Our Tricentennial: 300 years later, is N.O. still an international city?
6th August 2018 · 0 Comments
In Transit: South American Commodities, Communities Pass Through New Orleans
By Nicholas Hamburger
Contributing Writer
Editor’s Note: This is Part IV of a series of articles chronicling New Orleans’ immigrant communities and their cultural influence, economic impact, and individual stories on the Crescent City.
People migrate across national borders, yes, but so too do products, commodities and capital. Prior to its economic dependence on tourism, New Orleans was a focal point for international trade, so much so that several of the most prominent organizations designed to foster the exchange of foreign business originated here.
In 1943, International House, before its modern incarnation as a hotel, was chartered to coordinate trade missions primarily throughout Latin America. When the International Trade Mart opened five years later, New Orleans’ status as a hub for foreign commerce was further reinforced by offering a space in which buyers and sellers could easily meet. Eventually, the merger of these two local institutions resulted in what would become a golden child of capitalism: the World Trade Center, the founding chapter of which calls New Orleans home.
It’s no surprise, then, that in the twentieth century, New Orleans, with more than a hint of self-promotion, fashioned a nickname for itself meant to allude to its deep hemispheric trade ties: the “Gateway to the Americas.” Although the city has since ceded its regional prominence to Miami and Houston, statistics provided by the U.S. Census Bureau show that last year four of the top twelve countries from which Louisiana imported goods were in South America, suggesting that, despite the city’s diminished role in international trade, the Port of New Orleans has maintained notable business links with places like Brazil and Venezuela.
But while trade routes often double as migration corridors, the enduring commercial connection between New Orleans and South America has never prompted significant movements of people. In 2016, the Migration Policy Institute recorded just 9,565 South Americans living in the entire state of Louisiana. Of that number, Brazilians, mainly concentrated in New Orleans, formed the most populous group, with close to 2,500 Brazilians residing in the state.
And yet that small number of Brazilians represents only the twilight of a brief but formerly vibrant community. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, as a mass exodus of native New Orleanians left the city, thousands of Brazilians arrived, lured by the sudden market for laborers to participate in reconstruction efforts.
“New Orleans was seen as a kind of El Dorado,” said Annie Gibson, associate director of Intercultural Learning at Tulane University and the author of “Post-Katrina Brazucas.” El Dorado refers to the name of a mythical South American empire of gold, the pursuit of which was partly responsible for the mapping of northern South America.
According to Gibson, who served as a Portuguese translator for Brazilians in the aftermath of the hurricane, the Brazilian community at its peak totaled between 9,000 and 10,000. But if Brazilians indeed discovered an El Dorado in New Orleans, the supposedly infinite riches vanished as quickly as they appeared. “The height of Brazilian immigration to the city was until 2007, and now has drastically decreased,” Gibson said. “The people that were in transit, many of those have passed.”
One of the last bastions of the Brazilian community in greater New Orleans is Brazilian Market & Café. Since opening in 2006, the restaurant has provided a communal nucleus for brazucas, or Brazilian expatriates, who come not only for gustatory purposes but for professional and logistical reasons as well. In addition to a variety of mouth-watering traditional dishes and an array of culinary goods imported from Brazil, the establishment offers translation services and help with paperwork.
“Sometimes this feels like a little City Hall,” said Greyze Vieira, the restaurant’s founder and head chef.
Nestled into an unassuming strip mall in Kenner, Brazilian Market and Café is also a portal back to Brazil. Near the entrance of the establishment, two framed columns of six postcards apiece hang on the wall. The first forms a photographic mosaic of the construction of Brasília in the 1950s, which Vieira’s father participated in and where Vieira himself was born a decade later. The second column consists of a grouping of postcards detailing in miniature various Brazilian landscapes, from the serene beaches of São Paulo to a verdant mountain pass on the Rodovia Anchieta. Each picturesque landscape, Vieira explained, conceals a handwritten story scrawled on the backside of the postcard.
“They are small stories of Brazil,” Vieira said.
Taken together, the wall decor assembles a collage of Brazilian culture and history, presenting, among other items, photographs of jabiru storks in flight; a piece of thin cloth on which the likenesses of West African slaves making acarajé is painted; and a wood carving of the tucunaré, a fish native to the Amazon River.
Vieira arrived in New Orleans in the midst of the post-Katrina boom and, unlike the majority of his countrymen, decided to stay. Though most Brazilian immigrants in the United States reside in places like Los Angeles, Miami, New York and, in particular, Boston, Vieira associates New Orleans most intimately with Brazil.
“The sun has a great effect on people, and the weather here is like Brazil, especially Manaus, where it is hot and humid,” Vieira said. “I think New Orleans is the closest thing in the U.S. to Brazil.”
