Creole

The term Creole has assumed several meanings and conjured as many images. Meaning “home-grown,” the Latin word originally referred to any person of French or Spanish descent born in the colonies of the Caribbean Basin. The Acadian exiles who settled in southern Louisiana represent the sole exception; they were called Cajuns. Thus, the original usage of Creole not only accounted for millions of inhabitants in the West Indies, the Gulf Coast, Mexico, and Central America, but also encompassed numerous ethnic combinations of Europeans, Africans, and Indians. Even in Louisiana, where the term has persisted to the present, scholars and inhabitants have disagreed on the exact meaning. At different times Creole has been applied to the white aristocracy, to residents of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, or to all of southern Louisiana’s populace.

According to the inclusive definition, colonial Creoles of Louisiana represented a heterogeneous cultural and racial milieu. France hoped to establish Louisiana as a productive, slave-based, commercial colony—a larger version of Haiti. Toward this goal French officials offered attractive land grants to encourage planters to bring slaves into Louisiana, and they garrisoned their American empire with soldiers and criminals. French settlement of Louisiana, then, represented a multiclass and multiracial endeavor. The French slave societies of Alrica and the West Indies directly influenced the culture of this new settlement. In Senegal, Saint-Domingue (Haiti), Martinique, and Guadeloupe a scarcity of European women and intimate daily contact between white and black people nurtured a general acceptance of racial mixing. This established colonial tradition of miscegenation likewise took root in Louisiana.

Miscegenation lent a distinctive quality to Louisiana race relations. Masters manumitted thousands of their enslaved relatives. This liberated class formed the gens de couleur libre (“free people of color”) and they continued to mix among themselves as well as with other black and white people and with Native Americans. As the races mixed, French, African, and Indian customs combined to create a unique culture. An ethnic fusion of language, music, dance, religion, and cuisine marked Creoles with a distinct cultural character that still exists. Not surprisingly, scholars employ the term creolization to describe the process of creating a distinctive, Native culture from disparate cultural elements.

See also mulattoes.

Further reading: Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); Gary B. Mills, The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977).

—C. B. Waldrip