, at the time of the founding of Puentes, Latinos were still an afterthought at these decision-making tables.  What we have lacked all these years, has been an organized voice with institutional support.  So we started, what I still marvel to say, the first Latino run, Latino serving community development organization in the New Orleans metro area.  It really is hard to believe that we are the first for our community in this work.  We started this organization because my founding board members noticed that despite everything we’d been through, our long history in this community, our contributions to this region, and the change that we were witnessing and living, the Latino community remained voiceless.  We were, and remain in large part, a disjointed, disconnected, and disengaged Latino community.

So we started Puentes with no money and a dream to build houses for our working Latino families.   After five months of looking into the potential of becoming a housing developer, we realized that if we, as a community, were going to succeed, we needed to have a voice.  Everywhere we went, from meetings on emergency planning to meetings on the lack of available funding for English as a Second Language, we noticed the same thing over and over and realized that if we, as a young, start-up organization, didn’t begin to address this issue of voicelessness, we would end up in the same place we were before the storm, ignored and irrelevant.

What was our response to be, in the face of all these challenges?  We were nothing more than three board members and one volunteer staff person.  I can’t honestly tell you right now if it was accidental, providential, or other, but we landed on an idea that took root and gave shape to other ideas.  We landed on the idea that our goal was bigger than just housing-which is our initial strategy for addressing one of our pressing issues.  Or goal, in truth, was to build a strong Latino voice.  We wanted Latinos in New Orleans to be recognized, heard, served, and engaged.  We wanted Latinos to be an active voice in the dialogue about how we rebuild our communities.  We wanted, in short, equitable access to asset building opportunities that are available for all.

As we hit upon what we needed, we gave birth to a new concept, LatiNola, that is—Latinos in New Orleans—LatiNola.  Similar to other community development organizations, we would, of course, build strategic programs to address economic and community development issues, which we have, such as our home buyer training class in Spanish, which has begun to increase the pool of potential homeowners; or our work with law enforcement to improve relations between the police and the Latino community.  We have started these programs now, and will build other similar programs,  which I am now confident we can accomplish—but our key to our ongoing effort to develop our voice is LatiNola.

LatiNola is so important, as both a concept and a program, to Puentes that we gave it its own website and have pushed for it to become its own brand in the minds of the community.  Our first public effort through LatiNola was simply to bring attention to the need to register to vote.

We created LatiNola Votes!, rounded up volunteers around this issue, and began to go to festivals, talk on the radio, give interviews, and talk to college students.
We created a group of energized community volunteers who took the LatiNola concept into the community in a very short period of time.

We built a website to communicate our message and used it to share community information.

For example, when the Louisiana Legislature threatened to pass hateful anti-immigrant bills, we were able to cast out action alerts and keep the process in community’s mind. We had done our work just in time to have an effect on the outcome. We educated ourselves and our leaders educated the community by talking to radio, newspapers, and holding forums such as the one on this slide.  We prepared to testify against the bills with help from one of our board members, who was working with the Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops to stop the fear-inspired bills.  Many of us, including myself, who had never done this sort of work before, matured into public life in a significant way during this time.

We also started a public leadership program in January, which was designed to develop local Latino leaders into a team of public leaders.  Because our community is lacking in capacity on so many fronts, we felt that it would be vital to our ongoing work and our ongoing growth as a group if we started training leaders who showed a passion for exercising their ability to act on behalf of others and themselves as community citizens—in other words, in their ability to exercise poder, which means power in Spanish, as well as as to be able to.

So our volunteers grew and our leaders grew.  More people began to take ownership of LatiNola and soon folks who were not involved with us at all knew about us.

This summer, on June 28th, we launched our first major community event at Lakeside Mall, which we called Experience LatiNola.  The event was an immense success for us, bringing together so many working pieces of a concept still in flux and still in formation.  We had a good time, made new friends, and entertained the community while we also educated, but even more than that, we learned how to do something none of us  had done before.

Thanks to the creativity of our volunteers, we created a video booth and we did what we now know we need to do so much more of—we listened.  We asked people to tell us about their concerns as Latinos, and they did so.

So, now you find us at that precise moment that comes after listening—on the verge of action.  That is where Puentes and its LatiNola leaders are today, and that is where it will remain for many years to come.  Our goal is to create a major institution in this community that will always be ready to act after having listened WELL to its community’s concerns.

What we need from you, our audience, our listeners, our supporters, is to conduct the same kind of listening.  The Latino story of New Orleans is complex.  It is multi-faceted, multi-ethnic, and multi-generational.  Our community is deeply diverse, and growing in diversity each day. As we move forward, the leaders working with Puentes, those who have helped shape our LatiNola program, as well as our partners in the community, are gearing up for a future in which the Latino community is actively involved at decision-making tables that affect our lives.

But we need your help.  With your help, we will be able to push to no longer accept our status as an afterthought when decisions are being made and policies are being set.  With your help, Puentes will grow and become a stable institution that can help others to grow and become productive and active members of our community, in turn, who will then help even others to join in the fray and make our region stable.

As we move into tomorrow, we have a vision at Puentes of a region that is accepting of people from all points across the world.  We have a vision of a region that is vibrant with multicultural and multi ethnic life.  In short, we have a vision of an international city, of an international region.  To accomplish this mission, we not only need financial support to enable us to do our work, we need your active participation in our vision, which we believe is a vision that the entire New Orleans region can own, that you can, and in many ways already do, own.

So, as a proud Latino of Dominican origin and a proud member of the New Orleans community, I would like to close by asking you to look around you to see who makes up LatiNola.  I AM LATINOLA.

Tags: hispanic, hispanic community, latino, latino community, latinola, louisiana, lucas diaz, new orleans, new orleans hispanics, puentes, puentes director

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 10:46 am and is filed under Other News, Puentes Director. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.