A Google search for “Katrina Moment” on the eve of the storm’s twentieth anniversary returns the following results on the first two pages: “Spain’s ‘Hurricane Katrina Moment’ after Valencia floods”; “Lula’s ‘Katrina Moment’ and Brazil’s Wider Environmental Challenges”; “The Forced Separation of Families is Trump’s ‘Katrina Moment’”; Iran’s ‘Hurricane Katrina Moment’”; “Appalachia’s ‘Katrina Moment’”; “Kamala’s Katrina Moment?”; “Obama’s Katrina Moment?”; “Is the Coronavirus President Trump’s Katrina Moment?”; “Trump Obsessed with Avoiding His Own ‘Katrina Moment’”; “London Fire Is Theresa May’s ‘Hurricane Katrina Moment’”; “Japan’s Katrina Moment”; “Has a ‘Katrina Moment’ Arrived?.”

As this diversity of references suggests, “Katrina moment” has become a standard signifying phrase in our contemporary political and cultural lexicon. In general, it tends to take on two meanings, one fairly strict and the other somewhat broader. In the strict sense, a “Katrina moment” suggests an event or series of events that exposes a political figure or government’s incompetence or corruption. Such events are usually, though not always, related to an environmental catastrophe of some kind. The specific referent here is to the now apocryphal memory that it was George W. Bush’s mishandling of the response to Katrina that tanked his popularity for the remainder of his presidency.1 In this strict sense, then, a “Katrina moment” usually implies some unforeseen disaster or public relations failure that unmasks the malfeasance or ineptitude of a leader or administration. “When Americans recoiled from their president,” as Jill Abramson put it in The Guardian, suggesting that family separation would be the first Trump administration’s “Katrina moment.”2 Writing in Bloomberg in the aftermath of the October 2024 flooding in Valencia, Spain, Helen Chandler-White suggested that Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and his coalition government witnessed their own “Katrina Moment,” defined by a “lack of government preparedness and a slow political response [that] have unleashed fury among the city’s residents.”3 As a moment, it is imagined as a durable transformation of thought (i.e., public opinion) in such a way as to have material consequences—usually electoral—for the people deemed responsible for a given disaster or catastrophe.

More capaciously, the phrase has come to imply a shocking exposure of a previously unseen or unconsidered injustice. Here’s the late comedian Greg Giraldo in a 2006 Katrina bit:

I heard a lot of people saying that during Katrina poverty was revealed and we saw that there was poverty in our country. That’s kind of true. People don’t want to admit that there’s poor people in our country. Cuz you don’t think about. Cuz in our country, poor people, they just look like black people. You don’t think of them as poor until they come floating by on a car door with their kids in a cooler. Holy shit that dude’s poor. He doesn’t have a bass boat or nothing.4

Giraldo’s commentary has been echoed—if often less trenchantly so—across both media and scholarship. In the twenty years since the storm, it’s become a truism that the original “Katrina moment” unmasked the nation’s previously invisible poverty and persistent racial inequality. As Giraldo said, it forced us to “admit that there’s poor people in our country.” Or as then-New York Times columnist Frank Rich put it in his book The Greatest Story Ever Sold, “the true Katrina narrative was just too powerful to be papered over by White House fictions.”5 A month after the failure of the federally maintained levees, Susan Douglass argued in In These Times that “Hurricane Katrina exposed the nation’s continuing failures to combat poverty and racism … [it] created the moment for a true paradigm shift.”6 That same month in the San Francisco Chronicle, Marc Sandalow opined, “Hurricane Katrina’s winds ripped away barriers that kept one city’s poor out of sight, and for most people, out of mind.”7 Washington Post communist and MSNBC commentator Eugene Robinson chimed in, “[I]t took a conspiracy of woe to create the human conditions that Hurricane Katrina unmasked.”8 Even President Bush, in his nationally televised September 15, 2005, speech in New Orleans’s Jackson Square, noted how surprised Americans were to witness the suddenly visible “deep, persistent poverty” of the Gulf South and New Orleans in particular.9

