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Other residents are more sympathetic. One motel owner arranged mooring space in a small canal she owns, and local volunteers helped move the Vietnamese boats there. But after an explosion, parish officials put pressure on her to have them evicted. As in most things, what really matters is how Chalin Perez feels. Father Michael Haddad, who runs a group that coordinates the resettlement of Vietnamese, says, "Perez is quick to enforce the law but slow to be accommodating."
Van Tran, head of the Vietnamese Fishing Association, is preparing to move his people to nearby Terrebonne Parish, where he hopes officials will be more hospitable. Says Perez: "They don't understand our laws. They fish out of season. There are reports they catch seagulls, pluck them alive, and when they decide to eat them, wring their necks. Dogs — that's one of their favorite foods too. I have a friend who had a setter, and one day he came home and saw the hide sitting right out front. That's their business if they eat dogs, but they shouldn't eat our dogs." As in the case of water for Ironton, Perez refuses to apply for federal grants to help the Vietnamese, because he fears federal controls.
It's a recent Wednesday in Plaquemines. Perez has delayed a Commission Council meeting because he had to appear in a New Orleans court to justify the disqualification of an anti-Perez man from a school-board race. Now a parish helicopter puts him down on the lawn of the old brick courthouse in Point á la Hache. As he strides to his seat on the council dais, under a mounted blue marlin, a commissioner shows him a proposed zoning change. "That's not the way we're going to do it," Perez replies, pulling out a pen. "What they have to do is buy this piece here and start subdividing like this." During the meeting, he reads out his resolutions, adding, almost as an afterthought, "Moved by Mr. Petrovich, seconded by Mr. Kirby and adopted unanimously."