Innovation and creativity abound in professor Gene Koss' Foundations of Glass and Intermediate Glass classes. With stay at home orders forcing his students out of the casting and glass blowing studio in the Newcomb Art Department, these liberal arts students put their ingenuity to work by using materials from home to create sculptures for their final projects. The results were inventive, resourceful, and thought provoking. We hope you enjoy these student samples illustrating their dedication and imagination.

Coleman Bishop (SE '22)

"The Plate of Life," 2020

My name is Coleman Bishop and I’m from Great Falls, Virginia. I’m a rising junior majoring in psychology with minors in studio art and architecture design. In addition, I play club lacrosse here at Tulane. With limited access to materials for a sculpture, I decided to use the leftover paper plates I had and joined them together with clear tape, creating “The Plate of Life.” The design itself is a variation of the Flower of Life design of repeated circles. The process was like putting together a puzzle of paper plates and became very methodical after my second and final edition.

Sophie Fuselier (SLA '23)

"Stuck in Flight," 2020

I am a freshman from New Orleans, and I'm majoring in Classics. The title of the piece is "Stuck in Flight." I was inspired by the shape of the wooden board, which I thought could be well used to simulate motion. The effect I ended up with was birds clearly going somewhere, but then being frozen and idling in a single instant. With life being put on hold due to the pandemic, this piece is closely related to the way I view my current place in the world.

Cole Harmon (SLA '21)

"Looking Glass," 2020

Cole Harmon was born and raised in Saint Louis, Missouri. He is a member of Tulane’s Class of 2021, majoring in Philosophy with a focus on language, mind, knowledge. In addition to his sculptural and academic pursuits, Cole is also passionate about music and politics. “Being away from the studio, I knew I would have to get creative with the sourcing of my materials; and, while digging through piles of recycling and like junk, realized that I would not be satisfied with a simple shoebox-scale model. So, I decided to use the bulkiest and most plentiful material on hand: firewood. The design itself is largely inspired by the works of Andy Goldsworthy — works with which I became acquainted while watching ‘Rivers and Tides,’ a documentary of his assigned for the online portion of our Intermediate Glass course.”

Claire "Happy" Herold (PA '23)

Happy Herold, 2020

Happy Herold, 2020

Happy Herold, 2020

Happy Herold, 2020

Previous Next

My name is Happy Herold and I am from Decatur, GA. I am a rising sophomore. I enjoy fiber arts. My mom took glass from Professor Koss in the 80's. The inspiration for these sculptures was a Thai bamboo rice basket. I tried to emulate the basket in these three sculptures. My sculptures are made of plastic tubing traditionally used for plumbing and wire. I found these materials at my local hardware store. I experiment with many different materials, but found the most inspiration in the tubing.

Anna Maija Li (SLA '23)

Anna Maija Li, 2020

Anna Maija Li is a freshman Political Science and Studio Art: Printmaking Major from Palo Alto, California.

For this final project, I was inspired by food vessels. Things like cups and bowls are everyday objects and I wanted to take an artistic and functional approach to create the sculptures. I was inspired by fast-food french fry containers. I find something really nice about the curvature of them, even though they are made for fast food they seem to have a simple sort of elegance. I put my spin on it by creating a larger scale form out of paper mache. I wanted to play with the curves, and how it could comfortably sit in your hand. I added some details with paint to give it the graphic and color-blocked look that is pretty universal amongst fast food packaging. I like the juxtaposition of creating something artistic that would normally just end up as junk after a single-use.

Sofia Vila (SLA '23)

Sofia Vila, 2020

Sofia Vila, 2020

Previous Next

Sofia Vila is a rising sophomore from Miami, FL studying public health on Tulane's pre-medical track. She is also working towards a minor in studio art with a focus in glass. As an aspiring Obstetrician-Gynecologist, Sofia finds that the skills required to work successfully in an operation room and a glass studio are unexpectedly similar; both entail the comprehensive understanding and employment of fine motor skills while using tools, teamwork and clear communication with peers, as well as the ability to work smoothly under pressure. When her Intermediate Glass class was instructed to create a model for a blown glass sculpture, Sofia - as a fan of competitive cooking shows - was inspired to mimic glass with isomalt, a sugar alcohol often used to create stunning sugar art for stylish desserts. She achieved each bubble-like shape by pre-inflating a balloon to stretch the plastic into a rounder shape, refilling it with water, and then pouring hot melted isomalt over the top of the balloon, supported by a ceramic ramekin on a silpat mat. Combining these translucent structures with rusted steel, "SugarWheels" unites the fragility of glass and robust nature of metal alongside the repetition of a circular shape to create a paradoxical image of balance.

