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J James Catano SScreenwriter, Filmmaker, and Professor of English ““American Dream/American Tragedy: Croatian Fishing Families in Southeast Louisiana” F “I’ll make it. I think it’s going to get better. ‘Cause it can’t get any worse.” Captain Pete Vujnovich aboard the Miss Eva, 2009
These words were to appear late in the documentary “After the Aftermath,” a film portraying the destruction that storms, coastal erosion and declining markets have unleashed on Louisiana’s little-known Croatian fishing community. It is a story that reads like a well-wrought version of the American Dream. Coming to Louisiana in the early 1900s, Croatian immigrants acquired the skills and materials needed to do what few others cared to do: settle in fishing camps deep in the marshes in order to fish and farm oysters. Slowly other family members were brought over, new families were begun, and the small community grew to be self-sufficient and proud of its unique heritage and way of life. As Captain Vujnovich declared, times were tough. But the community had weathered storms before. Things would get better. On April 20, 2010, things instead got much worse. The explosion and collapse of BP’s Deepwater Horizon produced yet the latest threat to the Croatian community’s heritage and its industry. Interviews taped that June were heart-wrenching: “We have to have more hope than most, because we have everything to lose;” “Just fix it;” “I can’t take much more of this—at least that’s what my doctor says.” Six months later, in January 2011, I have just returned from taping another event: the remodeling of a building in lower Plaquemines donated