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September 15, 2008 - New Orleans City Business
Hispanics leery of evacuation process
By Richard A. Webster
MariaElena Michel-Melendez knew there was a problem with the city-assisted hurricane evacuation at Union Station when dozens of Hispanic people approached her and asked many of the same questions.
“How much does the bus trip cost?”
“Can we ever come back?”
“Will we have to pay for food and shelter?”
She reassured them the city services were free and everyone who evacuated would be safely returned home.
But she could tell there was something more pressing on their minds. She saw the fear in their eyes as they looked past her, staring at the camouflaged National Guard troops keeping watch over the crowd.
After Hurricane Katrina, tens of thousands of Latinos came to New Orleans to capitalize on the construction boom. The Hispanic population in the metropolitan area jumped from between 80,000 and 100,000 before the storm to estimates as high as 150,000, said Martin Gutierrez, Catholic Charities of New Orleans director of neighborhood services. A large number of the newcomers are believed to have entered the United States illegally.
Michel-Melendez, a community volunteer who served as a Spanish translator during the evacuation, urged Hispanic families to join the thousands of people waiting in line for a seat on one of the buses out of New Orleans.
But many resisted, and eventually they all asked the same question.
“Are they going to check our papers?”
Michel-Melendez reassured them the city was only concerned with public safety, not enforcing the country’s immigration laws. Eventually they boarded the buses, but Michel-Melendez worried that thousands of Latinos who needed help evacuating didn’t seek assistance because they suffered from the same misconception.
It was apparent to her that vital evacuation information was not reaching New Orleans’ growing Spanish-speaking population.
Information given too late
Out of 200 day laborers surveyed, less than 5 percent said they understood the city-assisted evacuation process leading up to the hurricane, according to the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice.
“The most important thing is that immigrants were in need of not just information about how to evacuate but clear assurances that immigration checkpoints would not target them on the evacuation route,” said Saket Soni, lead organizer for the Workers Center for Racial Justice. “Without that, people were forced to choose between the possibility of death or deportation. They were afraid of a Category 4 hurricane, but they were even more afraid of immigration.”
Long before Gustav made landfall, the city received assurances from the state that no one would be deported during the evacuation, said Col. Jerry Sneed, director of the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Preparedness. And the Red Cross guaranteed that undocumented immigrants would be safe in their shelters. But it wasn’t until Sunday morning, the day when Mayor C. Ray Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation, that the Department of Homeland Security released an official statement that no immigration enforcement would take place during the evacuation or along evacuation routes.
That was the assurance many in the Hispanic community were waiting for but by the time word came down, for many it was too late, Soni said.
“A press conference the day of evacuation at City Hall isn’t going to reach a homeless day laborer who doesn’t speak English on the corner of Martin Luther King and Claiborne,” Soni said. “There’s no way to trickle down that information to the community. Next time that information needs to reach them earlier, and as a result many more people would be willing to board buses.”
City works with nonprofits, media
The influx of day laborers after Hurricane Katrina created a new wrinkle in the city’s post-Katrina evacuation plans — how to effectively convey information to this underground population.
The city sat down with Hispanic community groups before the start of hurricane season to talk about their needs and how best to prepare them for an evacuation. It was a learning experience, Sneed said.
“It wasn’t just that they were illegal, but many of the Hispanic people come from countries where they don’t trust their governments at all. We didn’t even think about that.”
The city relied heavily on nonprofits such as Catholic Charities and the Spanish-language media to relay emergency information.
Ernesto Schweikert, general manager of KGLA 1540 and Channel 42 Telemundo, said they stayed on the air throughout Gustav, as they did during Katrina, informing the Spanish-speaking population about available city services.
Dozens of people called into his radio program expressing concerns they would be hounded by immigration officials, but overall Schweikert had nothing but praise for the city’s outreach efforts, as did Gutierrez.
The majority of the Hispanic community may have avoided city-assisted services, but they safely evacuated by relying on their close-knit network of friends and family, he said.
“They’ve dealt with civil wars, earthquakes, hurricanes, all sorts of disasters in their home countries, but what was new to them was dealing with an evacuation like we had,” Gutierrez said. “Many have had awful experiences in their own countries during disasters where the government didn’t provide for their needs, so they were nervous and relied on their own means.” |