For its part, scholarly treatment has echoed the political commentary in its emphasis on narratives of Katrina as a moment of unmasking and visibility. Cultural theorist Henry Giroux has argued, “Katrina broke through the visual blackout of poverty and the pernicious ideology of color-blindness to reveal the government’s role in fostering the dire conditions of largely poor African-Americans.”10 Aimee Berger and Kate Cochran pointed out that Katrina helped lay bare the way “the South functions in the nation’s social imaginary to contain and make invisible racism and poverty.”11 Historian J. Mark Souther noted in a special issue of the Journal of American History devoted to Katrina that the image of starving, ill-clothed, destitute black and brown bodies huddled together on freeway overpasses and crumbling rooftops “laid bare the persisting relevance of race and poverty.”12 In the same issue, Alecia Long, in a trenchant critique of the ongoing destruction of public housing in the city, noted that “the crime that the poor of New Orleans are most guilty of is making themselves so damn visible.”13 Meanwhile, sociologist James Rhodes suggested that “Katrina exposed the immobility of the Black poor, revealing the dual logics of concealment and containment.”14

These, of course, represent just a smattering of examples. Whether in relationship to the strict or capacious notion of a “Katrina moment” and whether in regard to popular or scholarly discourse, largely synonymous verbs and verb phrases like “expose,” “lay bare,” “make visible,” “unmask,” “see,” “rip away,” and “reveal” have frequently—perhaps even predominately—been the analytic lens in which the storm has been understood to have meaning (at least for those who did not experience it in a material way). Indeed, the motif of exposure, of uncovering and making visible the nefarious aspects of what lay beneath the standard picture of American society at the beginning of the twentieth century, gave post-Katrina New Orleans an almost noirish character in the eyes of Americans at large. In the same way that critics like Mike Davis have argued that mid-century Los Angeles functioned as a rotten and decayed backdrop for revealing the corruption at the heart of the American Dream, New Orleans has come to embody the ultimate location where a new rot at the core of the United States was revealed.15 At the same time, New Orleans and the Gulf South, through the motif of their uncovered façade, are functioning much like the broader, “backward” South has always functioned for liberal American opinion. Nearly sixty years ago, historian C. Vann Woodward commented that the South has operated as a space that enlightened northerners can look at while patting themselves on the back for their supposed progressiveness. As Woodward wrote, “North and South have used each other, or various images and stereotypes of each other, for many purposes … not only to define their identity and to say what they are not, but to escape in fantasy from what they are.”16 Indeed, much of the metaphor of exposure and visibility that permeates the nation’s understanding of Katrina and its moment is more about the nation itself than those in New Orleans and the Gulf South. Segregation, racism, poverty, and white vigilante violence are what happen below the Mason-Dixon line, or alternately though all too similarly, Katrina showed us that New Orleans is America writ large. In either narrative, though, the subject remains not New Orleanians or their city but the whole of the nation.

The problem with the narrative of visibility and invisibility as expressed in virtually all media, scholarly, and popular outlets is its disconnect from political economy, from the very forces that not only produced the invisibility to begin with but continue to do so. The very notion of the “Katrina moment” depends on a causally idealist conception of social life. Problems of exploitation, inequality, and injustice are, in this telling, functions of us not seeing them rather than having the political capacity or interest in meaningfully counteracting them. At the same time, though, this essay argues that a different kind of invisibility—one that remains stubbornly unexposed in the Katrina moment narrative—is in fact the constitutive cultural characteristic of the political economy of New Orleans, more so in the aftermath of Katrina than ever before. While the storm may have exposed the so-called invisible poor and the destitute living conditions of one of America’s most poverty-stricken and disrepaired major cities, it in fact furthered the connection between invisibility’s political economy and economic dislocation. Arguably, “invisible commodities” are more central to New Orleans than they are to any other city in the United States, save perhaps Las Vegas. As goods that are produced, owned, sold, and consumed, academic disciplines such as history, economics, sociology, and critical social theory have rarely reckoned with commodities that do not take tangible form. For most scholars across the political spectrum, they remain analytically what John Stuart Mill defined them as in 1848, mere “pleasure(s) given” or “inconveniences(s) or pain(s) averted.”17 Yet, in post-Katrina New Orleans, the city, broadly construed, has had little to sell but such intangible goods. The vast majority of economic activity in the city can be understood as attaching economic value to social meaning via hospitality, health care, security, or real estate development. In New Orleans, the commodities the city has to sell hinge on the ability of residents, new migrants, and consumers to place an economic value on a certain kind of experience. Consumers pay for authenticity, desire, service, luxury, tradition, and security.18 Furthermore, beyond direct consumption, the immense profits made in the post-Katrina real estate market are directly tied to the invisible labor that produces New Orleans’s “last-frontier appeal” of “authentic charms”—the constitutive commodity of the city’s growing gentrification.19 The ways in which two of these commodities—security and hospitality—are produced, managed, and sold in the recent history of New Orleans tell us much about the political, racial, and economic character of the post-disaster city.