#FeesMustFall protests at the University of Cape Town, Photo Credit: Discott / CC BY-SA

Sarah Jones (SLA '20) explores what modern revolutions look like.

During the spring semester of my first year at Tulane University, I took a comparative politics course that focused on revolutions in the context of Western societies. This course offered insight into the characteristics and mechanisms that constructed a revolution, and it opened my eyes to how my studies could impact my world view. From the start of this course, I began to imagine what would coming revolutions look like? Who would lead them?

Years later, I took a leap in my academic career. After taking courses with Elisabeth McMahon and Z’étoile Imma, professors in the Departments of History and English, respectively, I decided to study abroad at the University of Cape Town (UCT) due to the rich anti-apartheid resistance present in the country before and after 1994. When I arrived on UCT’s campus in January 2019, I could feel a similar atmosphere as when I arrived at Tulane in Fall 2016. In the spring of 2015, students from UCT started nationwide movements to decolonize education with #RhodesMustFall, which organized a collective of students to demand the removal of a statue memorializing British imperialist Cecil Rhodes on their campus. The movement soon spread to the University of Witwatersrand (UWC), which led to the emergence of #FeesMustFall. This movement demanded an end to increasing student fees and pushed for more financial assistance for students. Together, these movements sparked the mobilization of university students across institutions, the streets of the Western and Eastern Cape, and on social media. Students collectively organized to spread awareness of the oppression they faced from colonial and apartheid legacies and assert that education was not a commodity. #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMust- Fall contributed to defining an era of digital activism, which made organizing and advocating accessible to a larger audience and created an international awareness of these issues.

Across the ocean, students at Tulane had ignited their own movement. At the Call for Unity action in 2015, students from organizations such as Tulane’s Black Student Union (tBSU), Generating Excellence Now and Tomorrow in Education (GENTE), Students Organizing Against Racism (SOAR), and the Muslim Student Association (MSA) stood in solidarity with students at the University of Missouri to demand a list of changes to make Tulane a safe and equitable place for marginalized students. Echoing the 1968 requests from African American Congress of Tulane, the tBSU’s list of demands included changes to academic and financial departments and admissions in an effort to increase accessibility and representation. These demands reflected the concerns and realities for marginalized students that faced barriers of not only being admitted to Tulane, but navigating the campus and feeling supported while completing their academic careers. Knowing that they may not experience the benefits that could result from the list of demands, the student organizations were intentional in creating a legacy to alleviate stress for future students. The mission of Tulane and UCT student organizers resembled the reality of organizing, which is obtaining the liberation of all impacted by legacies of oppression. When I studied abroad at UCT, this became even more clear to me.

At UCT, I befriended students who reminded me of my friends and mentors at Tulane. Students who wanted to learn in an environment free of economic and social oppression and marginalization. Students who attended school to break barriers for their families. Students who knew that they could not treat 2015 as a single event, and who knew that change started with them. While at UCT I took an African Political Economy course, which awakened me and my classmates to protest scholarship and challenged us to “ask the right kinds of questions.” The lecturers, tutor, and guest speakers encouraged us to not accept any text or theory as just a body of work; rather, we were empowered to see ourselves as producers of knowledge. In this course, the students and I became comrades working together to imagine and cultivate a revolution needed to decolonize the academic space and allow those who have operated on the margins to have their voices heard.

Since coming back to Tulane in August, I am aware that the next revolution will not fully reflect what I learned as a freshman. Now, I understand that students have the tools, knowledge, and understanding to resist the perpetuation of colonial legacies in academic spaces and to challenge those legacies. As students, we can imagine what it would look like to have a space of learning separate of economic, social, and political oppression. From climate activists to immigration advocates and student action groups like Les Griots Violets, Tulane is entering a new era of students holding their peers, professors, and administrators accountable for the learning environment we cultivate and encourage and the legacy we produce.

