The maddening juxtaposition of humanity that is New Orleans, Louisiana

Over the weekend I ran across a couple of articles in the New York Times that illuminated perfectly the main reason so many of us from the area have such a love/hate relationship with New Orleans...we're endlessly flummoxed as to how a place so beautiful and enchanting can, at the same time, be so ugly and unforgiving.

The first article was a spotlight piece on Magazine Street in the Sunday Times Travel section...

It was a humid evening in New Orleans and the shops along Magazine Street were open late, pouring free wine for the Art for Art’s Sake street fair. Bands played on every other street corner, kids and dogs were underfoot amid the crowds, and it was tempting to pretend that no disaster ever befell this city.



Or at least Magazine Street, which was spared the brunt of the destruction. Once lined with boardinghouses and rowdy saloons, this bustling street in the Uptown neighborhood is perched atop a strip of high ground beside the Mississippi River, and was one of the only functional thoroughfares in the months after the levee failures.

In the three and a half years since Hurricane Katrina, Magazine Street has emerged as a boutique row and a testing ground for new retail concepts, many of which pay homage to New Orleans’s heritage.

Magazine Street is indeed one of the brightest shining of New Orleans' many jewels. And I know that there was a lot of pride in that article in the Times. Many people I know were emailing it around to each other. The New Orleans paper, the Times Picayune, even ran a short piece over the weekend essentially touting the fact that Magazine Street was featured in the Times. But then on Monday there was this front page story on the city's Hispanic migrant workers falling victim to local thuggery, and it brought things back to reality a bit...

They are the men still rebuilding New Orleans more than three years after Hurricane Katrina, the head-down laborers from Honduras, Mexico and Guatemala who work on the blazing hot roofs and inside the fetid homes for a wad of cash at the end of the day.

But on the street, these laborers are known as “walking A.T.M.’s.”

Their pockets stuffed with bills, the laborers are vulnerable because of language problems and their status as illegal immigrants. And as Hispanics have become the prey of choice in crumbling neighborhoods here in one of America’s most crime-ridden cities, racial friction between the newcomers and longtime black residents has moved close to the surface.

It is an under-the-radar crime epidemic: unarmed Hispanic workers are regularly mugged, beaten, chased, stabbed or shot, the police and the workers themselves say. The ruined homes they sometimes squat in, doubling- or quadrupling-up at night, are broken into, and they have been made to lie face down while being robbed.

They are shot when, not understanding a mugger’s command, they fail to hand over their cash quickly enough, shot while they are working on houses, and shot when they go home for the day. Some have been killed, their bodies flown home to families who had been dependent on their remittances.

News reports suggest that at least a half-dozen Hispanic workers have been shot and killed in the metropolitan area since Hurricane Katrina, though the police say they have no idea of the precise number. At least once a week, the police receive reports of a mugging or a holdup — certainly an undercount, since illegal workers with little or no English generally do not go to the authorities.

When the day is over, and their employer for the day drops them off in the darkened Lowe’s parking lot, thugs could be waiting in the shadows for them, several said.

With resignation but no visible anger, more than half told of being threatened or robbed. One man, Armando Cruz, from Honduras, asserted flatly, to nods of assent, “Most of us here have been robbed.”

Many bluntly assigned a racial component, saying that it was “los morenos” — their colloquial term for blacks — who were after them. “When we are leaving here after work, we have to go on foot,” Mr. Billado said, speaking through an interpreter. “The blacks are waiting for us. They’ll beat you up. They’ll take your money.”

Such incidents can occur more than once a week, Mr. Billado said.

The police, the men said, either ignore their calls, admonish them for being in the country illegally or arrive too late at a crime scene to do any good.

“The blacks know when we have cash,” said Juan Guillermo Medina, another waiting worker. “Yes, it’s dangerous. But we have to be here. It’s the risk we run.”

I too have been mugged in New Orleans, as have many who've spent any significant amount of time there I suppose, so I know all too well what these guys are talking about. There's an element that emerged there in the latter portion of the 20th century that has no respect for authority and very little respect for human life. I, like many, had hoped that the post-Katrina New Orleans would be one free of such misery and suffering. I am beginning to believe that my optimism was sadly misguided.