New Orleans and its economy have not always been dependent on selling such incorporeal and invisible commodities. In the last half of the twentieth century, a series of disasters—technological, economic, and environmental—served to unmoor the city from virtually any connection to the so-called “traditional” anchors of blue-collar employment and economic growth. First, the relatively simultaneous growth of Houston as the financial center of the oil industry and Miami as the economic and cultural gateway to Latin America supplanted New Orleans’s earlier positions as both the financial and administrative center of the Gulf South petroleum industry and the nation’s leading trading partner with Central and South America. Later, the city’s relatively slow adoption of containerization shifted its port, for more than a century one of the world’s busiest and America’s most geographically important, into the second tier in the hierarchy of the nation’s shipping. Later in the 1980s, the downturn in oil prices wiped out a brief boom in extraction employment, oil service, and petroleum finance. While the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill off the Gulf Coast only briefly diminished local petroleum employment, the Gulf Coast seafood industry has still not recovered.20

For at least the last three decades, though, all of these industries—oil, shipping, Latin American import/export, and seafood—have taken a back seat to the region’s biggest employer and largest moneymaker, the hospitality industry. By the time Marc Morial took office as mayor in 1994, the city’s transformation from financial center of petroleum extraction and key global shipping node to an economy overwhelmingly based on tourism and service was almost complete. Forced to compete for convention and leisure dollars with the relatively sanitized spaces of Las Vegas, San Diego, Orlando, Orange County, and metropolitan Phoenix, the Morial administration made a concerted effort to sell the city and its attractions’ safety and physical security. In 1995, Morial formed the Tourism Industry Leadership Task Force (TILTF) for the express purpose of stemming purported declines in visitors as a result of the city’s reputation, noting that there was “a trend for groups considering New Orleans to question whether they should come because of national news about crime here.”21 According to the TILTF, “there has never really been in the past any noted tendency for groups to question their plans to come here,” and the industry is “now worried that we would be facing a Miami like situation with a significant fall off in visitation.”22 The task force was referencing a wave of crime against tourists in early 1990s Miami, including a series of murders and carjackings that led to the cancellation of hundreds of conventions and a marked downturn in the region’s own tourism-based economy.23 By the mid-1990s, New Orleans was fully aware that its biggest problem in luring more tourists lay in the city’s perception among out-of-town visitors as being unsafe. Indeed, according to a Gallup poll commissioned by the New Orleans Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, “safety and crime rate was the number one response for least positive aspect of conducting tours and conventions” in the city.24

For a city supposedly as inefficient and bureaucratically backward as New Orleans, Morial’s TILTF operated like a Swiss train regarding concerns about safety and security. Tourist complaints of crime and “street harassment” (typically synonymous with aggressive panhandling) were met with immediate replies and a host of vouchers and coupons. At the extreme end of this response is the story of Daniel Renaud, a Toronto man visiting the city for the first time in 2000 who wrote to Morial to complain about the crime he experienced. As he told Morial, “On February 23rd … I was assaulted by a group of youths on the corner of Loyola and Canal. I was punched in the jaw and fell to the ground where I was repeatedly kicked in the throat and face .… Not a person offered any assistance nor did anyone attempt to stop the attack. Seconds after the incident a police car passed by but did not stop to offer assistance despite my friends frantically waving at the officers in the car.”25

