I have a fondness for food. I’ve visited New Orleans three times prior to this trip and have always found the city to be one of the most atypical American cities. Not because of its maintenance of the French Quarter but how the diverse groups and circumstances came together and both melded and upheld their identities. American culture tends to steamroller itself over nuance and removes many of the vestiges of an area’s origins. Somehow New Orleans partially escaped this process or was too mighty to succumb.
I love that it managed to do that, its individual parts and the final results. I suspect that many feared that in the ensuing restoration much of what built and preserved the culture might disappear. I worried that it required a certain critical mass of each group to both preserved what they had contributed and to ensure that the fruit of that mixture, what makes New Orleans a live and not a static culture, may not be able to endure with such a population loss. It’s my hope that the area’s renewal keeps those qualities; that the displaced families would find what they always loved about the place and hopefully to see it improved. That’s certainly no easy task and certainly not in a city mired in its government’s past behavior.