After spending much of this spring advocating for financial and housing support from universities as they transitioned into their “new normal” of living through a pandemic, student activists across the nation faced another traumatic moment. On May 25, George Floyd lost his life to police brutality, which was documented in an 8-minute and 46-second video. As Black communities attempted to grieve the deaths of Nina Pop, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others, Floyd’s death symbolized an accumulation of frustration and exhaustion. The Black Lives Matter Movement, Movement for Black Lives, and BYP100 brought people out of isolation to advocate and demand justice for Black people whose lives have been disregarded due to the productions of racism, capitalism, violence, and exploitation. Joining and leading these movements were student revolutionaries who were equipped with knowledge of care, liberation, and justice that they wanted for their communities. Across the nation, students united to organize around policing presence and practices on their campuses, financial insecurity, and how to free themselves from colonial histories. For many students, this will be a summer that will change their entire lives. It will be a summer during which they have to challenge themselves to reimagine what accountability will look like from institutions to the state. They will have to imagine outside of the confines in which they have been told to exist. They will have to imagine who they want to be and the communities they want to create. In the years to come we must continue to ask ourselves, what does a decolonized education reflect at Tulane? But this responsibility is not just on students. Administrators, faculty, and staff must also ask themselves, how will I respond when I am held accountable? How will I respond when I am asked to reimagine the conditions within the academy?

According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), women are the fastest growing population in the criminal justice system, their numbers increasing at a rate almost double that of men since 1985. In addition, the ACLU reports that two thirds of women in state prisons have children that are minors, and more than 1.5 million children in the U.S. have a parent in prison.

In 2015, Annie Phoenix began her doctoral studies in the City, Culture, and Community (CCC) Program, a collaborative doctoral program of Tulane’s Schools of Liberal Arts, Social Work, and Architecture, to address these statistics. Before enrolling in the CCC Program, Phoenix was teaching in public schools in Louisiana. “I felt like I wasn’t making the impact I wanted to make,” expressed Phoenix. She applied to the Ph.D. program “as a way to transition my life to be more about the issues that I wanted to address—I wanted to explore incarceration more in depth and had always been interested in gender and women specifically. But I was thinking about it from the perspective of my students and the families I had been working with as a teacher, and how incarceration was affecting youth.”

Shortly after beginning the CCC program, Phoenix attended a multitude of community events about incarceration and met Syrita Steib. Together, Phoenix and Steib co-founded the New Orleans-based organization Operation Restoration with a vision to focus on educational initiatives, policy changes, and social services for women and children affected by incarceration. She began her work in the community teaching ten women in the inaugural iteration of the Women FIRST Clinic, a GED program for women who have been incarcerated facilitated by Operation Restoration in collaboration with New Orleans nonprofit Women with a Vision, which receives funding from Tulane’s Newcomb Institute and Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking.

Today, the Women FIRST Clinic is thriving and has served more than 140 women, and Operation Restoration has grown to serve individuals across the country through their programs and policy work. As the organization’s Policy Director, Phoenix works with Steib and lawmakers to enact laws that help women and children survive in existing systems, and more importantly, change those systems. Over the course of four years, Operation Restoration has facilitated bills such as LA HSR 2, a Bill of Rights for Children with Incarcerated Parents; LA Act 392, the Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act; and LA HCR 27, the Louisiana Task Force on Women’s Incarceration, among others. Currently, their bill to ban the box on public college and university applications asking if you have been incarcerated has been enacted in Louisiana and four other states, and over the next two years, 15 states will introduce bills to remove this criminal history question. These bills not only fight for human rights, such as helping supply women in prison with basic needs like sanitary products and soap, but also strive to increase access to education so formerly incarcerated women can attend college and secure meaningful work and safe housing to support themselves and their families.

In a recent interview with Yale Law School, Steib explained, “Women coming out of prison need everything. It goes from basic things like underwear and a toothbrush to connections to systems of higher education, opportunities to heal from trauma and resources to reconnect with family. And more importantly, they need other women who have been through the same experience and can help them walk through their journeys.” Steib was sentenced to prison for 120 months at the age of 19. Since her release she has championed the strength of women and their families, working to address humanitarian inadequacies both in criminal justice systems and beyond. “It’s not enough to be a resource provider, the most effective thing is to walk with somebody and say ‘I’ve done this walk before, and I know what this feels like.’”

