Christopher A. Airriess

Katrina and Migration: Evacuation and Return by African Americans and Vietnamese Americans in an Eastern New Orleans Suburb

Hurricane Katrina constitutes the most costly natural as well as technology-induced disaster, in terms of both human suffering and financial loss in the history of the United States. Even years later, it continues to profoundly impact the livelihoods and the mental and physical health of those who have experienced evacuation and return and those who have begun lives anew elsewhere. Our study focuses on these geographical processes associated with the Katrina disaster experiences of African Americans and Vietnamese Americans comprising an overwhelming majority (93.4 percent) of residents in a racially mixed pre-Katrina eastern New Orleans neighborhood. We examine the spatial morphology of routes, volumes, and frequencies of evacuees; their return rates and experiences; and rationales and motivations to return or stay. The conceptual framework is based on the disaster migration, place attachment, and social network literature. Both quantitative and qualitative evidence indicates that the evacuation and return experiences of each minority group substantially differed, especially among African American women, and this was strongly influenced by existing social networks.

Resilient History and the Rebuilding of a Community: The Vietnamese American Community in New Orleans East

As the floodwaters have receded from New Orleans and rebuilding has begun, new sto-ries of race relations have emerged and new histories are being written. One is the his-tory of a predominantly Catholic Vietnamese American community located in eastern New Orleans. Before Hurricane Katrina, Vietnamese Americans constituted less than 1.5 percent of the city’s population. Since Katrina, the small Vietnamese American com-munity in eastern New Orleans has received significant press coverage due to its mem-bers’ high rate of return and the rapid rebuilding of their community. This essay will explore how shared refugee experiences, the leadership role of the Catholic Church, and the historically specific circumstances of Vietnamese immigrant settlement in eastern New Orleans contributed to this community’s mobilization and empowerment. Some might attribute the community’s ability to recover so quickly to a strong work ethic and an innate identity—both features of the myth of Asian Americans as “model minorities.” That myth is a 1950s and 1960s construction that has since been deployed to justify racist assumptions about African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians. It also obscures historical processes. This essay argues that the eastern New Orleans Vietnamese American community’s response to Katrina is clearly rooted in its particular history and collective memory. As the experience of the Vietnamese American community in Village de L’Est demonstrates, history and memory are more than analytical artifacts—they are political resources.

Regional production, information–communication technology, and the developmental state: the rise of Singapore as a global container hub

Abstract The production strategies of transnational corporations (TNCs) have revolutionized the structure of global port and container shipping industries as both have adopted information and communication technology (ICT) to better articulate the spatial movement of goods between producing and consuming regions. This research first explores the structural synergies between TNC production, ICT and container transport. With in the context of “developmental state” policies, the bulk of the paper examines the rise of Singapore as an ICT-based global container hub to serve the simultaneous processes of spatial agglomeration and dispersion associated with regional TNC production strategies. The aggressive adoption of ICT by the Singapore Port Authority (PSA) enabled the city-state to territorially embed and competitively manage trade flows through a complex, but spatially flexible hub and spoke geometry of container movements. Through the process of “glocalization”, the PSA has itself become a TNC by operating container terminals around the world.

Versailles: A Vietnamese Enclave in New Orleans, Louisiana

New Orleans supports one of the more substantial urban concentrations of Vietnamese in the United States. An enclave of Vietnamese immigrants has been established at the eastern edge of the city where the Catholic Church, vegetable and herb gardens, and a commercial strip assist the residents in adapting to a new environment. The persistence of this enclave is explained by local conditions as well as by the socioeconomic heritage of the community.

Surviving Katrina and its aftermath: Evacuation and community mobilization by Vietnamese Americans and African Americans

The flooding of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina on 29 August 2005 uncovered critical issues in local, state, and national strategies for emergency preparedness and disaster relief. The Katrina disaster reveals the persistent racial inequality and economic disparities in American society. This paper examines the pre-Katrina socio-spatial configuration of the African-American and Vietnamese-American communities in an eastern New Orleans suburb. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to collect data and compare the two groups, our study reveals media are the first and foremost information sources for both groups. Many Katrina victims evacuated more than once, some not with their families during their first and subsequent relocations. However, the communities mobilized to provide intra- and inter-group self-help among families and relatives, friends and neighbors, while receiving assistance from community organizations, religious institutions, and the government. Compared to African Americans, there were higher percentages of Vietnamese Americans learning about Katrinas impending landfall from government sources, evacuating before Katrinas landfall, and being more satisfied with assistance provided by the government. Those who are lacking in English skills reported more difficulties compared to their co-ethnics. These findings lead to several policy recommendations.

THE SPATIAL SPREAD OF CONTAINER TRANSPORT IN A DEVELOPING REGIONAL ECONOMY: NORTH SUMATRA, INDONESIA

As a capital intensive transport technology linked to industrialized economies, containerization has only recently penetrated the non-Western, developing periphery. The spatial spread of this revolutionary technology through the transport surface of a developing region encounters numerous institutional and technological barriers which are only removed by a reformulation of government trade and transport policies. In examining the spread process of container technology at the Port of Belawan and its hinterland of North Sumatra, Indonesia, attention is given to the important role of policy as a catalyst to the spatial penetration of this foreign imposed transport mode. Some negative consequences of technology adoption are explored and a spatial penetration model of container technology in a developing regional economy is proposed.

