Seadrift

TUE OCT 22 | 6:30PM | BLUE ORLEANS THEATER (THE ADVOCATE)
WED OCT 23 | 3:45PM | THE RANCH THEATER AT CAC

In April of 1979, a violent altercation over crabbing and shrimping rights in the tiny Texas village of Seadrift ended in the shooting death of Billy Joe Aplin. The shooter was Sau Van Nguyen, one man in the wave of Vietnamese citizens who immigrated to the US in the late ‘70s, and the shooting was a flashpoint in the so-called “crab war” between Vietnamese newcomers and local white fishermen. The ensuing months saw a high-profile criminal trial, a visit from the KKK, open racial acrimony, and the shadow of state and federal intervention. From forty years on, Seadrift surveys a small-town tragedy, one whose lessons, in our era of resurgent nativism, seem incompletely learned. -JK