When native New Orlea­ni­ans talk, the top­ic inevitably turns to con­flicts with the new migrants. Before Hur­ri­cane Kat­ri­na hit 10 years ago, on August 29, 2005, New Orleans’s old neigh­bor­hoods saw lit­tle turnover. My own fam­i­ly has lived in the 7 th Ward and Tremé/Lafitte for three gen­er­a­tions down one line and at least four down the oth­er (maybe more, thanks to a Native Amer­i­can ances­tor who may have been Choctaw). And for more than a cen­tu­ry, we natives have passed down cau­tion­ary tales of strangers.

New Orleans has always had an ebb and flow of newcomers. Besides the Native Americans, African tribesmen, French and Spanish were Haitians, Cubans, Germans, Irish, Italians and Asians—just in the 19th century.

New Orleans’s Creoles date the end of civilized living to the invasion of “the Americans”—that is, Anglo whites—in the early 1800s. Like everything else in Louisiana, which at one time proclaimed itself the Dream State on its license plates, the stories of foreign takeover are both real and imagined. The truth is complicated: Some people fought the invaders. Some people cooperated. Some people lost everything. Some people profited. And so it is today.

As longtime residents searched for places to live, cobbled together family from decimated kinship structures and retook their communities from flooded blocks, the wounds of Katrina had barely scabbed over when another assault began.

All things new, successful and moneyed now seem to be falling into the hands of people who did not experience the suffering of the hurricane or the oppressive poverty before the storm, yet stand to profit from both. Local newspaper stories and their hundreds of commenters debate gentrification while community leaders discuss the “fauxbourgs”—a play on “faubourg,” the local word for neighborhood—that have sprung up as developers, entrepreneurs, business leaders and careerists move full steam ahead.