Dixiecratic Dreaming and Disavowal in Plaquemines Parish: Leander H. Perez Memorial Park

ABSTRACT

This paper situates a park commemorating Plaquemines Parish segregationist “Judge” Leander Perez, whose political career spanned from 1919 until his death in 1969, in the changing landscape of post-Civil Rights era white supremacist ambitions. Opened by the parish in 1979, officially closed in 1984, and re-established by residents of a nearby majority-white neighborhood under another name in 2020, the site’s uses reflect shifting iterations of white spatial logics oriented toward maintaining power through racialized exclusion (Lipsitz 2007). As a ruin, Leander H. Perez Memorial Park’s trajectory contrasts those of nearby plantation manors that were similarly dedicated as heritage sites in the late 1970s. Park brochures, archival newspaper articles, and ethnographic interviews illuminate the ways in which the park’s representations of Perez made continuities of the Antebellum plantation racial order too legible for comfort for those who benefited from the political philosophy he represented. I elaborate “commemorative concealment” as a way of recognizing an assortment of practices through which dominant groups in a racial hegemony maintain power by hiding continuities of past exclusions in the heritage landscape.

KEYWORDS:

• Political ecology
• Louisiana
• racial capitalism
• ruins

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the editors of Capitalism Nature Socialism and the anonymous peer reviewers for their generous and encouraging feedback. Thanks also to Dylan Harris, Josh Mullenite, and the participants in the two panels that grew into this special issue.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, School of Liberal Arts, Tulane University.