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Most New Orleans natives spice their red beans and rice with cayenne pepper and dried thyme, but the Alexis Family uses what they like to call their special ingredient — mutant pepper. The kick in theirs comes from a chili of the homeland they left two generations ago — Honduras.

“I have friends who come down all the time, and they always talk about my mother’s cooking,” said Franz McField. “She does red beans and rice, which is native New Orleans foods, but when she adds her mutant pepper and little spices, it just kicks it up to another level.”

The Alexis family is a small part of the sizable Honduran community in New Orleans.

New Orleans has the third largest concentration of Hondurans in the U.S., dating back to the 1950s, when they began flooding into the Big Easy after joblessness swept their country due to the decline of the fruit industry. New Orleans was a natural migration point for immigrants from Central America, only 1,000 miles away. When Hurricane Mitch hit Honduras in 1998, the community in New Orleans grew even larger with people fleeing the storm. When Hurricane Katrina pummeled New Orleans in 2005, most of the Honduran community decided to rebuild instead of fleeing to their homeland.

Hurricane Katrina hit Evelyn Alexis especially hard, killing both of her brothers and her husband of 40 years. She fled to Texas with her son and contemplated staying there to avoid her gloomy new reality.

“I had a hard time after coming back from Katrina,” she said. “Your life has been shattered, everything and all the people that you know. My life has changed forever. My husband and I —that’s gone. Gone. But everything that I had was in New Orleans, and we needed to work our way to get back home.”

Evelyn Alexis, like many other Hondurans who immigrated to New Orleans, made the city her home. Even after Katrina, a majority of New Orleans’ Hondurans returned to rebuild and start over.

Dawn Williams, Alexis’ niece, was born in Honduras and moved to New Orleans at the age of 6. Although she is bilingual, her accent is inconspicuous unless she is in a room filled with her older relatives. She thinks of America as her home and says although she enjoys visiting Honduras, as she did a few years ago, she feels like a tourist there.

“We are very Americanized,” she said. “We were all down there on a trip a few years ago, and for us it was so amazing. We felt like tourists because we didn’t know a lot of the people there.”

Many Honduran-Americans feel the same; a significant number of them have been in New Orleans for over 80 years, and have become assimilated in American culture.

According to the Census Bureau’s 2008 American Community Survey, more than 4,500 Central Americans make New Orleans their home. There are no statistics available specifically for the Honduran population in New Orleans, but Ted Heken, chairman of the Black and Latin Studies Department at Baruch College who received a doctorate in Latin American Studies at Tulane University, estimates that most Central Americans in New Orleans have roots in Honduras.

New Orleans celebrates its Honduran community by supporting a Honduran Independence Day parade each year. New Orleans culture has also rubbed off on Honduras. Over the years that parade has a taken a decidedly New Orleans style, with participants dressed in Mardi Gras costumes and dancing to music with zydeco sounds.

“It’s almost like they transformed the culture from there and brought it here and continued it as well,” said McField, Williams’ cousin.

Angel, an illegal immigrant from Honduras, came to New Orleans specifically because of its ties to his homeland. His last name is being withheld because of his immigration status. He speaks very little English, but is determined to fulfill his dream of making enough money to bring his family to live with him in the U.S.

He moved from Honduras to New Orleans in October 2005 in search of work after Katrina. He planned to go back to Honduras, but never went back.

“I wanted to make money and send it back to my family,” he said, mainly in Spanish. “I was not going to stay here, but now I am a leader at my church and so many youth look up to me.”

One reason the community in New Orleans is unique is because there are few Honduran communities. Most of them are dispersed throughout the city.

“That group is mostly a suburbanized group and roughly middle class,” said Heken. “There is no defined Honduran neighborhood. They have been in New Orleans for such a long time and have assimilated within the culture and no longer need that ethnic enclave.”

Franz McField has his own opinions about why Honduran communities never established themselves as an enclosed community in New Orleans, while other Latino groups have very specific areas where they reside.

“I think you often times get a lot of immigrants together, living in a community together,” he said. “I think they get lost to a certain degree into their difference and separation from the general population. “I think these guys (Hondurans) saw what was out there and they weren’t going to get stuck together all the time and not really exposing themselves to the things that were out there.”

Although members of the Honduran community do not live in proximity to each other, they still maintain their cultural ties. Floyd McField, who is Williams’s uncle, and Lenna McField’s husband, watch soccer games together every Sunday afternoon in a nearby park, where many of the participants are Honduran. Alexis attends church every Sunday, where the members come from several Latino countries, including Honduras.

“Hondurans are united with other Latinos by language and a shared sense of Hispanic ethnicity,” said Richard Campanella, lead professor of geography at Tulane University.

Honduran-American families also put a strong emphasis on education.

“In our family it’s not if you are going to college, it’s where you are going to college,” said Williams, who has embraced that idea. Everyone in her family, with the exception of her parents, has graduated from college. Williams herself has three masters degrees and a doctorate.

Lenna McField, Williams’s aunt, migrated to the U.S. because of her husband’s job as a merchant seaman, but also because of the educational opportunities in America.

“They could have got a good education in Honduras, but everything just would have been in Spanish,” she said. “America was the best place for the children.”

Campanella said Hondurans are still coming to New Orleans because there is a strong local job market, even during a recession. He also said the presence of a Honduran community here and the city’s similarities to Honduras also make the place attractive. The humid, tropical climate and the greenery are just some of the similarities between the two.

“Here in New Orleans it just reminds us so much of home,” Lenna McField said.

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