Operation Restoration employs thirteen individuals that all identify as women, a majority of whom have been incarcerated. Approximately one third of Operation Restoration’s programs are rooted in education, from their Women FIRST Program, to the College-in-Prison program they offer in partnership with Tulane University’s School of Professional Advancement and Newcomb Institute, and a vocation program for incarcerated women that helps equip them with tools for job placement upon release from their sentencing. The organization also offers social services such as The Closet, which provides clothing and hygiene products to women at no cost; Hope House, a safe, transitional housing program for women returning home after incarceration; and the Rapid Response program, which supports clients with rent, utilities, court costs, transportation costs, and other expenses that women incur when establishing stable housing and employment, among others. This year, the growing organization also began expanding their services to women experiencing immigration detention, which is escalating at a high rate in Louisiana.

“I think the reason why Operation Restoration is effective in policy work is because we do service work and we know the issues very intimately,” explains Phoenix. “The fact that we do policy work helps us connect folks that are going through issues with services. Providing resources is necessary; but you can’t put band-aids on gaping wounds. That increases your chances of becoming complicit in the issue, when we really need to be changing laws.” Through her role as a doctoral candidate in Tulane’s CCC program, Phoenix is able to not only research and enact policy changes, but also reflect on and write about her findings, the policies, and their effects for her dissertation. Furthermore, the types of classes she has been able to enroll in through the program—from public health to sociology—has allowed her to research at a higher level, ethically engage in research, and bring a multifaceted approach to issues she cares about deeply.

New Orleans is often referred to as the northernmost city of the Caribbean. As such, researching and teaching at Tulane offers many moments to draw connections between our city and Latin America. We often think about these connections first in relationship to Spanish-speaking Latin America given that Spain had sovereign control over New Orleans in the 18^th century. Tourists visiting the French Quarter see the Cabildo, the municipal hall that dates to this period of Spanish colonial rule and various plaques and monuments throughout the city commemorate more recent relationships with Latin America, most notably the statues of Simon Bolívar, Benito Juárez, and Francisco Morazán Quesada along Basin Street. Other landscape elements such as the Spanish-language signage along Williams Boulevard in North Kenner, an area just a few miles beyond New Orleans, manifest the dynamic Latino communities that are a part of the city’s more contemporary history and character.

The 2010 census revealed that the Latino population as a whole has more than doubled in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. However, an important and often overlooked enclave within this Latino community in New Orleans is the Brazilians. By the nineteenth century, the networks that linked New Orleans to ports around the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean also extended south of the equator to Brazil. From this point until Hurricane Katrina, a special commercial connection led to the establishment of a small Brazilian community. Brazil was a major supplier to the New Orleans coffee industry, with Louisiana Coffee and Spice Mills marketing the guarantee on its packaging that its Lunch Bell brand contained “pure Rio,” referencing the allure and seductiveness of Rio de Janiero in its coffee beans. Currently, about a quarter of all coffee imported to the U.S. still comes from Brazil—the supplier to nearly a third of the world’s coffee—and enters the country through the Crescent City.

It was not until the extensive flood damage of Hurricane Katrina, however, that New Orleans became a crucially important part of the story of the “New Latino South,” a term used to describe booming contemporary Latino migration to the Southern U.S. in the early 2000s. Researchers have sometimes referred to Brazilians as an “invisible minority” in the U.S. due to restrictive census definitions of the term Latino along with language and cultural differences. Exact statistics of the number of Brazilians who arrived in the aftermath of Katrina are difficult to confirm, though calculations from Brazilian churches, the itinerant consulate, and social media tracking seem to indicate that between 7,000-9,000 Brazilians arrived to rebuild the city after the storm. Today, the number of Brazilians is close to 4,000 in the greater New Orleans area.

I was recently reminded of the interconnectedness of research on Brazil at Tulane and our local Brazilian community in 2019 when the Latin American Library hosted the Amazônia Ocupada exhibition, featuring the work of Brazilian photographer João Farkas. Farkas documented the mass migration of workers throughout Brazil who came to the Amazon basin in the 1980s and 1990s to try their luck in gold mining, logging, and cattle ranching. The international attention given to environmental degradation in the in the Amazon basin, the lack of productive markets for the pioneer settlers who resettled in Rondônia from Southern Brazil as part of the migration wave, and subsequent policies to save the rainforest that put restrictions on their cattle farming, were all motivating factors in an undocumented immigration network that went from Colorado do Oeste, Rondônia, and actually led to New Orleans, Louisiana. While Farkas’ photographs concentrated on the Amazon Basin, I had heard stories of this migration from children of these workers who left the Amazon region for work in New Orleans post-Katrina. Immigrants from Colorado do Oeste, Rondônia began describing New Orleans as the next El Dorado in post-storm reconstruction, and today, New Orleans, and its suburb Chalmette in particular, is home to one of the main communities of Rondônians living in the U.S. These Brazilian storm chasers left the Amazon for the U.S. seeking more productive markets to support their families, and are now a part of the hybridity that is New Orleans and the Gulf South’s cultural identity.

