New Iberia’s West End neighborhood is one of the city’s most impoverished communities. Demarked by South Hopkins Street west of downtown, the West End is where Phanat Xanamane’s family first landed when they came to New Iberia from Laos in 1981, as part of a wave of post-Vietnam War resettlement to New Orleans and rural areas of southwest Louisiana.
They moved into a trailer in the Westend mobile home park, a community that still stands directly across the street from the brick house and market that Xanamane’s parents would later purchase and run for 20 years.
That house, one of the oldest still standing on South Hopkins, is where Phanat Xanamane lives and works today — creating a community-minded business that reflects the legacy that his parents left for the property.
“When the Asia Market was under my family’s ownership, this whole property was a social and cultural hub for the community in so many ways,” he said, gesturing to the grassy expanses that regularly hosted gatherings among the family’s friends and customers.
“People would come after getting their paychecks and hang out, buy beers and a bunch of snacks. We had volleyball courts and ping pong tables, and there were parties happening, and people would just come,” said Xanamane.
Phanat Xanamane with Iberia Market Garden explains the urban garden at Iberia Market Garden on Monday, August 25, 2025 in New Iberia, La..
STAFF PHOTO BY BRAD KEMP
Today he runs Iberia Market Garden at his family’s home place, and has transformed the property into a series of cozy garden rooms and open green spaces, with an urban farm operation growing vegetables for restaurants, volunteers who work in exchange for free veggies, and summer CSA participants who receive weekly boxes full of cucumbers, squash, eggplant and other treats from the harvest.
Iberia Market Garden also hosts visitors via Airbnb and Hipcamp. Xanamane is experimenting with an eco-friendly glamping space, where people can stay off-grid among his flower gardens in a charming space that runs, in part, off a bio toilet system that converts waste into methane gas.
After growing up in New Iberia, Xanamane moved back to Louisiana 15 years ago after stints at Columbia University, where he studied urban design, and in Bangkok, Thailand. He is also a trained architect who came back home not sure what he was going to do next, but knowing that he wanted to use his skills to improve his community.
“I felt my meaning, my purpose, was pulling me back here. I decided to go back to Louisiana and commit myself to 10 years of being a sort of activist artist, and when I moved back to my family home, it was just all grass.”
He said, “when I was growing up, my grandparents lived next door, so it was sort of like a compound, and they all worked. They gardened a lot, and grew the vegetables we sold at the market, and I just grew up around that environment. I wanted it to be a lush garden again. So I put a shovel in the ground, and became obsessed.”
Phanat Xanamane with Iberia Market Garden explains the urban garden at Iberia Market Garden on Monday, August 25, 2025 in New Iberia, La..
STAFF PHOTO BY BRAD KEMP
Xanamane is working to transform more than just the space at 1505 S. Hopkins St. Since blowing past his 10-year deadline, he has been active in creating change in the broader neighborhood, such as by partnering with Corey Saft with Louisiana Housing Lab to build four new affordable homes in the West End. In his spare time, he uses his design skills to draft ideas like a new public bus system for New Iberia he called NIMBL — New Iberia Mass Bus/Bike Lanes.
As a Louisiana Lao immigrant, Xanamane also stays busing working as a kind of “cultural attaché,” promoting the preservation of Lao culture in south Louisiana. This summer his short film on Lao foodways, “Bayou, Buddha, and Padaek,” aired on the Library of Congress YouTube channel. He also helps with the Lao New Year Festival, held annually over Easter weekend at Lanexang Village and Wat Thammarattanaram in Broussard.
“In the next phase I want to continue creating this space and contributing to the city,” said Xanamane. “It’s been such a positive presence in a part of the city that has such a negative stigma attached to it. When kids are passing by on the school bus and look out and see the house and gardens, it’s like an escape. It can mentally shape how they see their lives.”
Iberia Market Garden is open for volunteer hours on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, from 6:30 to 8:30 a.m. in the summer and 7 to 9 a.m. when it cools down. Volunteers receive two pound of free vegetables for each hour they put in. Iberia Market Garden also offers 4- and 8-week seasonal vegetable box subscriptions, which cost $150 for the summer season.
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