Title: Surviving Katrina and its Aftermath: A comparative analysis of
community mobilization by Vietnamese Americans and African Americans
in an Eastern New Orleans Suburb
Author: Wei Li
Affiliation: University of Arizona
Abstract: Hurricane Katrina revealed several fissures in local, state, and national
strategies for emergency preparedness and disaster relief. Geographically, the
hardest hit areas were those inhabited by socioeconomically marginalized
communities; these also were the areas that had restricted access to
communications about evacuation, the extent of the flooding, and evacuation
procedures. Media analysis about access to emergency resources during the
Katrina crisis has focused primarily on African American communities and
overlooked a large Vietnamese American community also was located in the
easternmost New Orleans residential subdivisions that boasted an almost equal
distribution of ethnic Vietnamese and African Americans who are economically
disadvantaged. There is an urgent need to analyze the spatial, socioeconomic,
and psychological consequences of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath on the
most vulnerable segments of our society: those who are economically
marginalized, racially marked, spatially segregated, and/or linguistically isolated.
The bi-university interdisciplinary team identified an easternmost New Orleans
residential suburb as primary study site for our exploratory and comparative
research, by employing a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods,
including surveys, focus group and in-depth interviews to address the several
research questions and present our initial findings. It is anticipated that this
project, both practical and academic in nature, will produce the following:
An interdisciplinary model, policy recommendations, impact research, continued
comparative research across racial and ethnic differences, engaging and training
underrepresented graduate and undergraduate students, especially Vietnamese
Americans and African Americans, in community-based policy-relevant research.