But not every brazuca in New Orleans is as attuned to their past as Vieira, who remembers a time when every week five Brazilian families would leave the Crescent City in search of better economic prospects elsewhere. “It was like an airport terminal,” he noted of the widespread departure of Brazilians from New Orleans. “You might have a meaningful encounter with someone, and then never see them again.”
Today, the Brazilians who stayed tend to live in Kenner, Metairie and Chalmette. They primarily work in construction and as domestic workers, though a substantial number of Brazilians are also employed by Globalstar, a Covington-based satellite and data services company.
Using a constellation of satellites in orbit, Globalstar provides a connection for satellite phones that extends well beyond a typical cellular network’s range, making it possible to track and communicate with people in the most remote locales, such as seamen who are offshore or hikers venturing into the backcountry.
Due to the worldwide reach of the company’s service, its customers speak numerous languages, and Globalstar therefore seeks to hire a multilingual workforce in its customer services department. As native Portuguese speakers, Brazilians in New Orleans have proved to be a valuable resource for the company, which operates an around-the-clock helpline from its offices in Covington.
“The number of Portuguese-speaking and Brazilian people that work with us is uniquely high,” said Samantha DeCastro, Globalstar’s corporate communications manager.
But aside from the brazucas who remain in New Orleans, a less obvious presence links the city to Brazil – the products and commodities imported from Brazil to the Port of New Orleans. Before becoming a cruise terminal and riverfront outlet mall, the Poydras Street Wharf was known as the Coffee Wharf on account of the high volume of Brazilian-produced coffee unloaded there. The Port of New Orleans still handles nearly a fifth of all U.S. coffee imports and, as Annie Gibson has pointed out in “Hispanic and Latino New Orleans,” the coffee one might drink at, say, Café du Monde likely grew in Brazil.
Additionally, iron, steel and lumber from Brazil also pass through the Port of New Orleans. The National World War II Museum, for example, features Brazilian hardwood floors imported by Robinson Lumber Company, a New Orleans-headquartered importer and exporter of various kinds of lumber, including Amazonian wood.
Trade links like these served as the basis for the existence of the Consulate of Brazil in New Orleans, which shuttered its operation in the 1980s as major industries fled the city.
“The consulate in New Orleans had to do with an older kind of consulate,” said Felipe Santarosa, Deputy Consul General of Brazil in Houston, whose jurisdiction now covers New Orleans. “We used to do a lot of paperwork for ships, so we tended to have consulates in ports.” This makes for an unfortunate irony for Brazilians in New Orleans; that is, before they arrived in significant numbers, a Brazilian consulate operated downtown, but by the time a sizable brazuca community lived here, the consulate had closed.
Venezuela, on the other hand, continues to maintain a consulate in New Orleans, in spite of the city’s minute Venezuelan population. In 2017, the U.S. Census Bureau recorded Venezuela, a country with vast oil reserves, as the number one exporter to Louisiana by dollar value. Meanwhile, the top two commodities Louisiana imported were crude oil and petrol oil. Indeed, more than anything else, the oil industry bridges Louisiana and Venezuela, with the Venezuela-owned oil company Citgo operating one of its three American refineries in Lake Charles.
But as Venezuela plummets into economic free fall, Citgo’s Lake Charles refinery has steadily decreased the number of barrels of oil it imports from Venezuela per day. The possibility of a Venezuelan oil embargo also looms, threatening to further harm the economies of both Venezuela and Louisiana.
If Venezuela’s suffering economy underlies the reduced amount of oil the South American country ships out, it’s likewise responsible for the large-scale exit of Venezuelan citizens. Roughly 400,000 Venezuelans left the country in the first five months of 2018, and the effects of this migration are perhaps just beginning to appear in Louisiana.
“The non-official statistics are showing that there has been a movement of Venezuelans to Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama,” said Jesús “Chucho” Garcia, the Consul General of Venezuela in New Orleans.
Though the Consulate of Venezuela now occupies a corner of the 21st floor of 400 Poydras Street, it was once located at 2 Canal Street – previously known as the International Trade Mart building. Constructed to house the International Trade Mart and later home to the World Trade Center and various other foreign consulates, 2 Canal Street overlooks the Mississippi River, a kind of financial lighthouse positioned to guide business and goods into New Orleans. Its cruciform shape points in each cardinal direction, symbolizing the crossroads of international commerce within the Crescent City.
These days, however, the black and white-striped building is deserted, a testament to the movement of business away from New Orleans in the latter half of the twentieth century. Four Seasons plans to renovate the 33-story structure soon, though its conversion into a hotel has not yet begun. But like a beacon directing the course of a voyage, the light atop 2 Canal Street continues to blink. For what – or for whom – does it flash?
This article originally published in the August 6, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