What seems remarkable about Renaud’s experience, and that of other tourists who were or claimed to be victims of crime in New Orleans, is the speed and generosity with which Morial’s office attempted to placate them. By March 31, barely two weeks after receiving Renaud’s letter, the mayor’s office had sent Renaud a voucher on Air Canada for a return trip and three nights at the Sheraton, as well as coupons for a riverboat cruise and various meals, and a special dinner party hosted by the city’s Council of International Visitors. While Morial and the city were exceedingly generous in the case of Renaud, offering vouchers, coupons, and even a “key to the city” to disgruntled tourists who experienced crime was the norm. Lest the city’s actions in these cases be understood as altruism, the mayor’s press secretary noted how it “was a great opportunity for the mayor and the city to get some good p.r. …. [T]he story might appear in other markets. This has the potential to be a win/win situation.”26 The Morial administration’s interest in transforming the city’s reputation for visitors and tourists was unprecedented at the time. Previous mayors like Sidney Barthelemy and Dutch Morial had seemingly paid little attention and less money to combating New Orleans’s image as crime-ridden in the minds of potential tourists.

Thus, for at least a decade before Katrina hit, the relationship between crime, national reputation, and the city’s economy was well understood by policymakers. Katrina and the fabricated and false images of a city overwhelmed by racial disorder and its descent into a kind of Hobbesian, state-of-nature chaos represented a turning point not in a concern with crime but in the overwhelming entrance of security into the marketplace. Cities and urban planners have always concerned themselves with crime as a broad social problem; what Katrina helped usher in was not a concern with crime per se but the growing need to purchase security, often for its own sake. Even the most regressive and ineffective anticrime measures and policies, from branding and mutilation in the premodern city to mandatory minimum sentencing today, were explicitly designed to either prevent crime, change the criminal, or remove him or her from society.27 Security, on the other hand, is directed not toward the criminal or the crime but toward the marketplace, cash nexus, and consumer. It is a feeling or experience—highly subjective—that occurs under certain social conditions. As it became a truism that the aftermath of Katrina entailed social breakdown, lawlessness, rampant theft, and racialized violence, a massive market was created to both sell this feeling and experience and to use its existence or lack thereof as a justification for the transformation of social space in the city.

In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, security as a commodity has been instrumental in the almost wholesale transformation of the city’s once large concentration of public housing into private, mixed-income development. The 1980s and 1990s saw a shift in national urban policy that resulted from the coalescence of the policy concerns of the new-right, free-market revanchism, Democratic Party “third way-ism,” the middle-class rediscovery of the city, and culture of poverty ideology. This confluence led to the removal of large populations of the poor and racial and ethnic minorities from real estate that was rapidly multiplying in value.28 What is of particular interest in this new urban-planning era is the way in which the concept of “defensible space” has not simply been incorporated into the demolition of public housing—in both its physicality and as a social right—but has in fact become the primary reason in the case of New Orleans for the production of security as a constitutive commodity in the city’s redevelopment.

“Defensible space,” in its classic formulation by architect Oscar Newman, argued that the massive housing projects of the industrial North and Midwest created a series of physical spaces outside the watchful eye of productive community members.29 Criminals were thus more likely to gravitate to places such as corridors and stairwells where residents and police would not witness them engaging in crimes. At the same time, housing developments that featured residents who were more invested in the community, usually through paths to ownership or ownership itself, would tend to “defend” their spaces from criminality. As a concept, “defensible space” was a constituent aspect of the Clinton-era HOPE (Homeownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere) VI program that led to the wholesale demolition of public housing in many American cities from the mid-1990s through the present. In New Orleans, though, the logic of “defensible space” gained particular traction after Katrina. While in most cities it was part of new design concepts meant to alleviate crime and the so-called social pathology of the urban poor, in New Orleans it also became a justification for itself and the profits of those who provided it.

In 2008, HUD, in conjunction with the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO), began demolishing the old “Big Four” public housing projects in the city: Lafitte, B. W. Cooper, C. J. Peete, and St. Bernard. Curiously, despite these buildings having no spatial or architectural resemblance to the high-rise model of northeastern and midwestern public housing—the physical layouts that Newman originally singled out as so problematic—a HUD spokeswoman argued that New Orleanians deserved much better than the physical layout of the crumbling “buildings which basically warehoused the poor” and spread crime and social ills.30 The bastardized version of “defensible space” employed by HANO and its associated private developers argued that the public housing stock in New Orleans must be demolished not because the old projects were indefensible—indeed, under the traditional theory, a few minor landscaping adjustments could have made them model physical spaces for Newman’s theory—but because residents of both subsidized housing and the city as a whole needed to feel secure for the city’s economic and commercial future. To that end, “defensible space” has been employed by HANO and, in particular, private developers like Columbia Residential, which redeveloped the old St. Bernard Projects into the mixed-income Columbia Parc using defensible-space rhetoric as the main selling point for the new community.31 Similarly, at the old Magnolia Projects (C. J. Peete) in Central City, McCormack Baron Salazar (MBS), the St. Louis-based developers who won the contract for the new Harmony Oaks development, argued in their 2008 press release to commemorate the new community’s groundbreaking that the new design would revitalize all of the Central City neighborhood by offering safe, secure, and high-quality housing to residents of a variety of incomes.32

Companies like Columbia Residential and MBS have found New Orleans to be an especially lucrative market for their design concepts. HANO, the Louisiana Industrial Development Board, and the Louisiana Office of Community Development have outlaid over $170 million in public financing for the new Harmony Oaks development. Most telling, though, is where MBS received its private funding. With little working capital on hand, MBS has almost fully funded its construction costs in partnership with Goldman Sachs. Initially, Harmony Oaks planned to offer 193 units of public housing, 144 units of subsidized (which for the developer and investors comes out to the same as market rate), and 123 market-rate units. Additionally, MBS was allowed to construct fifty houses, dubbed “Harmony Homes,” which it can sell at market rate.33 Over time, MBS’s requirement to allocate public housing will decline, leaving it with essentially unfettered ownership of twenty square blocks of prime real estate, conveniently located halfway between New Orleans’s two major centers of wealth, Uptown and the Downtown/French Quarter areas.

Contrasting the fate of Magnolia with that of the old Florida Projects in the Upper Ninth Ward makes both the logic of Goldman’s investment and the impulse toward security clear. The Florida Projects, isolated from key economic parts of the city and bounded by the Industrial Canal and a group of abandoned warehouses, were abandoned after Katrina and have attracted little of the comparable interest that greeted the Magnolia redevelopment and the possible future redevelopment of Iberville. MBS and Goldman have seen the mixed-income redevelopment of Magnolia as an opportunity and not simply as a land grab; indeed, if that were the case, developers would be knocking down HANO’s door to flip Florida into mixed-income units. Rather, the city, state, and federal governments turned to partners like MBS and Goldman to purchase security in developmentally important areas like the Central City corridor. In turn, Harmony Oaks can now sell that security back to the city and its residents at a tidy profit. The perceived demand for safe and secure housing—amplified and enabled after Katrina, not for low-income residents themselves but for the future of New Orleans’s economic development—opened up possibilities for developers to supply new, “defensible space” to the city and its residents. In the end, this is a process whereby capital, in its literal form in the case of Goldman’s investment in Magnolia, is able to latch onto a cultural demand for public safety and the feeling of security and turn it into a vendible commodity.

While the political economy of invisibility has manifested itself in the selling of subjective security back to the city in the form of newly privatized housing, invisibility as a constitutive commodity in the post-Katrina city is also evident in the way labor is organized in New Orleans’s largest industry—hospitality. In a 2009 interview to promote his HBO show, Treme, David Simon expressed, albeit uncritically, the constitutive aspects of the city’s political economy. As Simon told the New York Times, “[L]ots of American places used to make things. Detroit used to make cars. Baltimore used to make steel and ships. New Orleans still makes something. It makes moments.”34 Moments, experiences, and feelings—Mill’s “pleasures given”—are in fact exactly the commodities made in New Orleans and, as a direct corollary, the places where value and profit are produced. And like cars in Detroit or steel in Baltimore, they are made by people under specific political, labor, cultural, and social conditions and in contingent historical contexts. Indeed, Simon’s “moments” are not static examples of some imagined authentic culture but produced, managed, and sold commodities—sometimes momentary pleasures, while other times concretized in a new hotel or condominium development.

