New Orleans: A Peculiar American City

In 1803, the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from France for $15 million, and New Orleans became American. Yet even as Americans poured into the port city, New Orleans was not really of the United States. New Orleans was always different, a little on the outside.

The Creole-Caribbean heritage, the racial fluidity, and the languidness of weather and residents alike created a place unlike any other. New Orleanians boasted of their city's uniqueness and attendant quirks: exceptional food, corrupt officials, why-work-so-hard? approach to life. By choice, they identified themselves as outside the American mainstream.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina appeared to take that choice away. Against their will, New Orleanians were pushed to the margins. In the weeks after the hurricane, they asked over and over, "where is my government?" Four years later, they continue to wonder.

FOR RESIDENTS of the working-class Lower 9th Ward, Hurricane Katrina only reaffirmed doubts about citizenship festering for decades since another natural disaster, Hurricane Betsy, roiled out of the Gulf of Mexico in September 1965 and pushed Category 3 storm surges through the city's levee protection system.

Most of the levees held, with the exception of a large segment of the Industrial Canal, whose collapse unleashed floodwaters into the Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish -- drowning dozens as they scrambled to higher ground and stranding thousands more in local shelters.

To this day, Betsy survivors are convinced that officials of some stripe or another ordered the levee break in order to save the rest of the city from destruction. And why not? They had always been marginalized citizens, working hard to keep New Orleans running but powerless in the city's social and political structure.

For Lower 9th Ward residents, Hurricane Betsy and Hurricane Katrina rest on a continuum of historical exclusion. With Katrina, however, other New Orleanians felt what it meant to involuntarily exist on the outside.

ONE SURVIVOR of both hurricanes, Gilbert Dave, recently said about rebuilding his Lower 9th Ward life, "The government's gonna do what they want to do regardless. I'm doing what they told me to do. I'm following the rules. [In return], I got nothing."

Today, two questions run through the stories of weary New Orleanians: How can the United States, the greatest nation on Earth, allow an American city to drown? And, how can the right to rebuild be taken away from us, those who have lived in and love this city?

Paradoxically, hope lies in that distinctly American concept, self-reliance, as New Orleanians slowly piece back together their beloved city.

Juliette Landphair, a member of Leadership Metro Richmond, is dean of the University of Richmond's Westhampton College and a historian of U.S. Southern history. Contact her at .