Weathering Katrina: Culture and Recovery Among Vietnamese Americans

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The principal Vietnamese American enclave was a remote, low-to-moderate income area that flooded badly. Many residents arrived decades earlier as refugees from the Vietnam War and were marginally fluent in English. Yet, despite these poor odds of success, the Vietnamese made a surprisingly strong comeback in the wake of the flood. While some commentators initially attributed this resilience to fairly simple explanations such as strong leadership or to a set of vague cultural strengths characteristic of the Vietnamese and other "model minorities", Mark J. VanLandingham shows that a broad set of factors fostered their rapid recovery. By carefully defining and disentangling the elements that enabled the swift recovery of the Vietnamese in New Orleans, Weathering Katrina enriches our understanding of this understudied immigrant community and of why some groups fare better than others after a major catastrophe like Katrina.