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Thanks for agreeing with me about the food. However I don’t agree that Acadians came in large numbers. The entire Acadian settlement to Louisiana was just 3,000 people total. To put that number in perspective, 57,000 French arrived in Louisiana in the 18th and 19th century and that’s not including the 20th century. Also, close to 3,000 white St. Domingans arrived in Louisiana (St. Domingue, which was the multicultural French colony that would later become the all black Haiti after the whites left because of the Haitian Revolution), yet you hear nothing about white St. Domingans in Louisiana. The white St. Domingans melted into the population of south Louisiana. My own ancestors that came from the Canary Islands of Spain, were just over 2,000 people and we are but a small proportion of Louisianians today, maybe about 60,000 in total in all of Louisiana. Yet you have about 700,000 people today that identify as Cajun in Louisiana. Acadian descendants in Louisiana only numbered about 16,000 in Louisiana in 1860. There is no way that they could be 700,000 today.
If we examine the surnames of Cajun identified people, we see it’s not purely Acadian surnames from the recorded passenger lists of Acadian migrants to Louisiana. We see a large amount of French surnames that were not part of the Acadian migration, which shows that they heavily mixed with the French in Louisiana. There was also a migration of Mobile French from colonial Mobile when it became no longer French. Some of those surnames are found among the Cajun identified population as well. Then we see a significant proportion of white St. Domingue, Spanish and German surnames as well as many English and Irish surnames and an Italian one here and there. So what we have is, the Acadians heavily mixed with the French, but also that group absorbed Mobile French, white St. Domingans, Spanish, Germans, English, Irish and even some Italian descendants into their group. Knowing all of this, there is no way they qualify as Acadians and therefore should not be identifying as Cajun, which we know Cajun is just a corruption if the word Acadian and should therefore describe a Louisiana Acadian. There are some genuine Acadians in Louisiana and they mostly live in the limited areas of Louisiana that were recorded Acadian settlements, which most of south Louisiana was not. However, the vast amount of people that are identifying as Cajun (Louisiana Acadian) today are far from being Acadians, surely not the same or even mostly the same as the migrant group of Acadians that immigrated to Louisiana. There is a saying in Louisiana, one can be Cajun by blood, by marriage or by the back door”. That’s a an attestment of the multiethnic nature of the Cajun identified group today, they are not Acadians and thus not truly Cajuns.
We know that Cajuns identified as Creoles before the invent of the term Cajun. We also know that the term Cajun was invented in the 1860’s and was primarily used as an insult toward Acadians in Louisiana and was considered as fighting words by a great many of Acadian descendants. Some small group of Acadians however, adopted the term as an identity some point after that. In the Jim Crow era of the 1920’s, the term Creole became polluted for a sizeable portion of French speaking whites that identified as Creole because of the confusion about the word by Anglos that made accusations toward white creoles as having black admixture solely because blacks and mulattoes also identified as Creole in Louisiana. Of course this was not true for most, but the damage was done. At that point, a large amount of creole identified whites in southwest Louisiana switched away from the Creole identity and adopted a Cajun one, despite Cajuns being Louisiana Creoles as well. This increased the Cajun identified population greatly. However, a great many creole whites in Louisiana still identified as Creole well into the mid 20th century. It was especially large in and around New Orleans. However, in the 1960’s during the civil rights movement, mulatto and black Creoles began black pride campaigns surrounding their Creole identity. The local and national Media latched on and so did book authors looking to write about civil rights era black related stories and seemingly overnight, Creole became associated with blacks and mulattoes of Louisiana of a French speaking background to many rather than the Creole whites in Louisiana that the word Creole has been associated with for over 250 years at that point (over 300 years now). Creole identified white creoles still remained after that and still do today, but are greatly reduced in number and are mainly in existence in and around New Orleans and a small part of northern Acadiana (southwest Louisiana).
At the same time in the 1960’s when mulattoes and blacks in Louisiana were pushing a black Creole identity that the Media broadcasted across America, the small group of peoples that identified as Cajuns got together along with some politicians and a language group and convinced many white people of a French speaking background in south Louisiana to identify as Cajuns. People in droves adopted the identity whether they were Acadian descended or not since many viewed the Creole identity to be now polluted. And that is how we got 700,000 Cajun identified people today when we only had a total of 3,000 Acadians settle Louisiana and amounted to only 16,000 in 1860 from natural births inside Louisiana and no more immigration to Louisiana.
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