Back-Support Belt
Back-Support Belt
Usage conditions apply
- Description
- Day laborers found plenty of work in New Orleans in the weeks and months following Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Mammoth quantities of trash removal from devastated homes and businesses, clean-up, and reconstruction offered the promise of gainful employment to anyone willing and able to undertake heavy labor. The possession of technical skills was less important than pure muscle power and persistence.
- Mexican immigrant Francisco Zu&ntild;eiga, wearing this heavy, tooled leather back-support belt, was waiting in a downtown gas station in December 2005 for drive-up labor needs when he was approached instead by a Smithsonian team looking for something to acknowledge this aspect of the human response to Katrina. Much has been made of the outpouring of volunteerism after the hurricane, but another form of service was the individual with an aching back willing to labor under very adverse conditions for the hope of a small wage.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Object Name
- Belt
- Associated Date
- 2005
- user
- Zuniga, Francisco
- referenced
- United States: Louisiana
- United States: Louisiana, New Orleans
- Physical Description
- leather (overall material)
- Measurements
- overall: 4 in x 1 in x 11 in; 10.16 cm x 2.54 cm x 27.94 cm
- ID Number
- 2006.0018.01
- catalog number
- 2006.0018.01
- accession number
- 2006.0018
- Credit Line
- Gift of David Shayt
- Hurricane Katrina
- See more items in
- Work and Industry: Mechanical and Civil Engineering
- Health & Medicine
- Clothing & Accessories
- Cultures & Communities
- Work
- Art
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
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