"Be A New Orleanian, Wherever You Are" started as a sketch on a sticker. Blake Haney, who founded Dirty Coast, drew it at the Mello Joy coffeehouse in Lafayette during the Katrina evacuation, when nobody from New Orleans knew how long they'd be gone. It became one of our best-known designs, and for a lot of displaced New Orleanians, a way to find each other.
We get asked about this one a lot behind the counter on Magazine Street and Chartres Street. Mostly people want to know if they're allowed to wear it. Short answer: yes. Longer answer below, starting with where it came from.
Where Dirty Coast Was Before the Storm
Dirty Coast started as a reaction to the T-shirts on Bourbon Street. If you've walked down Bourbon, you know the ones. Crude jokes in big letters, nothing that had anything to do with the city people actually lived in. The idea was simple: make shirts about New Orleans that New Orleanians would wear.
Then the levees failed.
The Evacuation
When Katrina hit on August 29, 2005, and the floodwalls gave way, about 80% of the city went under water, as Axios recounted for the twentieth anniversary. People scattered. Baton Rouge, Houston, Atlanta, Dallas and plenty of smaller towns took in New Orleanians by the tens of thousands. The city that had 484,674 residents in 2000, according to The Data Center, had less than half that by mid-2006, by one Census estimate cited on Wikipedia's Katrina displacement page.
Lafayette, about two hours west, was one of the places people landed. That's where Blake was. And at Mello Joy, a coffeehouse, he sketched the phrase on a sticker.
What the Phrase Was For
Read it again with 2005 in mind. "Be A New Orleanian, Wherever You Are."
At that moment, "wherever you are" meant a cousin's couch in Houston or a shelter cot. It meant a hotel room you were paying for with money you didn't have, or a new school for your kids in a town you'd never heard of. Nobody knew if there would be a city to go back to, or what it would look like.
The phrase didn't promise anything about that. It said something smaller and harder to take away. You are still from here. You can carry it with you. Cook the food. Keep the calendar. Say "where y'at" to the stranger in line who sounds like home.
How It Became a Signal
A sticker on a bumper. A shirt in an airport. Spotted in a city full of strangers, the phrase was a way for New Orleanians to recognize each other without saying a word. It said: I'm from there too.
That's what a good design does when it works. It doesn't explain. It just lets the right people know. The people who weren't from New Orleans saw a slogan. The people who were saw somebody they could talk to.
Over the years the shirt has traveled a long way. The product page thanks Jimmy Fallon and Sienna Miller, among others, for wearing it. We appreciate every one of them, because the whole idea was to keep New Orleans on people's minds.
What It Means Now
Twenty years later, "wherever you are" covers a lot of ground.
It's the folks who left after the storm and built lives in Texas and Georgia and never moved back. It's their kids, who grew up somewhere else but know what a second line is. It's the people who moved away for work and still order Camellia beans online. And it's the people who were never from here at all, the ones Blake calls Nola Converts, who visited once and fell for the city hard enough that it became part of them.
Being a New Orleanian has never really been about a birth certificate. It's about how you treat people and whether you stop to listen when there's music playing on the corner. You can do all of that in Minneapolis. It's just a little colder.
How to Be a New Orleanian Wherever You Are
There's no checklist, but if you're far from home and wondering where to start, here are some ideas:
- Cook red beans on Monday. If your store doesn't carry Camellia, we've got a guide for that.
- Throw a king cake party after Twelfth Night, and make whoever gets the baby buy the next one.
- Listen to WWOZ online.
- Find the other New Orleanians in your town. There are more than you think, especially during football season.
- Tip the musicians, wherever the musicians are.
And if you want to wear it, the Be A New Orleanian. Wherever You Are. shirt is still in the shop, along with our whole For the Ex-Pats collection. If you're buying for someone who left, our guide to gifts for someone who misses New Orleans has more ideas. Pair the shirt with an I Like New Orleans Better tee for the friend who brings it up at every dinner party.
Be A New Orleanian Wherever You Are: FAQ
Who came up with "Be A New Orleanian, Wherever You Are"?
Dirty Coast founder Blake Haney. He sketched the phrase on a sticker at the Mello Joy coffeehouse in Lafayette, Louisiana, during the evacuation after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
What does "Be A New Orleanian, Wherever You Are" mean?
It means you can carry New Orleans with you, wherever life takes you. It was created for people displaced by Katrina and has since been adopted by anyone who loves the city from far away.
Can I wear it if I'm not from New Orleans?
Yes. Being a New Orleanian is a state of mind as much as a hometown. If the city is part of you, the shirt is for you.
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