Our Tricentennial: 300 years later, is N.O. still an international city?
16th July 2018 · 0 Comments
By Nicholas Hamburger
Contributing Writer
La Ciudad Hondureña: Hondurans in New Orleans
Editor’s Note: This is Part III of a series of articles chronicling New Orleans’ immigrant communities and their cultural influence, economic impact, and individual stories on the Crescent City.
Vestiges of the banana trade still haunt New Orleans.
321 St. Charles Avenue, the former headquarters of the United Fruit Company, preserves the memory of the past on its stone facade, which features an engraving of the corporation’s name as well as three cornucopias overflowing with fruit. On the river, cruises docking at the Julia Street wharf recall the Great White Fleet, United Fruit’s armada of refrigerated freighters, which just upriver once unloaded shipments of bananas grown throughout South America, Central America and the Caribbean. And that shipping line is also echoed in the name of the White Fleet taxicab company, transporting not bananas but passengers, and whose emblem likewise adapts the red and white flag flown by United Fruit’s ships.
The banana trade, however, left New Orleans decades ago. Beyond the traces lingering in the cityscape, its legacy primarily lives on through New Orleans’ Honduran community, the largest immigrant group in the metro area. Indeed, the presence of Hondurans in New Orleans is a byproduct of the banana trade, as American fruit companies based out of New Orleans transformed Honduras into a quintessential banana republic during the 20th century, prompting migration to the Crescent City that still continues to this day.
Popular myths surround the number of Hondurans in New Orleans. Urban legend would have it that the city represents the third-largest population of Hondurans in the world – including urban areas in Honduras – and the largest one in the U.S. In truth, the Honduran community in New Orleans, according to Census 2010, is only the sixth-largest in the country.
Even accounting for the sizable population of undocumented Hondurans who aren’t recorded statistically, as well as the inevitability of census undercounts in any immigrant community, it’s estimated that no more than 40,000 Hondurans reside in the New Orleans metro area.
But the primacy of Hondurans within New Orleans’ Hispanic and foreign-born populations distinguishes the city from anywhere else in the country, and it is perhaps this proportional difference, coupled with the entwined histories of the Crescent City and Honduras, that causes the texture of certain New Orleans’ suburbs to feel like a ciudad hondureña, or a Honduran city.
“You can go to Kenner and just see the Honduran presence right up and down Williams Boulevard,” said Mayra Pineda, the president of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Located on the western margins of the metro area, where low-flying airplanes hourly soar overhead, Kenner is home to thousands of Hondurans, and its commercial landscape indicates this population: Latino restaurants, supermarkets, bars, insurance agencies, construction companies and law firms, mostly operated by and serving Hondurans, line Williams Boulevard from the highway to the lake.
Kenner also possesses Louisiana’s only publicly funded resource center for Hispanics, which opened in 2003 to assist the suburb’s concentrated Hispanic population. From a modest one-floor building, the Kenner Hispanic Resource Center offers, among other programs, English classes and interpretation services to the many Honduran, Mexican and other Central American immigrants who reside in Kenner.
“For a Spanish-speaking parent, it’s so hard to help their kids with education and their homework,” said Rafael Saddy, the Cultural Diversity Coordinator of the city of Kenner and the chief liaison between the suburb’s Spanish-speaking population and its local government. “The Resource Center opened up and it was overgrown on day one.”
According to the 2016 American Community Survey, Jefferson Parish is 14 percent Hispanic, nearly triple the percentage of Hispanics in Orleans Parish (who tend to live in Mid-City, Central City and Village de l’Est). In fact, part of North Kenner has been dubbed “Little Honduras” due to its large number of Honduran residents, many of whom have lived there since the 1960s and ‘70s.
But before the moniker “Little Honduras” was coined, Kenner used to be called “Little La Ceiba.” Saddy, who is originally from Bluefields, Nicaragua but moved to Kenner in 1971, where he grew up within the Honduran community, remembers those days well: “Most people here were from La Ceiba – where the banana companies were based.”
Starting in the early twentieth century, La Ceiba, a city on the north Caribbean coast of Honduras, functioned as a critical seaport for fruit companies centered in New Orleans. By virtue of its usefulness in the banana trade, La Ceiba was for a time hardly more than a company town.