These connections between Brazil and New Orleans emerge in immigration patterns, music, and ethnic and racialized categories in our local city politics, making Tulane an exciting place to be a Brazilianist. Tulane has long been a prominent center for research and teaching on Brazil, having offered Portuguese language courses since 1947 and a Brazilian Studies degree program since 1999. Next year the University will begin its prestigious five-year term as the secretariat of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA). The Brazilian community in New Orleans offers opportunities for scholars at Tulane to explore how real people living in our communities participate in the creation of specific places and hemispheric networks that link New Orleans to Brazil.

Angela Tucker, Photo: Paula Burch-Celentano

It was the end of 2014, and I needed to do a real intake of my life. I was living in my hometown, New York City, and I had hit a wall. I was steadily working on an enviable amount of film freelance jobs, a difficult feat to pull off in this competitive industry, but was beyond exhausted. At that time, I knew I wanted to teach more, to take fewer soul-sucking money jobs, to continue my life’s work of creating media about underrepresented communities, and to live in a place where people valued and appreciated the importance of joy, rest, and self-care. So, with my production company, TuckerGurl Inc., I took the plunge and moved to New Orleans.

When I told film industry people that I was moving to New Orleans, they would often say, “Oh, there’s so much film happening there now.” I would reply with excitement but honestly, I did not know how this perceived boom in film work in Louisiana would affect me directly. My company’s biggest client was Black Public Media, an arm of public television, where I am the Co-Executive Producer for their documentary series “AfroPoP.” That project could be done from anywhere but it was not enough income to hold me for the year. Part of my rationale for moving was a desire to make more fiction projects, especially feature length films. I knew that large studio films like Jurassic Park 3 or series like NCIS: New Orleans filmed in the city but they weren’t exactly posting job listings for independent film directors. I had to dig deeper to understand what these film incentives meant for me.

Louisiana’s film tax credit program has been around since 2002. In layman’s terms, having this program means that productions at a certain price point can get benefits, also called incentives, for filming in Louisiana. States have become production hubs entirely because of incentives, with Georgia and Louisiana at the top of the list creating a new regional hub called “Hollywood South.” In Louisiana, these incentives include filmmakers getting back 30% of what they spend in the state. For larger projects, this can add up to a return of millions of dollars. Obviously, this money has to come from somewhere—in 2019, the state of Louisiana shelled out $150 million toward film tax incentives alone–and for a state as poor as ours, having incentives this extensive, does not come cheap. However, the influx of crewmembers and actors brings increased revenue to local businesses throughout the city.

I quickly learned that these incentives would benefit me in ways I wouldn’t have imagined working in New York City. Even though I was not working on these larger features, my peers were. This steady work allowed me to easily find crew and collaborators who had outlets to earn regular income. The arrival of studio films and television shows has created what Governor John Bel Edwards called in a recent industry event a “creative class:” a group of people that can remain in Louisiana making a living while pursuing their own passion projects. I’ve been able to meet other independent filmmakers quickly because of New Orleans’ size and culture, and groups like Film Fatales and organizations like the New Orleans Film Society and the New Orleans Video Access Center have allowed me to create a community with invaluable friendships. Most filmmakers get jobs because of referrals and so the more people you know, the better.

What a bigger investment in the Southern film industry and an increased interest in Southern stories have made clear is that the film industry has a growing interest in regionalism. Documentary funders have started the charge by creating new programs like Tribeca Film Institute’s If/Then Short Documentary Program, which specifically funds filmmakers based in underserved regions like the South or the Midwest so they’re able to make short documentaries that are distributed on major platforms like The New York Times’ website or PBS. These funders see the importance of having work made by people living in these regions. Independent feature filmmaking is slowly following suit but there is still a tendency to use places like New Orleans as a studio space instead of making stories that are specific to the region. Vicki Mayer, a professor in the School of Liberal Arts Department of Communication, attests to this in her book Almost Hollywood, Nearly New Orleans: The Lure of the Local Film Economy, observing that the influx of film-making in New Orleans has “created a para-industry predicated on the city’s malleability as a canvas.”

