The rode in our Mardi Gras Parades: ICE, La Migra, in an armoured car labeled Police (they are not; they can’t arrest anyone without a judicial warrant), in forest camo and tactical vests throwing beads and bobbing their heads on the 1 and 3 to the adjacent band.
They rode through a city that would not exist without an army of Mexicans and Central Americans who flooded New Orleans after Katrina and The Federal Flood for the ugly work of rebuilding: breathing the black mold, wielding sledge hammers in the humid dark of ruined houses, or splashing KILZ over the moldy walls in the slumlord shotguns, ripping out the floor furnaces, floating the new sheetrock, fitting the trims.
No one blinked an eye in this formerly Sanctuary City.: America claiming at last the lingering, recalcitrant border territory for the Real Anglo-Saxon White Jesus America.
They might as well have invited David Duke and his Klan to March down St. Charles with torches instead of flambeau.
The Surrender of New Orleans
About Me
Mark Folse is a provincial diarist and aspiring minor poet from New Orleans. His past blogging adventures included the Katina/Federal Flood blog wetbankguide on blogspot.com which David Simon told NY Magazine was one of three blogs that helped inform Treme, and Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, which once outranked the Doobie Brothers on Google Search. His work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The New Delta Review, Metazen, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited).
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Well Bottom Blues 
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