While banana importation from Central America to New Orleans started at the turn of the century, it was in 1911 that Samuel Zemurray, the founder of Cuyamel Fruit and later the CEO of United Fruit, orchestrated a coup in Honduras to reinstate the country’s former president, who’d been living for years in exile in New Orleans.
Zemurray’s intervention into Honduras marked a grim turning point in the Central American country’s exploitation by foreign fruit companies, and it also escalated the American practice of meddling in Honduran governance, a dynamic that persists even now.
Today, Honduras is the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and its straitened economy continues to depend mainly on the production and export of agricultural goods and textiles. Gang violence is ubiquitous and, after decades of U.S.-backed political suppression and military rule, Honduras’ government appears to be unstable. This entanglement of dire circumstances has in recent years compelled Hondurans to emigrate in refugee-like numbers.
Honduran immigration to New Orleans began in earnest after 1933, the year that Zemurray, himself an emigrant from the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, moved United Fruit’s headquarters from Boston to St. Charles Avenue. This consequently opened up a channel of northward migration from Honduras to New Orleans – Hondurans would disembark at the Port of New Orleans after sea voyages aboard the Great White Fleet – and further strengthened the complex connection between the two places.
To this day, Honduras remains oriented to New Orleans.
“If you talk to any Honduran in Honduras, they have this warm spot for New Orleans. There’s a very strong relationship, or tie, to the city,” said Pineda, who came to New Orleans in 1980 from Tegucigalpa. The New Orleans Saints have even garnered a following there, as television networks carry Saints games in autumn across the Gulf of Mexico to Honduras.
The number of Hondurans immigrating to New Orleans ebbed and flowed throughout the 20th century, but it skyrocketed after Hurricane Katrina, as thousands of Hondurans, in addition to Mexican and Brazilian immigrants, ventured to New Orleans due to the high demand for laborers to clean up and eventually rebuild the city.
Construction continues to be the most common profession among Hondurans in the Crescent City. Tulio Murillo, the owner of CMC Construction and a first-generation American whose parents emigrated from Honduras, estimates that 80 to 90 percent of his employees are Honduran.
Nowadays, the Trump administration’s hostile rhetoric and chaotic immigration policies, directed in part at Central Americans, have caused some Hondurans in New Orleans to fear for their future in the city. “The level of anxiety has definitely risen,” said Miriam Crespo, an immigration lawyer based in Harvey.
Crespo noted that she has not found any evidence the number of deportations in greater New Orleans has gone up since Obama left office. Nonetheless, she has begun offering Saturday information sessions in partnership with the Consulate of Honduras in New Orleans, intending to clarify the complicated legal procedures looming over certain Hondurans.
Staffed with only seven full-time employees, and tasked with handling the paperwork of Hondurans who worry they will be affected by the Trump administration’s increasingly harsh policies, the Consulate of Honduras forms the bureaucratic backbone of New Orleans’ largest immigrant community.
From the fourth-floor office of Marcela Mejía, the consul general of Honduras in New Orleans, Harrah’s Casino is unmistakably visible – an appropriate, if also disheartening, view for a consulate serving a community around which uncertainty now prevails. “It’s totally unpredictable,” Mejía said last month, in reference to the chances Hondurans who hold Temporary Protected Status (TPS) have of extending their stay in New Orleans.
TPS was created for Hondurans in 1999 in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch, which ravaged Honduras and its largely agricultural economy, effectively spelling the end of the country’s banana production. In May, the Trump administration announced TPS would expire in January 2020, over two decades after the designation was established.
Mejía estimates several hundred Hondurans holding TPS reside in New Orleans today, and its imminent expiration necessitates that these catrachos, or Honduran expatriates, must prepare for the possibility of yet another odyssey, one which would entail retracing the route they initially traveled. Typically a point of departure for its citizens, Honduras will soon be faced with accommodating thousands of its own emigrants.
Meanwhile, the Latin American Library at Tulane University continues to be one of the premier resources for research on Honduras, Central America and the region’s ongoing connection to New Orleans. Housed behind gleaming glass doors, the collection includes hundreds of Spanish-language texts, in addition to countless Central American travelogues, atlases, and academic studies. It is almost as if one can travel to Honduras and back simply by engaging with the wide-ranging contents of the Latin American Library, the endowment of which is funded by none other than a financial legacy gained through the banana trade – the Zemurray Foundation.
This article originally published in the July 16, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
