Rebuilding New Orleans

“The strength of Fouts’s analysis . . . is in the intimate portraits of lives that were, she writes, ‘hidden in plain sight’: vendors who ply baleadas and licuados among the trio of adjacent food and flea markets that operate on the West Bank; the family that owns a restaurant in Mid-City and faces the same existential threats—displacement due to rampant redevelopment—that they did back home in the coastal Honduran town of Tela; the esquina owner who feeds the police officer who writes her a parking ticket for violating the policy that required food trucks to move every half-hour.”—Times-Picayune

“Fouts tells this important story with an impressive depth of knowledge, narrating events through food and food workers. That she does so by following migrant workers back and forth between New Orleans and Honduras makes it even more compelling. This book deepens our understanding of Latin American immigration and Black-Brown relations in the South.”—Steve Striffler, University of Massachusetts Boston

“Effective, detailed, and critically sharp, Rebuilding New Orleans shows how Black and Latinx labor organizers forge political solidarity to struggle against state abandonment and violence.”—Ruth Gomberg, Loyola University Chicago

“Decentering displacement as the sole narrative of the city, Rebuilding New Orleans beautifully illustrates the power of multiracial, cross-class solidarity among street vendors and day laborers despite fraught conditions.”—Ashanté Reese, author of Black Food Geographies: Race, Self, Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C.