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Creole: Version A

Garcilaso de la Vega, "The Inca," writing in the early 1600's, tells us: "The name was invented by the Negroes... They use it to mean a Negro born in the Indies, and they devised it to distiguish those who come from this side and were born in Guinea from those born in the New World....

The Spanish copied them by introducing this word to describe those born in the New World, and in this way both Spaniards and Guinea Negroes are called criollo if they were born in the NewWorld."

Recent scholarship has determined that this Spanish adoption of black usage dates from the 1560's, before which time the "word creole applied.... exclusively to Negroes."

Later practice in the Spanish empire seems to have been variable, with most South American creoles eventually fixing on purity of white blood as a mark of their kind, while in other areas, particularly the Caribbean islands, the distinction continued to apply to all those indigenous to the religious regardless of race."

 

Garcilaso de la Vega Royal Commentaries of the Incas (2 vols.; Austin, 1966)

 

The Unknown Creole Lady Adah Isaacs Menken,

 

	Now! Thats a Creole

 

The Atlantic Creole

more on Our Origins

Creole: Version B

The term Creole (Spanish -- Criollo) was introduced in 1590. It derived from the Latin word “crear”, which meant, “create.” In 1590, Father J. de Acosta decided that the mixed breeds born in the New World were neither Spanish, African, Indian, but various mixtures of all three, thus a created race.

So he identified them as "Criollos"

At that time, and for approximately 250 years afterwards, the word Creole, for the most part, only signified that a person was born in the new World. And it did not refer to color or race. For a time, in the Catholic colonies the term Mulatto was predominate because there were no white women to produce unmixed white offsprings.

Eventually, the Creole identity made its way to Jamaica as testified by Rev. James Ramsey in 1788. Ramsey wrote, “In every case within my knowledge, the farther back the Negro could trace his Creolism, the more he valued himself, the more he was valued.”

Also, it was reported by J.A. Rogers that some time during the eighteenth century, blacks from South America began to apply the term Creole to their children born in America, in order to distinguish them from slaves freshly imported from Africa. And like the term Mulatto, the term Creole evolved through succeeding generations and became a term for racial identity.

 

Too White to be Black Too Black to be White

Creole Chronology ©1994 (Permission granted) by Gilbert E. Martin

 

19th Century Creole Dr. Roudanez

 

Mulatto

The term Mulatto originally applied to aperson whose parents were of distinctively different races.

In this work Indians are considered as being different from Caucasians and Africans. Thousands of the New World mixed breeds were of African-Indian extractions. The Mulattoes in the West Indies extended the term beyond the first generation of half breeds by applying the term to their own offsprings.

 

 

 

Consequently, as the term was extended from generation to generation, it applied to any person of mixed ancestry. And by the open and continued use of the term in the latter sense, a Mulatto race evolved on Hispaniola,

the Mulatto race grew into a separate nation. And resulting from the Haitian revolution, which began in August of 1791, Haiti’s Mulatto nation, in conjunction with its counterparts from Martinique and Guadeloupe, bolstered and fortified the Creole nation already developed in Louisiana.

Occasionally, other Mulatto types from Santo Domingo, Cuba, and Jamaica became parts of the melting pot; the only real melting pot the United States ever had.

American Mulatto Rosa Parks

Good links

The Cajun

The ancestors of today's Cajuns were French pioneers who settled in Nova Scotia (Canada) mainly in 1604 and 1632.

The character and strength of the Cajun people today has its roots in their expience as colonists in the Acadia province of Nova Scotia, where they arrived at the beginning of a conflict between the British and the French that was to stretch into nearly a hundred years of war) In 1713, when Acadia was formally ceded to England in the Treaty of Utrecht,

 

the British answered the colonists' pleas forneutrality with a deman for allegience to the British Crown. The demand became an ultimatum in 1753; the French Acadians would either take an unconditional oath of allegience of face confiscation of property and deportation to teh British colonies.

In what has been called teh Grand Derangement of 1755, 16,000 French Acadians who had built a life in Nove Scotia for over a century were separated and scattered throughout the British colonies, where some were pressed int servitude. The greatest numbers eventually found their way to South Louisiana, where they again became pioneers in new and unsettled lands.

Ironically, then the Acadians began to arrive in Louisiana, the colony had just come under Spanish rule and they were again the subjects of a non-french crown. The Spanish government in New Orleans saw an opportunity to settle the area west of the Mississippi and offered Acadian and other immigrants of French descent a choice of lands on the frontier

. The first settlers made homes on high lands along the "German Coast" of the Mississippi River, and then along bayous in the Lafourche, Teche, and Opelousas districts.