On Why I Mourn My Time in New Orleans

I often mourn my time in New Orleans—the city I once called home several years ago.

I think about NOLA all the time. Its mom and pop shops. Its street performers. Its celebrations, its festivals, its joy.

I think about the way the culture lures you in and attaches itself to you, making a home within you, remaining long after you’ve gone.

I think about the smell of Cajun foods and beignets, and the chorus of accents and jazz that linger in the air.

I also think about the oppression, the racism, the generational pain.

I moved to New Orleans almost a decade after Hurricane Katrina ripped through the city, murdering and displacing thousands upon thousands of its residents. I didn’t know much about the city other than the fact that strolling through its neighborhoods felt like being transported to a new, imaginary place.

I also didn’t know much about evangelicalism and the differences within its denominations when I moved there, either. It hadn’t been too many years since I transitioned to Protestantism after being raised Latina Catholic in Miami. I moved to New Orleans to attend a Southern Baptist seminary. I wasn’t familiar with what that meant, the culture—and more importantly, the history that it entails. I didn’t know that the Southern Baptist Convention became the “Southern” Baptist because of its split with the North over slavery.

I admit, I was ignorant when I moved there. In more ways than one.

My first week of orientation while at this seminary, I sat in a session that talked about how to engage with the city. I remember feeling confused when all we talked about was how it was “wise” to stay out of the debauchery that happens on Bourbon Street, how the “demonic presence” there could affect our walks with Christ, lure us into a bar for a drink. The French Quarter was often talked about as a hellish place, one where only “sinners and drunkards” (yes, like the biblical reference) hang out. Sure, the French Quarter IS a place where folks go to drink and let loose, but when it comes to its demonic activity, I never once heard about how the French Quarter was the hub where slaves were bought and sold, where families were ripped apart, where young Black women were bartered by rich white men who’d take them home and rape them, among other things. The stronghold of this history didn’t make the French Quarter hellish or demonic, the giant margaritas and Voodoo shops did.

The first few months there I’d learn about the pagan Voodoo culture that dominated much of the city. The evil, demonic spirituality “savage” African peoples brought with them when they were forced against their will, arriving in New Orleans as chattel slaves.

New Orleans was founded by Sieur de Bienville and served as a hub for slavery in the 18th century. Many call it an “accidental city,” built mostly on swampland assumed to be incapable of holding its infrastructure. Bienville chose it because of its ready access to river and overland traffic, and it eventually became a major commercial center and port for goods passing between the Mississippi River system and the Gulf of Mexico. This made New Orleans an ideal city to trade slaves. In fact, the banning of transatlantic slave trade in the U.S. in 1808 only increased the volume of domestic slave-trade-traffic in the city.

Additionally, the sugar and cotton plantations that surrounded the city kept New Orleans at the center of this slave trade. Eve Abrams explains that, “back when cotton was king, New Orleans was its queen city.”

My last year there I lived on the beautifully historic Saint Charles street which was known as Mardi Gras’ predominant parade route. St. Charles is adorned with streetcars and decades-old beads—their faded purple, gold, and green colors tell stories as they decorate the power lines and trees. Like most mansions on St. Charles, I lived on a property that was divided up into several units—a Victorian mansion turned into small apartments, if you will. When family and friends would visit, we’d drive them up and down St. Charles, admiring the homes and how they’ve seemingly remained intact throughout the centuries.

But the nostalgia of these homes doesn’t come without its own dark histories. If you turn your gaze toward the very top of these mansions, you’ll often find a small window in an equally small triangle-shaped space, barely big enough for a person to move about. I learned early on that these small spaces were slave quarters where humans who were bought and sold were kept as property in these homes, mostly inhabited by plantation owners.

Tourism in the city thrives off of this history, with most tours aimed at bussing hundreds of white people to nearby plantations, where they listen to how slaves were tortured as they stroll through the grounds and sip their French wines. Even Mardi Gras parades highlight the dark history of the city and its celebrations, with Zulu (one of the most famous parades) thrown by an all-Black organization originally created because enslaved Africans were not allowed to participate in the pageants and parties of Mardi Gras.

The oppression and subjugation of Black people is tied to the very fabric of New Orleans, it permeates everything—even the corruption of the local government which has been tied to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

All of these details of its dark and demonic history make me mourn New Orleans, but I mostly mourn it because none of this was talked about or taken into considering during my time there, particularly within the Christian institutions and the Christian churches I was a part of that were so-called “training me for ministry.”

Now I don’t speak for all Christian people in the city, of course. But I do know that in most of the Bible studies, church sermons, and class lectures I attended, we talked primarily about the evil that engulfs the city due to the so-called pagan religions that make up so much of its culture, not the aforementioned evils that serve as its backbone.

During my last year there, I attended a church in the Bywater, which is known as a religiously plural area. We often did prayer walks around the neighborhood, praying that God would free the “demonic activity” that resides there. Across town, colleagues would stroll through Gentilly evangelizing from house to house asking that God would release the “spiritual stronghold” in its residents. Many I know—including myself—would engage in community activities in the 9th Ward, doing things like plant gardens and run summer camps for the youth, hoping this would do its part in eradicating the poverty and crime found there.

The problem wasn’t that folks weren’t engaging with the city. Many were. But I often think about the spiritual conversations that went along with these ministry efforts. While I know serving youth through community activities and prayer-walking around neighborhoods isn’t always a bad thing, I often wonder now as I look back if we were praying for and focusing on the wrong things?

My white, male pastors and professors were convinced that the stronghold in New Orleans was due to African religion, and wild parties, and they led us to pray fervently against those things. In many ways we were led to believe that if we told enough people about Jesus and effectively discipled them into our churches, then perhaps these evil things would be overcome, that perhaps poverty and crime would come to an end.

But I often wonder: why didn’t we pray enough (or even at all) against the demonic stronghold that is intergenerational trauma brought forth by slavery, segregation, redlining, voter suppression and other forms of oppression? Considering New Orleans’ dark history, why didn’t we ever seek to cast out the white demons of systemic racism that haunt and torment its people? Why didn’t we consider that enslaved Africans were evangelized to, too? If simply telling people about Jesus would eradicate the evil in New Orleans, then why was this evil only perpetuated by Christians during the Antebellum Period and beyond?

I often wonder what our ministry and missions’ efforts would look like in a “lost” city like New Orleans if whiteness wasn’t its king, if the torture of Black bodies wasn’t its foundation.

I often wonder what kind of effect door-to-door evangelism would have if it also brought with it information on voting, local government, and petitions for new laws that would protect the homeless, poor, Black men on the side of the road, whose narratives were framed as those displaced by drugs, alcohol, and even demonic possession. But what if homeless, poor, Black men are such because the city was not only built on their backs, but the system is designed to keep them from thriving? We often prayed for their spiritual deliverance, without giving thought to fighting for their physical freedom—and more than likely, white supremacy is the demon that displaced them rather than the red-horned one we gave all the credit to.

I still mourn New Orleans.

First, because I miss the city dearly. And second, because during my time there, whiteness convinced me that Blackness was the problem—that African spirituality and drunkenness, not white supremacy, kept it in its chains.