PAIN FROM IOTA
Central America pounded
Hurricane Iota battered Nicaragua with screeching winds and pounding surf Tuesday, chasing tens of thousands of people from their homes along the same stretch of the Caribbean coast that was devastated by an equally powerful hurricane just two weeks ago.
The extent of the damage was unclear because much of the affected region was without electricity and phone and internet service, and strong winds hampered radio transmissions.
Preliminary reports from the coast included toppled trees and electric poles and roofs stripped from homes and businesses, said Guillermo González, director of Nicaragua’s emergency management agency. More than 40,000 people were in shelters.
Later, Nicaragua Vice President and first lady Rosario Murillo said that a brother and sister, ages 11 and 8, had drowned in the community of La Pinuela trying to cross the swollen Solera River. There were reports of others missing in the same area.
A day earlier, Iota intensified into a Category 5 storm, but it weakened as it neared the coast and made landfall with maximum sustained winds of 155 mph.
The system came ashore as a Category 4 hurricane about 30 miles south of the Nicaraguan city of Puerto Cabezas, also known as Bilwi. That was just 15 miles south of where Hurricane Eta made landfall Nov. 3, also as a Category 4 storm.
By Tuesday afternoon, Iota had diminished to a tropical storm and was moving inland over northern Nicaragua. It had maximum sustained winds of 60 mph and was spinning westward at 12 mph. The storm was forecast to cross into southern Honduras late Tuesday.
Aid agencies struggled to reach their local contacts, and the government said in a statement that at least 35 towns in the east and north had no phone service. Nicaragua’s telecommunications ministry said phone and broadband provider Columbus Networks was offline because of flooding in Bilwi.
Along Honduras’ remote eastern coast Tuesday, people continued evacuating from damaged and flooding homes.
Mirna Wood, vice president of the Miskito ethnic group in Honduras’ far east Gracias a Dios region, was in Tegucigalpa collecting donations for her community ravaged by Eta when Iota hit.
Some 40,000 people in the area had moved to shelters from low-lying land beside rivers and the sea, but other people remained stranded near the border
with Nicaragua. Some were rescued by Nicaraguan authorities, she said.
In her last communication with the mayor of the community of Villeda Morales late Monday, he told her Iota was hitting them hard and the community had not completely evacuated.
“We are facing an incredible emergency,” Wood said. “There is no food. There is no water.”
In the community of Brus Laguna, some 500 people were in a shelter there and another 900 were being moved elsewhere, Mayor Teonela Paisano Wood said.
“We’re in danger if it keeps raining,” Paisano Wood said.
In mountainous Tegucigalpa, residents of low-lying, flood-prone areas were being evacuated in anticipation of Iota’s rains, as were residents of hillside neighborhoods vulnerable to landslides.
Panama reported that one person was killed and another missing in its western indigenous autonomous Ngabe Bugle area near the border with
Costa Rica.
As the storm moved westward, flooding became a top concern. The Tola River topped its banks, and western Nicaragua, along the Pacific coast, was forecast to receive the most rain. Nicaragua’s meteorology director, Marcio Baca, said areas where the soil was already saturated would receive 6 to 7 inches of additional rain.
Eta triggered flash floods and mudslides in parts of Central America and Mexico and killed more than 130 people. “This hurricane is definitely worse” than Eta, Jason Bermúdez, a university student from Bilwi, said as high winds preceded Iota’s arrival. Many houses lost roofs, fences and fruit trees.
“We will never forget this year,” Bermúdez said.
Even before Iota hit Nicaragua, it scraped over the tiny Colombian island of Providencia, more than
155 miles off Nicaragua’s coast. Colombian President
Ivan Duque said one person was killed and 98% of the island’s infrastructure was “affected.”
Providencia is inhabited almost exclusively by the descendants of African slaves and British colonizers, who speak an English version of Creole as their native language. The island has no direct flights to the continent, but it has become an increasingly popular tourist destination thanks to its quiet beaches and rich marine life. On Tuesday, Colombian officials said they were sending a ship with 15 tons of aid to the island.
