Re-grounding Resilience through Refugee Resilience: Navigating Climate Justice within the Vietnamese Community in New Orleans

Abstract

Vietnamese American refugees in New Orleans have long endured strenuous hardships through natural and man-made disasters including Hurricane Katrina, BP oil spill, illegal toxic landfill dumping, and many other environmental injustices. They have been praised for their resilience in rebuilding their lives as immigrants and refugees in the aftermath of these disasters but also face continuing challenges. This raises two questions: how does the Vietnamese community define and negotiate resilience? What are the implications of ascribing resilience to refugee and immigrant communities such as the Vietnamese community in New Orleans? Resilience is often used to describe the Vietnamese community’s ability to quickly return and “successfully” rebuild. However, there is potential harm in using resilience that overlooks daily vulnerabilities, risks, disinvestment, and inequities that the community faces. I re-ground the use of resilience by using a framework of refugee resilience to guide the understanding of the Vietnamese community’s process in negotiating resilience. Building upon recent scholarship of refugee resilience, I define it as exemplifying the strength and capacity of the community to adapt to significant disruptions while also acknowledging the challenges, vulnerabilities, and inequities that they continue to face as a marginalized community. Drawing on interviews, participant observations, and mixed media and document analysis, three elements of the community refugee resilience’s have been identified: social memory and community resilience, institutional capacity and local leadership, and intergenerational perspectives, care, and trauma. Refugee resilience offers one approach to understand this Vietnamese community’s experience of navigating challenges related to climate change and other disasters.