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A Fishing Town Survives
| Article
# : |
17513 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1990 |
3,110 Words |
| Author
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E. Paul Durrenberger
E. Paul Durrenberger is professor of anthropology at Penn
State University. |
Biloxi is a fishing town. When large shrimp boats come into or out of Back Bay to the north, traffic waits at the drawbridge that breaks the long, low causeway across the bay at the east end of Biloxi's peninsula. Between Biloxi and the barrier Islands, offshore strips of sand rearranged by every hurricane and tide, is the Mississippi Sound, which runs from the mouth of the Mississippi River in Louisiana to Mobile Bay in Alabama.
The first building to the north of Highway 90 after the bridge is the Seafood Industry Museum, whose exhibits illustrate the importance of fishing and seafood processing in Biloxi. Across the highway are the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory and Marine Education Center. Adjacent to it are docked pleasure crafts, and next to them is a municipal dock for shrimp boats. The rest of Front Beach is lined with shrimp processing plants, unloading wharfs, and boat-docking facilities, with their diesel tanks and ice-making machines.
Next to the museum on the north side of the highway is St. Michael's Catholic Church, its top scalloped to suggest a seashell, its stained-glass windows portraying Biblical fishers of men. Toward Back Bay, many of the signs are in Vietnamese, to accommodate the elderly Southeast Asian men and women seen on the streets clad in their native black garb and conical hats. The Slavonian Hall and Fleur de Lis Society Hall betray the Eastern European and Cajun origins of earlier inhabitants of Point Cadet, the eastern end of the peninsula. At the end of a deadend street some long ramshackle one-room-wide plank houses marked "Keep Out" are reminders of the labor camps that shrimp and oyster processors established for the Eastern European seasonal workers they imported from the eastern United States in earlier days. Many of Biloxi's current residents are descendants of these workers or of the fishermen who came from Europe to the booming fishing port in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Shrimp processing plants line the Back Bay, where large Gulf-going shrimp boats unload their catches. Between the Back Bay and the Front Beach processing and unloading areas are net-making shops, marine hardware stores, welding shops, machine shops, grocery stores, low-income apartment complexes, boat yards, freezing plants, schools, and single-family dwellings. There is a Vietnamese Baptist Church, a Vietnamese Buddhist Association, and a Vietnamese Church of God, although the majority of Vietnamese are parishioners of St. Michael's.
Downtown, a modern library displays the
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