Rooting Storms: Remembering What Remains is an ongoing Storytelling and Reimagining Data Equity project that aims to capture Asian American Pacific Islander diasporic stories in New Orleans and the Gulf South.
Across cultural and generational lines, languages, and borders–this project seeks to acknowledge climate trauma and make visible the invisible labor and displacement that generations of Asian American Pacific Islanders have experienced and continue to experience in Greater New Orleans and the Gulf South.
We are reimagining Asian American Pacific Islander Community Power and Narratives in during rapidly increasing Climate Crises and ongoing Environmental Racism through Storytelling.
This is a living breathing archive that intends to create dialogue with storytellers and community members. Through narrative plentitude and AAPI stories we can redefine data equity, mobility, and sovereignty for Asian Americans Pacific Islanders in New Orleans and beyond.
From 2000 to the present, at least 28 tropical or subtropical cyclones affected the U.S. state of Louisiana.
According to the latest US Census, Louisiana has a population of 4.7 million. 1.6% (76,000) of the Louisiana population is Asian. New Orleans has a population of 391,000. 3.0% (10,000). Asian Americans have often been left out of data conversations because of sheer numbers and a lack of disaggregation. As an ongoing Storytelling Data Archive–Rooting Storms is a project that reimagines data and advocacy methods for AAPI that are seldom represented in quantitative and qualitative data as our communities experience climate inequities, environmental racism, and data erasure.
According to the Pew Research Center in April 2021, the U.S.-born Asians are substantially younger than the rest of the Asian American population—nearly 60% of the Asian American population are Gen-Z, with six in ten Asian American foreign born. And the U.S. Asian population is projected to reach 46 million by 2060.
Asian Americans are projected to be the nation’s largest immigrant group by the middle of the century. We have an unprecedented opportunity to weave generations through creating a space to tell Asian American stories beyond quantitative data limitations.
We have a moral obligation to contextualize the little data we have and practice equity through community driven culturally integrative change.
We have an opportunity to contextualize and embody power.