Hospitality, like the other products the city increasingly sells, depends upon the social erasure and invisibility of the workers who produce it and their quotidian labors. Specifically, within a broad economy based on hospitality, managers and owners needed to organize their workforce in order to convince customers that their employees are not individuals and humans but products and commodities. Indeed, people ranging from academic economists to McDonald’s franchisees have understood that the more service and hospitality workers are seen as human beings performing a given service for another human being, the less efficient and profitable a given service-providing business would be. On the one hand, this is, of course, in the nature of commodities themselves insofar as the labor that produces them as such is abstracted and often temporally and spatially far removed from the point of sale and consumption. It is not, then, that commodities like Mill’s pleasures given or inconveniences averted entail labor that is more intrinsically invisible, but the opposite. That is, as more potentially visible both spatially and temporally, the labor required for their production can demand a greater attention to active processes of abstraction.

Theodore Levitt, a longtime Harvard business scholar, clearly appreciated the larger economic stakes in invisibility as it relates to service and hospitality labor. As he put it in his enormously influential 1972 Harvard Business Review article, “The Production Line Approach to Service,” “service thinks humanistically, and that explains its failures.”35 Levitt, who, less than a decade later, would become somewhat famous for his coinage of the term “globalization,” was attempting to formulate a management philosophy to solve one of the most vexing problems in the modern economy—how to increase profitability, efficiency, and labor control when American business increasingly sold intangible services rather than physical commodities. The problem, according to Levitt, was that far too often, business owners, managers, and customers saw in the sale and purchase of a given service not the buying and selling of commodities like cleanliness, efficiency, and comfort but the buying and selling of human beings such as the individual janitors, health aides, waitresses, maids, line cooks, security guards, and busboys who provided these services. Levitt argued that this alienation was an obstacle to greater profitability, as efficiency, labor-saving strategies, and automation were less likely to occur when managers and customers viewed service workers as individuals rather than products and commodities.

For a business to be economically successful, a kind of cultural and psychological distance was required between consumer and server. While a typical physical commodity, by nature of its visible physical existence, was able to screen out the exploitation and alienation inherent in its production, the intangible commodity central to profitability in an economy based around hospitality has no such luxury. Indeed, the consumption of services provided by individual human beings all too often inspired a feeling—in manager, consumer, and server alike—of pre-capitalist labor relations, of slavery, feudalism, and European social deference. As Levitt wrote, “The concept of service evokes, from the opaque recesses of the mind, time-worn images of personal ministration and attendance. … [I]t carries historical connotations of obedience, subordination, and subjugation. … [P]eople serve because they are compelled to, as in slavery.”36 For Levitt, countless managers, and business owners, the key to rationalized service operation was the removal of the overly and overtly human aspect of service work, be it through turning a perceived identity into a vendible commodity or, much more commonly, rendering an entire class of workers virtually invisible, both culturally and economically.

In certain regards, Levitt’s comparison of hospitality to slavery was apt. Service work and particularly the low-wage and highly capitalized personal service industries that grew in such dramatic fashion across the country after World War II and are so central to the American economy shared a central paradox with slavery. If slavery meant the buying and selling of human beings as commodities, then the service economy, with its similar selling of individuals rather than tangible, physical commodities, engendered somewhat closely related problems in a liberal, market-based society dependent on the self-ownership of free individuals. If liberal freedom grounded in possessive individualism is based on the assumption that no individual can own another, then the buying and selling of human beings in any form represents a profound cultural problem. Indeed, service workers at times seemed to be selling more than their labor, but rather their entire selves.

