Introducing River Road Re-Visited

My best friend and I spent most of our childhoods skipping up and down a slanted street named Janet Drive. We would spend after school hours alternating between our three-bedroom, red brick houses. Our middle-class neighborhood — Dianne’s Place — included one entrance and exit, and four rows of small houses. Railroad tracks separated the back of the neighborhood from the estuary Lake Pontchartrain.

To arrive in our small bayou town of St. Rose, we’d usually drive through a two-lane backstreet that connected us to River Road, which runs along a levee and the Mississippi River. On River Road, we’d turn left to find our childhood. We spent the oppressive humid summers, the cooler fall temperatures and exhilarating springs scrambling through our rural town, busing back and forth to school five miles west on River Road. Plantations and protruding oil and chemical industry structures formed around us like Hollywood green screens.

My best friend Keka still lives in the neighborhood we cherished as kids. Today, many outsiders might recognize this smaller geographic area as part of the stretch of land that contains more than 150 chemical plants and refineries, also known as “cancer alley” in local and national news coverage. Keka and I would never have defined the St. Rose or Dianne’s Place of the 1990s solely by the presence of a murderous industry. Disaster surrounded us, but these mainstays of southern Louisiana life almost seemed normal.

In River Road Re-Visited, I bring to you stories that capture the rich relationship between people living on the edges of Louisiana and the spaces along River Road they inhabit. Communities of color in the river parishes have faced almost insurmountable odds fighting large corporations that pollute the lands and water systems that people depend on. As one New York Times article recently highlighted, some activists in southern Louisiana believe that the region has been “sacrificed.” But while “cancer alley” serves as a shorthand for describing a geographic region where environmental catastrophes affect southern Louisiana’s Black and Brown residents, many of the complex life stories of the people who inhabit this part of the world have received less attention.

Certainly, industrial structures rose up from the ground we occupied, but we didn’t see ourselves as “cancer alley” citizens. Our quiet and playful neighborhood included as many Black families as it had white. At night, we’d walk each other home. Sounds of bayou life accompanied us during our short journey down the street. When boredom consumed us, we’d walk to the corner store to buy Snickers ice cream bars or rent a movie at the now-extinct local movie rental store. On sweltering summer days, we bought sno-balls at the neighborhood booth that still exists today.

A little less than two decades after I moved from my home state, I’ve temporarily returned to the only space I’ve known as home. I must disclose here that I can’t trace my ancestors to this land. I come from Puerto Rican roots, another colony island hundreds of miles south of New Orleans. But I grew up in a river parish. It’s a land that has absorbed much of my personal history. Before returning home, I read a story in The Atlantic by the freelance writer Anya Groner, who illustrates how chemical and oil plants occupy the same path of former plantations. Vast swaths of land exploited by a plantation economy are now pillaged and polluted by chemical and oil corporations.

On a recent road trip through River Road, I followed the river’s right and left curves and witnessed the past and present melding. The preserved plants of slavery and metallic plants of industry blurred before me. But alongside these forms of ecological disaster, I also noticed other spaces I didn’t recognize. Local historians and community advocates have joined regional efforts to memorialize histories of southern Louisiana’s Black and Brown communities. As I traverse through this patch of Earth, I highlight the voices of River Road’s inhabitants who continue to fight for a sustainable life along the Mississippi River Delta.

Cristina Mislán is an associate professor of journalism studies in the Missouri School of Journalism, where she teaches courses in media representation and critical/cultural studies. Her scholarship focuses on areas of alternative media histories, mediated activism, critical/cultural studies, and transnational/globalization studies.

This story was originally published October 5, 2022 at 8:00 AM with the headline "Introducing River Road Re-Visited."