But many of us are trying to change that. Now armed with an incredible community of filmmaking collaborators, I too am working to create local New Orleans stories in partnership with makers who are indigenous to this community. I have found a new quality of life that allows for more rest and focus. I have been able to make a feature length film, “All Styles,” currently available on Amazon, and also make three short films, one of which, All Skinfolk Ain't Kinfolk, premiered on PBS’ Reel South in April, while beginning to teach in Tulane’s Digital Media Practices Program. I know this doesn’t sound restful but trust me, it is!

After six years in New Orleans, I have seen more and more filmmakers and small studios bring their film projects to the city and increasingly hire local crew and talent in more decision-making positions. I have a deeper understanding of the complicated and beautiful history of my new city and, therefore, am able to tell richer and complex stories about it. However, until the larger film industry directly funds and distributes more work by born-and-raised Louisiana makers, we still have a long way to go in creating an industry that benefits everyone equally.

Sister Thanh Trang at the Buddhist Center in the Little Woods neighborhood of New Orleans. Photo: Paula Burch-Celentano

New Orleans’ Little Woods neighborhood stretches out along the southern shoreline of Lake Ponchartrain. Once called “poor man’s Miami Beach,” the area was famous for its fishing camps perched on stilts and piers jutting into the water. In the 1920s, these camps housed restaurants and a few music clubs, but later, only those in Little Woods withstood the onslaught of development planning, including the ambitious East Lakefront Development program proposed by the Orleans Levee Board in 1963. This was the case at least until 1998, when even those camps were reduced to pilings by Hurricane Georges, and in its aftermath when the mayor refused to grant rebuilding permits, citing public health concerns. Today, Little Woods is best known as home to the New Orleans Lakefront Airport.

I had never visited the neighborhood until September 2019 when I learned that Sister Thanh Trang, a Buddhist monk, had returned to New Orleans and established a new temple. After Hurricane Katrina, she resided in a nearby Buddhist center but left the city after a year or so. A few Vietnamese families continued to rely on her to carry out funeral rituals and to provide spiritual guidance and many urged her to return and settle down in New Orleans.

New Orleans is said to be an exceptional city. After the hurricane, the city embraced Vietnamese Americans within this narrative, particularly the New Orleans East neighborhood, centered around Mary Queen of Vietnam Church. But if exceptionalism highlights some stories, it casts shadows on others, overlooking those places and peoples that do not conform to the city’s exuberant storylines. As a cultural anthropologist, I have focused on Buddhist institutions along the Gulf Coast, and how these institutions challenge our understandings of the city and its place in the world. Presently, New Orleans has numerous Buddhist centers, including five Vietnamese temples in the greater metropolitan area, a Thai temple, and other meditation groups. Yet these spiritual communities are seen not of the city, only in the city, reinscribing the persistent trope of Asian Americans as strangers from a distant shore.

How can we instead see Asian Americans as full participants in the process of rewriting New Orleans, inscribing new meanings into the city’s landscape? The large structure that houses Sister Thanh Trang’s Buddhist Center on Edgelake Court today was once the residence of a Baptist pastor. Neighbors claimed he never returned after Katrina and that the building had lay vacant for almost 15 years. Last year Sister Thanh Trang saw a posting for the property just days before it was to be auctioned by a bank. She drove by and walked through an open gate. There she saw a large yard with its towering live oaks. The neighbors welcomed her, and now Sister Thanh Trang and her fellow monk, Sister Thiện Trang, support their vocation by caring for a dozen or so children after school.

I visited Sister Thanh Trang again in the early afternoon in December. She was dressed in grey robes topped off with a brown down vest, her smile warm and open. While we drank tea, we lingered over stories of her childhood—how she had fled Vietnam in 1981 at the age of eight; how she learned to shop and cook for her father and three younger sisters in Hong Kong; how her mother arrived three years later; how her family was later transferred to the Philippines, a former U.S. colony, to learn American culture. She giggled as she recounted her attempt to reconcile her attraction to Buddhism with her adolescence in America, and how her master refused to believe her when she told him she wanted to become a monk. She later resided in monasteries in California, Indiana, France, and Taiwan. Now she was ready to plant herself, and her practice, in New Orleans.

