Canal street, New Orleans,
postal card printed c. 1940
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/
leer en español
ler em português
A little over three months ago I moved to New Orleans, and though it isn’t surrounded by the sea, I live on an island. Not one of oceans, but of history, water, spirit, and soul.
Historically, the city has always moved to its own rhythm: born French, shaped by Spain, never British, and joined to the United States almost reluctantly after the Louisiana Purchase. Refugees from Saint-Domingue —free people of color, colonists, and the enslaved— brought languages, rhythms, and flavors that blended with the Creole world, creating an identity both unique and suspended, like land set apart from the continent.
Topographically, New Orleans is held by water: Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi curving around it like a crescent moon. That liquid border makes the city feel detached from the rest of the country.
Geographically, it is the northern threshold of the Caribbean. For centuries, its port connected with Havana, Port-au-Prince, Veracruz, and Central America; sugar, coffee, rum, stories, and dreams traveled back and forth until they seeped into the city’s very marrow. In many ways, New Orleans is the northernmost Caribbean island.
Politically, it is also an island: vibrant, diverse, progressive, floating in a conservative sea.
Climatically, it breathes the tropics. Storms fall like a curtain and minutes later a newborn sun appears. Heat embraces, humidity clings; even the weather moves to its own music.
And its people… they truly have island souls. They walk with calm, smile with warmth, and live trusting that tomorrow will sort itself out. Let the good times roll isn’t a slogan—it’s a tide pushing life forward. Many have never lived elsewhere, rooted like mangroves in brackish soil.
For all these reasons, New Orleans needs no ocean to be an island. It already is—shaped by history, softened by water, lifted by culture, and animated by its people.
And in these few months, I feel this island has begun to welcome me, as if I had always been meant to arrive here.
I love this island.