Also like Atlantic slavery, service work and the production of service workers as commodities, like the production of captured Africans and their offspring as commodities, were deeply intertwined with race. Without revisiting decades-old historical debates about the primacy of race in the making of Atlantic World slavery, we can at least generalize that race and slave status operated dialectically as ever more Africans were able to be enslaved because they were conceived of as a different race, while at the same time slave status helped to further fix African lineage as a separate race. And so it has been with service work. The labor of African Americans and Latino immigrants was more easily sold as commodities because they were racialized as not-white. Consumers and managers alike were able to ignore the troubling feeling that when one purchased a service, one was not simply purchasing labor but purchasing a body in large part because of the racial classification of those bodies. At the same time, the segmentation of African Americans and Latinos into service occupations reified a racially divided society that helped further the invisibility of an entire strata of the population.

Levitt’s understanding of service is a particularly apt place to start when analyzing the racial/labor geography of New Orleans, especially after Hurricane Katrina produced a wholesale reorganization of the city’s demography and economy. The New Orleans hospitality industry includes over 2,800 restaurants, bars, and hotels. Collectively, these establishments employ more than 110,000 of the region’s estimated 520,000 workers.37 Over the last twenty years, employment in hospitality has grown at a greater rate than any other sector in New Orleans. Between 1990 and the eve of Katrina, hospitality jobs nearly doubled across the New Orleans metropolitan region while the rest of the area’s employment remained virtually stagnant. Since Katrina and before the pandemic, this trend has continued, as hospitality jobs have nearly returned to their 2005 levels while non-hospitality jobs across the region remain at only seventy-five percent of their pre-Katrina levels (BKD, 5).

The character of the workers in the industry has changed since Katrina as well. Most significantly, the age of hospitality workers has gotten decidedly older since Katrina, with more than twenty-two percent of workers over the age of forty-five compared to just thirteen percent before the storm (BKD, 7–8). These numbers suggest the inadequacy of the broad cultural understanding of hospitality work. In the popular narrative, hospitality work is considered a way station for the young and upwardly mobile who are seen as on their way to another, more lucrative, and stable career. At the same time, within traditional understandings of what constitutes working-class work, labor that does not realize itself in a physical commodity, like service and hospitality work, is seen to be emasculating, female, and generally outside the category of socially valued labor.38

Also significantly, the industry has become less African American and decidedly more Latino and Asian. While African Americans still make up at least forty percent of the hospitality workforce in metropolitan New Orleans, that number is down from forty-five percent before Katrina. Asian Americans, especially Vietnamese, displaced from their primary regional node of employment in the shrimping and fishing industries, and Latinos, a plurality of whom are of Honduran descent, have picked up the difference, each doubling their numbers in the industry since Katrina and Rita (BKD, 7).

Across the board, the pay of these jobs lags well behind that of other regional employers. With the exception of managers, concierges, chefs, and back-of-the-house line supervisors, in the early 2010s, no position in the New Orleans hospitality industry averaged over ten dollars per hour. Indeed, of the more than 110,000 workers in the industry, fully eighty-four percent make less than ten dollars an hour, including tips. More than ten percent of workers in the entire industry make less than minimum wage, including tips (BKD, 14).

Unsurprisingly, benefits in the industry are virtually nonexistent. More than eighty-five percent of workers report that their employer does not provide health insurance. Even those who do have the option can rarely afford it. As one twenty-year veteran of New Orleans bartending put it, “even if I had the option to get health benefits, I wouldn’t be making enough to afford the health benefits” (BKD, 14). Or, as a male busser who moved to New Orleans right after the storm said, “My benefit is me working and getting tips” (BKD, 15).

Similarly, advancement within New Orleans hospitality is exceedingly rare. A longtime waitress put it like this: “[Y]our job is your set job where you work. … [I]f you a doorman, that’s what you’re gonna be, you ain’t gonna be nothing else. If you come in there and want to be a bartender, you always going to be a bartender, always. … [T]hem managers is keeping their manager positions, they ain’t going nowhere” (BKD, 16).

