Gendered constraints on a strategy of regional mobility: Latino/a migration to post‐Katrina New Orleans

In August 2005, rising waters from Hurricane Katrina compromised several of New Orleans’ levees, causing extensive flooding that, in the face of government inaction, resulted in the deaths of 1,400 people and a large‐scale evacuation of the city. As long‐term residents of the city evacuated, New Orleans witnessed an influx of new Latino/a immigrants who arrived to demolish irreparable structures, clear toxic debris, and rebuild. Disaster recovery work draws on construction and low‐skilled service sectors, which are already niches for undocumented Latino/a labour in the USA. Migration to disaster recovery sites is a potentially lucrative strategy for undocumented migrants, who use their mobility to seek better employment. By highlighting differences in gendered labour experiences in a neoliberal disaster‐recovery context, this study illustrates how migrant‐labour niches and a lack of reproductive support systems constrain opportunities and shape migrants’ mobility strategies. Through a perspective of constrained agency, it considers how migrants’ experiences differ according to gender as they negotiate labour and care possibilities. The constraints on migrant aspirations are explored through interview and survey data collected from 256 Latino/a migrants to post‐Katrina New Orleans who were working between 2006 and 2008. The paper argues that while disaster recovery sites create opportunity for some of the most vulnerable workers, gendered immigrant employment niches and the absence of reproductive support constrain women’s success. Using evidence from post‐Katrina New Orleans, this study reveals natural disaster recovery as a process that reproduces gender‐based hierarchies of opportunity through both the gendered division of labour and the lack of social reproductive support. Migrants’ decision to risk a mobility strategy is shaped and constrained by capital (labour market opportunities) and society (cultural demands and reproductive support). Embedding considerations of social reproduction into the analysis of immigrant workers’ constrained agency ultimately reveals its central role in mobility strategies.