In the aftermath of Eta, tens of thousands of Hondurans were homeless. The country reported 74 deaths and nearly 57,000 people in shelters, mostly in the north.
Iota is the record 30th named storm of this year’s historically busy Atlantic hurricane season. It’s also the ninth storm to rapidly intensify this season, a dangerous phenomenon that is happening more often. Such activity has focused attention on climate change, which scientists say causes wetter, stronger and more destructive storms.
For those of us who strive for a more inclusive United States, the election of Kamala Harris to the post of vice president is cause for celebration. In too many ways, America still struggles to acknowledge the truth that identity is not cleanly divided into Black and White. Harris’s family story illustrates our society’s continuing reluctance to perceive the subtleties within, between and apart from these categories.
Growing up in 1960s California, Kamala Harris must have known that there were few ways that our culture could understand her complex heritage — much less believe that she “belonged.”
Her father, arriving from Jamaica in 1961, did not share the history of many African-Americans, but few U.S. residents in those days would have understood the distinction or allowed him to fit in by any other way.
When Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, arrived in 1958, census figures show that only 13,000 Indians lived in the country; fitting in would have been even less of an option for her.
In Harris’s autobiography, “The Truths We Hold,” she writes that her mother, her primary parent, knew how mainstream America would view her children. Even while maintaining ties with her Indian origins, she encouraged her two daughters to embrace that side of themselves that America found familiar — to present themselves in public life as Black.
Kamala Harris would not be the first child of immigrants to present herself as the person that America expected her to be, and thereby make a home for herself. Her childhood was saturated with influences from India and Jamaica followed by high school in French-speaking Canada, but to run for political office in these United States, especially in her early race for San Francisco district attorney, she had to portray a narrowed perspective. She had to take the Jamaican side of herself and make it African-American. Like so many children of South Asian immigrants back then, she had to take her Indian side and privately tuck it away.
Both Harris and her mother were responding to the experience of other South Asians whom California had cast aside generations ago, and whose journey explains why so few South Asians lived in America when Shyamala Gopalan arrived.
Many people know about how the civil rights movement permeated Berkeley, Calif., in the 1960s. That was the setting in which Harris’s parents first met. Few know of the South Asians who congregated there in 1910s, similarly seeking equality under British colonial rule and organizing as the Ghadar Party.
Deeply influenced by that part of
American-ness that extols equality among races and classes, they lobbied the U.S. government, invoked Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, and published an international newspaper that advocated for Indian independence.
They raised money for their cause among the thousands of South Asians working in American lumber mills, railroads and farmlands, or living in Harlem or Detroit, or studying at universities around the country.
Together these immigrants formed a small but thriving population of South Asian immigrants. They would have grown and further established themselves, except for the state Alien Land Laws that forced all Asians to abandon their farms and find other livelihoods.
A few years afterward, Congress enacted national laws further restricting Asian immigration. By 1923, the Supreme Court rescinded naturalized citizenship for Asians, ruling that only “free white persons” and “aliens of African nativity ” or “persons of African descent” were allowed to naturalize. Mainstream America could not see beyond the Black/White binary.
For 40 years, supporters of these laws severely curtailed immigration from Asia and destroyed the influence of Asian-American-ness, which had existed since significant numbers of Chinese had arrived in the 1840s. No wonder much of mainstream America still believes that Asians are recent arrivals on these shores. The anti-immigrant fervor of that era changed the story of “who is American” by making Asians seem, and feel, like newcomers, even to this day.
The door to America wouldn’t truly open again for South Asians until the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. Shyamala Gopalan came to California seven years before this second wave of South Asian arrivals. Which is to say young Kamala was born into a country in which the legacy of earlier Asian immigration had largely been erased, which viewed India as foreign and unfamiliar.
To be sure, the U.S. is a bit different now. We are more conscious of the reality of our mixed roots, though we too often fail to fully recognize them. Indeed, contrary to assertions by those who question her American-ness, with her Indian Hindu mother, her Jamaican father, and her white Jewish husband, Harris may be the most American of us all.