Creole Culture: Identity and Race in the Bayou Country
Kreol Magazine
October-December 2013, Issue 7
pages 42-45
Christophe Landry
Louisiana is what many have come to refer to as the northern-most point of Latin America, where créolité, a Latin-based people, culture and consciousness, emerged early in the 1700s. From its earliest stages, the international melting pot of cultures that came to simmer along Louisiana’s bayous linked Louisiana Creoles with three continents in a global market economy including the Indian Ocean.
When the French crown ceded Louisiana to the Company of the Indies in 1717, Nantes (France), Goree (Senegal), Port-Louis (Mauritius), Saint-Denis (La Reunion) and New Orleans, became intimately related. For instance, between 1721 and 1745, 3,818 slaves were transported from Senegambia to Louisiana with roughly equal numbers destined for the Mascareigne Islands. In addition, Bretons, Picards and Normands came to represent the largest Francophone elements in early French Louisiana and in the French Indian Ocean islands. Not surprisingly, in Louisiana and in the Mascareignes, virtually the same Creole language developed, the first lengthy written examples of which date back to 1745 in Mauritius and 1748 in Louisiana.
As early as 1710, native-born Louisianians of Latin culture self-identified as Créole. Slave and free, tan, brown, yellow and fair have used Creole to differentiate themselves from Anglophones in North America. Where Spanish, Creole, and French languages were spoken and Catholicism practiced in Colonial Louisiana, people were sure to define themselves as Creole. This distinction between Américain and Créole became more pronounced after 1812 when Louisiana officially became an American state, and continued after the Civil War when Anglophone America’s binary racial system came to play a more immediate role in the socioeconomic destiny of Louisianians…
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