ABSTRACT
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which hit the American gulf coast in September 2005, the shock among most Americans, and the world generally, was not the devastation, the amount of human and property loss, or the economic cost of the destruction. The most shocking thing, as John Mwendwa rightly notes, was that Katrina brought America’s shocking poverty bubbling to the surface.1 This is because most people in Mississippi and New Orleans who stayed back were too poor to leave. Statistics from the 2000 census show that close to 40 per cent of New Orleans’ population lived in poverty, with 27 percent having no access to a vehicle. A victim only identified as J.R. in an Associated Press story presented it more accurately: “Let me tell you about abandoned people. Those people who were abandoned in New Orleans, they were abandoned long before that hurricane hit. We all were,” (Mwendwa, 2005). Another American noted that unlike in Africa, poverty was hidden. “You don’t see our poor because we don’t let them sleep on park benches or homeless shelters. We just squeeze in, and everyone is overcrowded and underfed,” (Mwendwa, 2005). This reality constitutes a major contradiction of the nationalist construction of the U.S. as an egalitarian society wherein virtually all citizens belong to the middle class and are afforded the opportunity to realize and live “the American dream.” It calls for a reexamination of the American nationalist myth in the nation-building process and the role of minority groups therein. This essay critically examines the process of nationalist myth making in the U.S. and Latin America from a comparative perspective with a view to analyzing the impact and implications of this dominant-group elite project on ethnic and racial minorities. The main thesis of the essay is that, in conceiving
of nations as egalitarian communities characterized by deep horizontal comradeship, nationalist myths camouflage the realities of glaring inequalities and ruthless exploitation in order to promote collective loyalty to the nationalist project. It is this reality that Hurricane Katrina brought home in regard to the U.S. As one individual argued, “[p]overty didn’t happen overnight, but now it’s as if someone lifted up a rock and wow, there they are, all those poor people!”2