Legal violations are also, unsurprisingly, incredibly common in the industry. Stealing tips and lack of overtime pay are common. As one longtime server said, “How they do you is they will work you extra hours, they will work you overtime, but what they do is in every establishment they separate you, so you got one place there, one here and they split you up and they give you a different time card for every place that you work at, and each one is separate so you never really work over time. … [T]hen, as far as tip-outs of, see, however many workers you might have, two people over here, three people over there working daiquiris and you got you manager sitting on his ass right here. … [A]t the end of the night the only person who can touch the money is the manager, and he counts all the money and splits the tips between everybody that’s working and himself. He gets a tip portion too … so you ain’t get nothing” (BKD, 19). Indeed, wage theft like that described by the above server is endemic, especially in restaurants that cater to tourism in the French Quarter.

Racial segmentation is particularly dramatic in the way employment is structured in the hospitality industry and contributes significantly to the racialized invisibility of the labor force. Over seventy-eight percent of the industry’s white workers work in front-of-the-house jobs, while nearly sixty-eight percent of African Americans work in back-of-the-house employment (BKD, 43). Latino workers have become similarly ensconced in back-of-the-house work, following an increased migration to South Louisiana in the years after Katrina. As one long-time bartender put it, “Definitely there are Hispanics working back there, and it’s interesting because they are the ones in the back, and they are the ones doing the hard work … but there wasn’t a single Mexican or Hispanic server. All caucasian, all college kids, all white, uppity on top of that. Everyone in the back … to them it’s almost like a favor you know, be grateful we even give you this job kind of thing so they kind of took a lot of abuse in like verbal, and racial slurs. Usually people in the background are minorities” (BKD, 42). Or, as a woman who’s been a line cook for three decades succinctly put it, “the majority of workers in the front are white. Everybody in the kitchen, ain’t no white, all black” (BKD, 42).

A particularly astute bartender at an elite French Quarter restaurant described the front-of-the-house, back-of-the-house divide in the terms of both gender and race: “In New Orleans, which has been a predominately black city, there’s been this since colonial times, well-established sort of totem pole of who works in the service industry. In fine dining there’s a preponderance of males working the floor, you notice if you go into those restaurants its male dominated and also European American males. So the people who work their way up the totem pole more often are male, more often are white” (BKD, 43). The location of hospitality workers within the divide between front and back positions, or what might be called the line between visibility and invisibility, largely determines wages, mobility, and workplace safety. Nearly a fourth of the city’s front-of-the-house workers report making what they deem to be a living wage, while only two percent of those who work behind the scenes can claim to make a living wage (BKD, 42). Similarly, the predominantly African American population of back-of-the-house staff experiences decidedly higher rates of job-related injuries, including burns, cuts, and toxic chemical exposure. In terms of mobility between positions, or even to higher-end jobs as line supervisors, many African Americans reported a “glass ceiling” and little opportunity for advancement. As one African American woman succinctly put it, “you can be as smart as this book right here but they won’t hire people like me for certain positions” (BKD, 46).

The fact that the New Orleans hospitality industry, like virtually every other hospitality industry in the nation, is engulfed by ongoing racial discrimination is hardly surprising. The discrimination, though, is usually not the direct result of racist hiring practices but a general desire on the part of the city’s industry to screen out from public view the largely black and brown bodies that work in the industry and pass through the same physical spaces as customers, tourists, and the city’s growing population of middle-class and wealthy post-Katrina migrants. The service and hospitality workers who are essential to the profitability of New Orleans’s largest industry are, like security, essential to the post-disaster city’s economic growth. Their labors and indeed oftentimes their selves are also like security, unseen and invisible as something bought and sold. The very notion of the “Katrina Moment” and the storm’s broader cultural meaning is predicated on exposure and uncovering, making visible the existence of previously unseen atrocities and corruption. In these tellings, though, not only does agency rest with the viewer—the appalled American citizen witnessing New Orleans poverty for the first time on television in late August 2005, or the valiant scholar delving into the inner workings of a broken penal system or the sociology of racial inequality—but the political economy that in fact produces security as the justification for the wholesale destruction of public housing and the hidden labor of hospitality workers as the backbone of the city’s largest industry and the profit margins of its wealthiest residents and investors remains, in a word, invisible.