Fictional?

Welcome to the Cajun culture of south Evangeline Parish! Hear Cajun spoken at Weelo’s et Ortego’s and all over the place. Eat bon Cajun food et hear great Cajun music! Learn the history of southern Evangeline: the majority of the people’s ancestors came from France; French soldiers came from Alabama; French settlers came from Mobile; French settlers came from Illinois; French settlers came from Quebec; French soldiers came from Napoleon’s army. Some Acadians came too but intermarried with the host French population and adapted to their ways. The blend of all the different people produced a wonderful, unique, American culture: Cajun!

Cajun? What does Cajun mean? Well, it’s a long story but this is the gist. Cajun is an American word that they supposedly got from Cadien. They couldn’t say it right in French and so they said Cajun. Cadien was created by the Acadians. Some Acadians became rich and in order to distinguish themselves from their poor Acadian cousins they called them Cadien. It became a negative word. Well, the people from south Evangeline were Creoles but Creole changed also to become a social status word. The rural Evangeline Creoles were too “country” and “backwards” and they were not called Creole anymore. The Americans couldn’t tell the difference between a Fontenot from Mamou and a Trahan from Terrebonne; they saw poor country French people and used the word Cajun to describe them. Many people resented being called that but that eventually changed as Cajun became popular. It caused some confusion, however, in modern times because the word Cajun was promoted to be a word associated with Acadian. There is the racial aspect too, but that is another story and it gets more complicated. Just eat your boudin, drink your beer, and to make it simple for you to understand: Cajun is white “French” people and Creole is black “French” people from southern Evangeline Parish.

Visit once and leave confused - but with having a bon temps!


Sources for my rambling BS: the sources listed and the sources within these articles

Sara Le Menestrel
Connecting past to present: Louisiana cajuns and their sense of belonging to an Acadian diaspora:

http://nuevomundo.revues.org/document646.html

The Cajunization of French Louisiana: Forging a regional identity.
Authors: Trepanier, Cecyle Source: Geographical Journal; Jul91, Vol. 157 Issue 2, p161, 11p, 2 charts, 10 maps


French, Cajun, Creole, Houma : a primer on francophone Louisiana / Carl A. Brasseaux.


De Ville, Winston, "'Cajuns' and Neo-ethnicity: Concerns of an Acadian-American Genealogist," National Genealogical Society Quarterly, 89 (March 2001)



Sexton, Rocky. 1999. Cajun Mardi Gras: Cultural Objectification and Symbolic Appropriation in a French Tradition. Ethnology 38(4): 297 -313


From Acadien to Cajun to Cadien: Ethnic Labelization and Construction of Identity
Henry, Jacques
Summer98, Vol. 17 Issue 4, p29, 34p