Situating banal nationalism, the culture wars, and civil religion: governing localized geographies of national identity in Indiana

Various material forms of national identity have become ubiquitous features of the post-9/11 American cultural landscape. This research specifically examines the ‘In God We Trust’ (IGWT) license plate in the state of Indiana as a material expression and territorialized form of national identity. While conceptually anchored in banal nationalism research, exploring the spatial patterns of adoption or non-adoption of IGWT license plates by Indiana residents is only possible through situating this research through the mediating lens of the culture wars and civil religion. Although the IGWT license plate project legislatively materialized through the localized spatial networks of non-state actors in the context of a new and conservative state–citizen relationship firmly anchored in the culture wars, adoption behavior is also mediated through the much broader influence of civil religion. We conduct a quantitative analysis to determine license plate spatial distribution by county, but more importantly to explore the sociodemographic dimensions of IGWT license plate adoption and non-adoption. While our results generally mirror the sociodemographic findings of social issue-based electoral geography, the imbrication of banal nationalism, the culture wars, and civil religion as materially expressed by the IGWT license plate yields an ideologically different and broader dynamic when compared to culture wars defined by national identity.

Global Economy and Port Morphology in Belawan, Indonesia

Ports are crucial links in global economic exchange. Structural modifications in the global economy have necessitated sequential morphological transformations in third-world port landscapes to accommodate each new emphasis of production in hinterlands. A four-stage temporal and descriptive model is proposed to examine relationships between structural evolution of the global economy and port-landscape changes at Belawan, the busiest international outerisland port of Indonesia. AS nodes linking land and maritime transportation, and as points of interdependent economic articulation between the Western core and non-Western periphery, third-world port facilities develop and operate in a manner that reflects the long-term structural evolution of the global economy. Colonially induced, sequential structural changes in investment, production, division of labor, and trade have come in response to the progressive economic maturation of industrial countries (Wallerstein 1979). Each stage has been accompanied by innovations in transportation that allow for reduced costs, the subsequent spread of capitalist production, and the incorporation of peripheral regions into a single production system (Mandel 1978, 50-51). This article interprets the long-term evolution of port morphology as a landscape expression of global economic relationships. The premise is that each stage in the penetration by Western economic interests and accompanying transportation technologies into peripheral resource regions engenders parallel changes in the morphologies of third-world port landscapes. With the implicit assumption that economic growth in the core depended on materials and markets of the periphery and that economic growth there required capital investment from the core (King 1990, 45), the morphology of Western ports was reproduced in the third world to promote the efficient articulation of global transportation. Interpreting and understanding the continuum of port-landscape evolution at one node of the global transportation system are possible only with reference to the production system of which that port constitutes one element. The port of Belawan on the Indonesian island of Sumatra provides an instructive case study. Belawan functions as the primary outport for the most productive plantation region in the country (Fig. 1). From inauspicious beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century, northern Sumatra by the early 1900s became known as the East Coast Plantation District. More importantly, West* DR. AIRRIESS is an assistant professor of geography at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana 47306-0470. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.149 on Wed, 28 Sep 2016 05:07:20 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW FIG. 1-Regional setting of Belawan. ern control, Western demand, and intimate industrial linkages with the West have characterized the history of plantation development. As a result, no regional economy in outer-island Indonesia is as externally oriented as that of northern Sumatra. 184 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.149 on Wed, 28 Sep 2016 05:07:20 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Port-Centered Transport Development in Colonial North Sumatra

From the middle 1800s to World War Two, the northeast coast of Sumatra emerged as the most productive plantation district in the archipelago and indeed one of the most productive colonial plantation districts in the tropical world (Fig. 1). Supplying foreign markets with a variety of plantation products including rubber, oil palm, tea, coffee, tobacco, and Manila hemp, the region became known worldwide as Oostkust Cultuurgebeid or East Coast Plantation District.1 Over a seventy-year period there developed a system of estuarinesituated ports along a 350 kilometer mangrove-clothed coastline servicing this productive plantation region. As nodes linking land and maritime transportation, these ports functioned as points of economic exchange and articulation between this resource frontier region and the distant resource consuming regions of the industrialized world.

Moral Hazard, Governing Culture and Localized Christian Right Gay Panic in Indiana

I examine a moment in conservative Christian political action producing the revocation of a specialty automobile license plate of the Indiana Youth Group (IYG), a support organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender teenagers. After a brief introduction to the Christian Right’s anti-gay ideology, I examine the political opportunities of the Right’s agenda at national and local scales. While the Right was successful in preventing inclusion of gays in federal civil rights laws, there existed dissatisfaction with the absence of government efficacy to promote their ideological goals. Thus the Right turned to local or state political institutions to further their governing culture power which paralleled the rise of Republican Party majorities in state legislatures beginning in the 1980s, especially in the Midwest and the South. Attention turns to an examination of practices and discourses of conservative Christian non-state and state actors to target and revoke the newly adopted and “pro-homosexual” IYG specialty license plate. A well networked group of Christian Right non-state actors distributed flyers to churches and state legislators to prevent in their worldview the spread of secular humanism across the state. Twenty state senators were successful in pressuring the state’s license plate issuing agency to revoke the license plate after legislative attempts had failed. Those twenty were generally older white males, represented largely rural districts, and possessed life experiences as small business owners, and members of the military or law enforcement. To traditionalists, the banal and quotidian nature of specialty license plates constituted a moral hazard by normalizing an “immoral” culture in public spaces whereas those adopting the IYG specialty license plate are proclaiming their stakeholder citizenship rights to govern culture. What constitutes moral hazard changes based on larger scale cultural and social transformations?