The Vietnamese of Versailles: New Orleans East After Katrina

The neighborhood is named for the apartment complex that anchored it. Versailles, in New Orleans East, was where the Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans resettled Vietnamese refugees beginning in nineteen seventy-five. Many of the families had come from the same province in northern Vietnam. Many were Catholic, which made the archdiocese a natural sponsor. The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities documents the resettlement as one of the largest concentrated Vietnamese communities in the American South, with population estimates in the range of five thousand to seven thousand people by the early nineteen eighties, though precise census figures vary by source.

The community built Vietnamese restaurants, Vietnamese grocery stores, and a garden district of backyard vegetable plots that became known throughout New Orleans as one of the most productive urban agricultural zones in the city. Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church became the community anchor. The neighborhood stabilized, and then it flooded.

When Katrina hit in August two thousand five, New Orleans East went under. The Versailles neighborhood took significant water damage. The federal response was slow. What happened next became the most-told chapter of the community's story: the Vietnamese residents of Versailles organized their own recovery without waiting for government assistance. They returned faster than almost any other neighborhood in the city. They cleaned up. They rebuilt. The community's relative cohesion, its organizational infrastructure through the church, and its experience of collective action gave it capacities that more dispersed communities lacked.

In two thousand six, when the city proposed siting a landfill adjacent to the recovering Versailles neighborhood, the community organized months of public protest and ultimately blocked the project. The victory was documented by local journalists and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities as one of the clearest examples of successful environmental-justice organizing in the post-Katrina recovery period.

It is one of the least-told chapters in both Vietnamese American history and in the literature of the Katrina recovery.