As our conversation wound down, she led me down the narrow hall, past the newly completed worship hall, through the classroom filled with art supplies, to the backyard. She showed me where she had removed dozens of trees so the children would have room to run, but she left the large oak tree in the front yard standing. Its thick trunk and outstretched limbs may have been standing long before the neighborhood was known for its fishing camps and public beaches. Now rooted firmly in the ground, the tree would shelter the temple in Little Woods.

Most Americans don’t know that Louisiana fought in the American Revolution on the side of the thirteen British mainland colonies. Only a handful know that one of the soldiers from Spanish colonial Louisiana who helped win America’s freedom was a man named Noel Carrière, the commander of the New Orleans free black militia.

The absence of Louisiana and Carrière from most versions of America’s founding story highlights one the great paradoxes embodied by New Orleans. In the popular imagination, the city is unique, unlike any other in the U.S.—an exotic, exceptional place that sits outside the parameters of what is typically American, past and present. This is the city that is promoted to tourists and, if truth be told, to prospective Tulane students. The New Orleans waiting to be discovered in the city’s archives, however, is quintessentially American, right down to the role it played in the nation’s birth. If you don’t know that this story and its heroes are there to be found, though, you’re unlikely to go looking for them. Even if you’re a historian. And even if you are a historian and intrigued by that prospect, in order to find them you have to be able to read the French and Spanish documents that reveal the city’s history.

The majority of American Revolution historians have not found themselves on this path. And although I can and do read French and Spanish, I have to confess that I did not go looking for Carrière. I stumbled over him. In the course of a quarter of a century in New Orleans archives spent chasing down the histories of colonial nuns and free people of color, I kept coming across his name. He flitted in and out of the archives like a moth, indistinct and elusive, but persistent. About ten years ago, I realized that I had enough archival fragments to trace him from his birth in slavery in the 1740s to his death in 1804. It’s rare to be able to do that, since the records that fill America’s archives were produced by Europeans and their descendants who were eager to tell their stories but mentioned Africans and African-descended people only in passing, if at all. That was especially true of those born into slavery, like Carrière.

Yet there he was in the archives, again and again. The priests of St. Louis Cathedral recorded him as the godfather and namesake of many enslaved and free infants and adults who shared his African ancestry. Those same priests wrote him into the historical record as an honored witness at the marriages of men who served under him in Louisiana’s free black militia. New Orleans notaries included him in the inventories of those who claimed him as a slave, recorded his sale to new owners and, finally, inscribed his name on the document that verified his purchase of himself, an act that made him legally free. Another priest documented his marriage, and yet another his burial. A census revealed that he was a barrel maker, and an act of sale revealed that he owned a home and a workshop in New Orleans. Other acts of sale chronicle his purchase of other human beings to labor for him, a sobering, confusing discovery. Spanish governors listed him on the rolls of the free black militia and twice nominated him for medals and monetary rewards for his valor in battles of the American Revolution.

As the bits and pieces from the archives piled up and I worked to make sense of them, I realized that Carrière epitomized many of the things that made America, America. He pulled himself up from nothing. He was a devoted husband and father who worked hard so that he could leave enough to his children to provide them with the security his own father, captured in Africa and enslaved in Louisiana, could not give to him. He fought bravely in the war that granted America independence and promised its people freedom. And, like so many economically successful American men of his time, he bought the bodies of others to serve him. One of the great ironies embodied by America’s founders was their invocation of liberty even as they held others in bondage. In this, sadly, Carrière was no different from Thomas Jefferson.

In other ways, Carrière could not have been more different. His father came to New Orleans in the hold of a slave ship as a small, terrified child taken captive in the chaos that followed the fall of the African kingdom of Ouidah. The African-born commander of the Louisiana free black militia who taught Noel the arts of war initiated him into the great military tradition of the ceddo warriors of Senegambia. The most important people in Noel Carrière’s life, the people who taught him how to be a man, a husband, a father and a soldier, were Africans. He was an American Revolutionary War hero, but he joined that fight as much as a son of Africa as a son of America.

Noel Carrière was a global American founder, a figure who embodies the intersection of New Orleans with the U.S. and the wider world. He was worth looking for.