Jose Torres Tama is a visual and performance artist who, like many others, was driven from his home in New Orleans during the Katrina disaster. 
He is currently living, albeit temporarily, in Florida. An interview with Torres Tama can be found here.. His webpage is at http://www.torrestama.com/.
Torres Tama loved living in New Orleans. This is how he felt about his adopted city:
New Orleans has been very very good to me. I’ve lived a dozen years in this sub-tropical swampland. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who is the literary godfather of a writing style described as Magical Realism, has called it the Northern most point of the Caribbean. New Orleans is the Macondo of the United States. Macondo is the fictional city of Garcia Marquez’s epic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude and much like New Orleans, it is a Confederacy of Dunces with fantastic eccentric characters. Its locals describe New Orleans as Babylon by the Mississippi, the Big Easy, and the City that Care Forgot.
New Orleans is magical and mysterious, and writers, painters, poets, actors, dancers, musicians and creative folks of all colors from all parts of the U.S. and the world come here. Many creative souls are born here. It is the birthplace of Jazz, indeed, but like in the past, its creative sons and daughters usually need to go north or west to make a living and receive due recognition. Its most famous musical son Louis Armstrong left for Chicago to become a legend. At present, Harry Connick Jr., the Neville Brothers, Dr. John and others in the music business have had to follow similar routes to achieve recognition in their time.
New Orleans does not have the resources to support its artistic talent. It is a provincial metropolis with all the vices that a big city can offer, but without the creative industry of Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. It is a small art Mecca so artists can create here without any pressure. Although this can be very helpful for the development of work, it can also be detrimental for the exposure of work. The Contemporary Art Center and the New Orleans Museum of Art are major institutions, but the art audiences are still small and rather fragmented. It has grown considerably since I first arrived in 1984, but it pales in comparison to other cities. Sometimes I think that the intrinsic party nature of this town, its laissez-faire attitude, keeps it from being a more important intellectual center.
Over all, I cannot thank New Orleans enough because it has been the place where I have matured as an artist. I have experimented with various mediums and I discovered the performer within me right here. I owe my artistic life to this city. It is my spiritual home. I have always felt that I have lived in New Orleans before. And living here as a Latino has been comfortable because New Orleans was once the capital of the Spanish owned territories in this area. It has Spanish roots and it continues to be a city with a Latin nature.
Here is a message he sent to his friends, fellow New Orleanians, and supporters in mid-September.
Dear National Arts Communities and New Orleanians-in- Exile,
Three weeks ago I managed to escape the chaos of New Orleans on a pirated/stolen school bus in a scenario that can only be describe as a Hollywood South version of “Hotel Rwanda.” I can only write to explore the madness that we are still bearing witness to today in the political aftermath of Katrina. It is my duty as an artist, activist, writer and cultural critic to present my analysis of an endemic disease in this society that was exemplified in the inaction of federal support after the natural storm of Katrina. Below is the latest piece that I have written. Know that I do not take things lightly and I am deeply disturbed about the direction of this Union. No, correction, I am outraged! I offer these words to you my cyberspace arts communities.
I believe it is a crucial time for action and my pen has always been my best sword against any injustices I have experienced in this country. Know that as a Latino immigrant, I have always wanted to believe in the “American Dream” mythology. It has been at the thematic center of all my work in the arts, and when I offer such critique of the system, it is because I care deeply about this “multiracial experiment” called the United States. Ashe, gracias. —JTT
The “Armies of Compassion” Were AWOL in New Orleans After Katrina
I keep hearing about these “armies of compassion,” and while I was sequestered by the chaos of New Orleans in Katrina’s aftermath–trapped in a perverse social experiment that seemed to be engineered by homeland security sadists–these armies were absent without leave. AWOL! Where were they while my beloved bayou city descended into an even greater terror than the physical damage that Hurricane Katrina spawned with her category five fury of water and wind? Their absence exemplified the criminal incompetence of local, state and national FEMA officials–who actually heightened the social upheaval by preventing private citizens and organizations from delivering urgent aid without their “official” bureaucratic “rescue” stamp.
These prevention strategies still continue even now, more than two weeks after the natural storm, because FEMA can only seem to flex its ineffectual muscles, which are trained in military practices, and have transformed a natural disaster into a state of war. Lets’ not forget that this is a “northern” confederacy of dunces who only know “war” and breed a “culture of war!” It should come as no surprise that FEMA has employed a strategy of uniformed military siege on the city of New Orleans, and the social chaos that was unleashed in their inaction gave them the best excuse to take the “perfect storm” and turn it into a war at home. And be informed that the practices being implemented on evacuees are turning them into “prisoners” of FEMA, and their “armies of compassion” when visible seem to lack the sensitivity training to exact a more humane effort in support of those who are left with nothing. These are your tax dollars at work.
While we have been privy to TV staged efforts of FEMA’s aid and the photo opportunities of Bush hugging evacuated African American children, many current accounts demonstrate that the “armies of compassion” seem astute in the act of disappearance after the cameras are gone or are rarely to be found on the fields of the disaster. Such was the case on the third day after Katrina had passed and the social storm in New Orleans was increasing in strength. It became more evident to me that the “armies of compassion,” still “missing in action,” were part of a political strategy to punish this Southern port city because it recently voted itself the color “blue” in a “red” state?
It was not a stretch of the imagination to envision this Christian maniacal executive chief whipping New Orleans into submission like so many African slaves were whipped by similar bible-toting masters only a century and half ago? Let’s not forget that previous “armies of compassion” have been used to protect slave-holding patrons and hold hostage their booty of dark-skinned property in a disturbing history that is not too far removed from this post-modern disaster.
