I remember seeing women on the sides of the highway in one part of town gathering plants to eat, there's plenty of edible stuff out there, and my parents telling me they were refugees. Must have been in '74/'75 and I was a wee lad. In a Southern state. My parents were PhDs from Berkley and UCLA who got positions in the south so it was a weird time and place. For everyone.

Many are still here in Louisiana and Texas. But in Louisiana and New Orleans the population is shrinking.

From 2.3% in 2010 to 1.8% in 2020 of Louisiana’s population.

There's no doubt that racism played a role, but a lot of the bitterness was more related to the fact that a huge influx of people, some of them very desperate, arrived and worked in the shrimping industry for low wages and in terrible conditions. This cut the rest of of the labor market off at the knees.

Suddenly a lot of people who had had the job for years, and had maybe been doing it for generations as a family trade, either lost their job or were unable to carry it out profitably.