Beaucoup New Orleans (ePub)

One of the most exciting cities in the world, New Orleans, LA, is well known for its cuisine, music, architecture, landscape, and the warmth and hospitality of its people. This collection offers an exploration of Black cultural life in New Orleans spanning various generations and from a uniquely Africana perspective.

In Beaucoup New Orleans, attorney Garrick Farria serves up several short stories, essays, poems, vignettes, biographical sketches, and plays covering topics as vast and varied as treatments of life in Central and Southwestern Africa (ancestral regions of early African inhabitants of Southeastern Lousiana), to historical New Orleans area maroon societies and enslaved rebellions, turn of the 20th-century life in New Orleans, to post-Katrina Union Organizing, to partying with the Mardi Gras Indians, and everything in between. Farria examines firsthand documents and other historical records and uses that data to weave fantastic tales about some of the most important populations in the City, its Black residents.

Garrick A. Farria, Esq. was born at Sara Mayo Hospital in Uptown New Orleans to a family with generational ties to the City. Upon graduating from The Ohio State University with an M.A. in African and African-American Studies in 1998 he returned to New Orleans to become an Admissions Counselor at the University of New Orleans, with primary responsibility for recruiting students from the New Orleans Public School System (NOPS).

In 2000, Farria joined the Greater New Orleans Hotel, Hospitality, and Restaurant Organizing Council (HOTROC) as the Research and Political Director. This campaign was powered by the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union, the former Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, and the Operating Engineers Local Union. The project had aims of organizing 100,000 hospitality workers across Southeast Louisiana.

Farria left the City in 2002 to pursue other Union opportunities, but returned in 2005 as the Louisiana District manager for the newly merged union, UNITE HERE, and represented various union members who worked at National Linen, Kenneth Gordon, Loews Hotel Properties, the Fairmount Hotel, the Superdome, and at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center through Aramark Convention Services, and workers at the Louis Armstrong International Airport through Delaware North companies and LSG/Sky Chef.

Farria and eighteen of his family members were stuck in New Orleans during the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and spent over twenty-seven hours on an elevated stretch of the I-610 interstate.