Last night I went to see Luna Negra Dance Theater's performance at Millennium Park featuring my friend Luis' backdrop for the world premiere of Quinceañera, a dance piece about the latin american coming-of-age party for girls on their fifteenth birthdays. The backdrop was beauitful: a lush sunshine dress with a fully opened rose around the waist, the folds and shadows reminding me of the pedals of Georgia O'Keeffe's desert flowers. Luis also created three stand-alone dresses that the dancers slinked up from behind at the beginning of the performance. Along with the Quinceañera piece, there were several others including one about Don Quixote that was commissioned by the Ravinia Festival last year and a fabulous piece called Flabbergast, where couples dressed in mid-century housedresses and ties with trousers moved among bead curtains carrying brightly-colored suitcases. Sometimes the suitcases overwhelmed the dancers, a clear visual metaphor for the difficulties of taking your life with you when you're forced for political or economic reasons to leave your home for a new place.

Just minutes before the show began my friend Lisa called from her home on Napoleon Avenue near Fountainbleu in Mid-City, New Orleans. This afternoon we finally got a chance to talk while she was taking a break from cleaning out her basement. Luckily the floodwaters missed the living area by inches, elevated as it is about eight feet above ground, but the basement was wrecked with debris smashed against the walls and mold crawling through the insulation. She and her roommate are staying with her sister in Metairie (which along with Kenner is coming back again) and driving into town to clean and assess every day. Before the storm, Lisa parked her truck in the neutral ground, the New Orleans name for the parkway separating the north-bound traffic from the south-, hoping that it would be spared. Normally it would have been. During Isidore and Ivan, the neutral grounds of many Uptown boulevards were safe because the waters only rose a feet or so. Of course this storm was different, and the water line on her truck comes just below the top of the vehicle. When she called her insurance company, they settled the claim over the phone based solely on her address. Knowing how much the neighborhood flooded was enough.

Lisa told me that today was a beautiful day in New Orleans, the temperature perfect and the full light of the sun shone down on them while they worked. In all directions, she told me, were piles of debris pushed in front of houses by the waters or stacked there this past week, waiting to be cleared. She drove around the city a little, where she was allowed, and said the place is essentially a ghost town. Most residents still haven't come back in, and it seemed the guard troops were driving out as Lisa was driving in, though she has seen a couple of humvees cruising down Claiborne Avenue.

Lisa's family is originally from Mexico. They moved to Texas several generations ago and then settled in New Orleans during the middle of the last century. Her father speaks Spanish though Lisa does not. This past week her dad met three men from Equador who had been brought over the Mexican/US border by coyotes trafficking in laborers to work in New Orleans. They were hired by a local meat shop owner who wanted them to clean out the coolers sick with rotten steak and chicken breasts, and repair the outside of the building. He told them to cook up some meat and take a couple of drinks from the shop when they asked for food and water, and they were locked in the shop to sleep. After several days of hard labor, the owner refused to pay them, telling them he would call immigration if they didn't work for free. That night after they'd labored for hours the men sneaked out and escaped and found themselves at a latin american market. Lisa's dad met them later and hired them to help them clean out his family's home.

During the eighteenth century New Orleans played a major part in the slave trade. Men and women stolen from their west African homelands were taken to the Caribbean, through the Gulf of Mexico to Veracruz, and then to New Orleans, where they were sold by the French then the Spanish then the French again (and then Americans) to wealthy landowners and homesteaders. New Orleans, "the city that care forgot," became one of the major slave trade ports just as it was home to the most free African-Americans in the country, who helped create a culture world-renowned for America's indigenous music, jazz, and our most distinctive indigenous cuisine. One of the neighborhoods badly flooded by Katrina was Faubourg Tremé, the birthplace of Louis Armstrong and home to the notorious Storyville. It is the oldest, continuous black neighborhood in the United States.

Lisa and I talked about how this one disaster has caused the displacement of so many New Orleanians, scattered as they are across the country (even in rural Arkansas), and how it has simultaneously brought displaced persons like these three men from Ecuador to New Orleans. How will New Orleans change in the coming months, years? When so many of its residents, new and old, are here and there?

I talked to S this morning and he was in somewhat better spirits. He had felt some of the earthquake that struck the Pakistan/India border yesterday, but he had no idea how tragic or devastating it was until I told him. Our conversation was typically short. Perhaps we'll be able to talk longer tomorrow.