In a city of ghosts like New Orleans, the past is always present, and I do not suffer from the cultural amnesia that often prevails in this channel-surfing consumer society. I know too well that this nation has an extensive resume of denying its citizenry of color due justice and protection under a set of laws–which have been historically applied with a biased gavel. From one century to another, I have seen little difference and only forty years ago similar “armies of compassion” were denying African Americans the right to assemble in the South and trying to suffocate the civil rights movement as much as they were denying proper voting rights and humane working conditions to Mexican American farm workers in California and engaged in acts of predicated murder to stop the American Indian movement. Welcome to a brief history of abuse of power in America.
I see a similar indifference in Katrina’s wake and the inaction by FEMA and the current heads of state is just as sinister and calculated as other previous atrocities committed against people of color. Where do I begin and how do I continue? Well, here are a few more examples just for the sake of practical argument: the “trail of tears” against native Americans, the Zoot Suit riots against Mexicans in Los Angeles, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the planned acts of arson against the Latino community in the Hoboken, New Jersey fires of the 1980’s that displaced thousands for real-estate development condos overlooking the New York skyline? Oh, give me a decade in this history, and I can point to an atrocity for your palette. If we are to have any justice for the future of this multiracial experiment called the United States, then heads should be rolling in the same bloodbath that these neo-cons have created in the remaining floodwaters of New Orleans.
And lets’ hear it for the Bush matriarch who aptly deserves the “Marie Antoinette Award” for calling the displaced evacuees at the Houston shelter as being better off because “you know, (they) were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.” What clearer evidence that this Bush family is completely without the faintest of clues when face to face with the poor–the other face of America that they have been shielded from in their veil of supreme wealth that is stained with more and more blood on the surface of the oil that feeds them. I imagine that this is her “compassionate conservatism” on display in polemic black and white?
And what about the “chosen” TV images that sculpted such a believable profile of a culture in electric short hand–images that criminalized African Americans even further than the norm? Even without Katrina, we are generally aware of the accepted norms that one is always suspect in this country just by being black and/or Latino, native and Middle Eastern. Repeatedly, we were treated to images that created even greater fear of African Americans in a city with a rich legacy of civil rights defenders and a black intelligentsia, premiere jazz musicians and composers, writers and artists, cultural workers and educators. But the media trance fixed its hypnotic loops over and over on images in which black people were either wanton looters or poor victims. Yes, there was certainly some truths in images of both and plenty of the city’s poorest were sequestered and abandoned in public shelters that never offered the public assistance promised by local and state officials. But where were Bush’s “armies of compassion” then?
What we certainly did not see on TV were the valiant efforts of African Americans like the middle-aged woman I met at the edge of Esplanade Avenue, in the residential end of the Quarter, trying desperately to secure safe passage out of the chaos for her eighty-year old mother. In my short exchange with her, she mentioned how she was being immediately sized-up as a “potential looter” herself, and it was difficult to get assistance and even check into a hotel for some safety. No, you did not see this face of a concerned daughter trying to do the right thing, and the invisible “armies of compassion” were not there to usher her and her mother to safety.
Never was any of this looting footage prefaced by a proclamation that what makes New Orleans attractive to the country and to world over is owed mostly to its people of color–its African heritage that has built this city with the spilling of its enslaved blood and that even under such abhorrent conditions, these historically oppressed people transformed their pain into art and music and a culture that is revered internationally. Of course not, how can we expect such historical tribute and debt to be paid to people of color on prime time TV and cable stations that are generally the most effective tools for the propagation of white supremacy? Yes, I said it!
I can only imagine how it scares you when the legacy of “white supremacy” is brought to the forefront in the analysis of such an atrocity. Well, let’s not forget that it is the most evident of the difficult civil secrets that lies just “under the skin” in this divided society, and there were no “armies of compassion” that countered this belief in the aid of the poor and abandoned.
This city that knows its respect for the ancients, this grand Madame of the South deserved an organized effort of heart and efficiency of humanity and true compassion. I remain deeply disturbed, perplexed and outraged as to how this great empire of capital and industry could not manage to organize its technology to mount a proper rescue for the most “precious pueblo” in its possession. By what method of madness and political design did the “armies of compassion” arrive a working week late when the city was already festering like an untreated wound in the August heat and people were dying in the plain view of national TV coverage and angered news reporters? Only, now, can I say that–finally–in the face of such tragedy it looks like the press in this country has regained its backbone–its cojones–its courage to put a camera on the brutal truths of a continuing legacy of abandonment!
What do I offer as a modest proposal of retribution or solution to these crimes? I call for more than FEMA’s Brown and his “calculated” resignation and put the “blood of these people” on boy George’s hands and the arrogance of his family privilege. This is not a time for us to be cowards and hold our flaccid tongues in silence for fear of sounding unpatriotic, because if we have any freedoms left in this Union and we are to deserve them as a free nation, then, we need to exercise these “inalienable rights” today and hold accountable a government that has played us with its recklessness and cruel indifference to working people and the poor.
This is a rogue administration whose pomposity is killing more of its citizenry, and if we remain with our tongues in our hands, then we deserve the fascist posturing it continues to flaunt while disguising itself as a “compassionate conservative” regime that calls for a “day of prayer” in the wake of its murderous bureaucracy. I will exhibit the same lack of FEMA compassion that dragged across the flooded streets of New Orleans and managed to turn my city into Baghdad in four days while it has taken three years to take that sovereign nation and turn into another “red mess” before the eyes of the world. If only the armies of compassion could have been that efficient.
-Jose Torres Tama in exile from New Orleans
September 15, 2005
Gainesville, Florida
cell # 504-232-2968
e-mail jose@torrestama.com or poetafiego@juno.com
