How did all things associated with Louisiana become Cajun? Cuisine, culture, music, language? And does it harm the state's authenticity? What about the exclusion of other culture bearers? It may have started out of the desire to instill pride in Louisianians, but at what cost?
Below are exerps from an article in 64 Parishes explaining how Louisiana's diverse culture and culture bearers were branded and promoted as "Cajun", excluding the contributions the Africans, free people of color, Afro-caribbeans, Indigenous, non-Cajun French and other immigrants who were already present in the land mass we now know as Louisiana.
Exerps (full article is below):
1764 and 1788, 3,000 Nova Scotian refugees pled for asylum from the Spanish government in New Orleans. They were granted their resettlement and sent to the bayous, swamps and marshlands of the southern region, where they became neighbors of Indigenous, Africans, free people of color and French Creoles, who had been well established in those parts for several decades. The intermingling between Acadians, Creoles, Native Americans, African and Afro-Caribbean slaves, Free People of Color, Spaniards, British, and waves of subsequent European immigrants, created the basis for a new hybrid subculture in South Louisiana.
When the English moved into Louisiana between 1920-1960, the use of French or Creole was forbidden in virtually all aspects of life in South Louisiana. Reports from school children during this period expose physical, emotional and verbal abuse for the use of their ancestral language. Often students violating the language restriction were required to write “I will not speak French on the school grounds” one hundred times. Speaking French became synonymous to being uneducated and backwards. The English-only statutes and climate were so effective that native speakers of French and Creole became embarrassed to speak in public and at home. (1)
"By the late 1960s, this oppressive political and cultural climate took a 360-degree turn towards ethnic inclusiveness with the apex of the African American civil rights movement. Segregation in American schools was outlawed in 1958, and throughout the ensuing decade all public institutions and sectors of American society were legally forced to integrate. Discrimination in the U.S. was increasingly tested and tried among waves of minorities, from Hispanics to Asian Americans and American Indians. Louisianians of French-speaking heritage followed suit in a less litigious way.
In 1968, in reaction to four decades of the rapid decline of the use of French in the state, the Louisiana State Legislature created a state-owned and operated agency named the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL). Louisiana Governor John J. McKeithen appointed a Lafayette native and self-identified Cajun, James “Jimmy” Domengeaux, as president. The agency was charged with doing “any and all things necessary to accomplish the development, utilization, and preservation of the French language as found in the State of Louisiana for the cultural, economic, and touristic benefit of the State.”(1)
... Domengeaux, meanwhile, had no knowledge of such differences (between the French and Cajun languages), and because the Cajun dialect was spoken by people of all appearances in South Louisiana, he busied himself transforming the local education system to offer increased or complete instruction in French. For his movement to work, physical boundaries had to be established, which led to the official state adoption of the name “Acadiana” (from Acadia and Louisiana) to describe the twenty-two parish region in the southern half of the state where Louisiana’s Gallic and Creole cultures were most prominent. Either Domengeaux assumed that all inhabitants of the region descended from Acadians, like himself on his mother’s side (the Mouton family), or he blatantly ignored other francophone ancestries altogether. Domengeaux labeled all of the region’s inhabitants Cajuns and the French they spoke became universally known as Cajun French.
... The post-segregation era became a turning point in American history where the hyphenated American identity took reins and when being culturally distinct was a source of pride, yet the commercial “Cajunization” of South Louisiana was not always flattering. The “backwardness” of nasal French speaking, life in the swamps and marshlands along the Gulf of Mexico, the notion of endless festivities and the “sin and debauchery” of New Orleans reduced South Louisiana’s multifaceted cultures to a stereotypical product. The marketing of all things “Cajun” boomed in the 1980s, at local, national and international levels. Restaurants serving South Louisiana cuisine flourished, tourism dollars increased, and the newly designed Cajun flag draped the windows of many businesses across the southern swath of the state.
Slowly, pride in being Cajun was restored. Simultaneously, another movement began to arise as a result of the increased exposure of Cajuns, a trend that seemingly excluded a certain segment of the Francophone population. Cajuns were classified as whites, and almost organically, Cajun as a cultural identity became racialized and synonymous with being a Caucasian of French-Acadian descent. This was solidified in the entry excerpts of the Dictionary of the Cajun Language (1984), arranged by the late Rev. Jules O. Daigle, wherein he consistently references “Negro French” and “Cajun French” as being separate people. Louisiana Creoles who were legally “of color” took issue in the Lafayette region when the University of Southwest Louisiana, now the University of Louisiana Lafayette, officially named its mascot the “Ragin’ Cajun.” All combined, Francophone Louisiana offers a culinary, cultural and linguistic gumbo that is too tasty to pass up. And it is indeed more than Cajun.
The Myth of Evangeline
The Cajunization of Louisiana
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