Southern Spaces

No other area of the U.S. South has so embraced a French heritage as a foundational and enduring part of its culture as south Louisiana. A complex ethnic and demographic history, combined with a striking topography compared to other places within the South, have made south Louisiana a distinctive place, one that observers often discuss as not fitting conventional expectations of the U.S. South. It has also become one of the most resonant places in the national imagination. In 1971, the Louisiana Legislature designated the twenty-two parishes of south Louisiana as Acadiana, acknowledging its distinctive French-based history and culture. The term Acadiana was inadvertently coined in the early 1963, by a Louisiana television station, owned by Acadian Television Corporation, which received an invoice in which the letter a had been added to Acadian to become Acadiana. The television manager appreciated this striking new descriptor and popularized it, using it to describe the stations broadcast area. It is more popularly known as Cajun Louisiana. C. Paige Gutierrez describes the region as the South of the South, while folklorist Nicholas R. Spitzer adds that it is north of, and connected to, the Caribbean.

While many people associate the southwest Louisiana home of the Cajuns with swamplands, its environment also consists of marshes, prairies, and wooded river areas. The earliest European colonists to what would become Acadian Louisiana came in the 1600s, settling along the Mississippi River and the major bayous. French land grants helped bring settlers to an area that was part of a larger French West Indian plantation zone in the 1700s, and descendants of these early French landowners would become farmers and planters in the area, adapting sugar in the nineteenth century as the dominant plantation crop. Another major eighteenth-century settlement group was the Acadians, exiled from Nova Scotia and arriving in south Louisiana after 1765. The early Acadians became small farmers and fishermen, settling along the Mississippi River. Acadians soon moved out of these areas, into the upper Bayou Teche to the west and, later, onto the lower coast and into the Atchafalaya Swamp Basin to the southwest.

Africa and the West Indies were major influences on south Louisiana in the colonial era. Planters imported almost 30,000 slaves from west Africa, through the French West Indies. The light-skinned descendants of the Creole planters (those claiming French-Spanish ancestry) and slaves became Creoles of Color. The Haitian rebellion brought 10,000 refugees from French sugar colony of St. Domingue, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, adding a pronounced West Indian influence to south Louisiana seen in Creole cottages and shotgun houses, Caribbean rhythms in zydeco and jazz, and gumbo and red beans and rice. Other eighteenth-century population groups included German colonists, Spaniards, Islenos from the Canary Islands, and such Native American tribes as the Houma, Bayou Goula, and Choctaw.

The Acadians would play a crucial role in defining south Louisiana. The 3000 or so Acadians who came from Nova Scotia to the lower Mississippi River Valley between 1765 and 1803 adapted to the new environment. People who once lived on cod and herring discovered shrimp and crawfish, making a compelling cuisine along the way. They came into a slave society, and after 1780 a significant number of them began to gain slaves. Most Acadians in the early years of settlement lived, though, as small farmers and trappers in the isolation of wetlands and in the prairies of southwest Louisiana. Anglo settlers began appearing in south Louisiana in the late 1770s, and the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 was a turning point in rising Anglo influence. Before then, there were seven times as many French speakers as English among Louisianas free population; by 1860, 70 percent of Louisianas free population spoke English.