Journeys to St. Malo: a history of Filipino Louisiana

Abstract

In this essay, I present a long history of St. Malo, Louisiana, revealing the ways in which the site’s social, cultural, and physical landscape has been shaped and unmade by the forces of slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism. St. Malo is a remote area in the coastal wetlands thirty miles south of New Orleans that was home to a fishing village built by Filipino sailors in the mid-nineteenth century. I introduce readers to St. Malo as a historical setting by narrating an encounter between two journalists and the Filipinos of St. Malo in 1883. Then, I trace the forces and networks that brought Filipino sailors to Louisiana in the nineteenth century, situating this movement within a larger history of freedom and unfreedom in the Atlantic World. Finally, I describe my own personal journey to the site of St. Malo in 2019, reflecting on the tensions between local communities’ efforts to preserve the site’s history and the ongoing erasure of the site due to the anthropogenic destruction of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands.