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The First Creoles

If You pick up a dictionary and look up the definition of the Word Creole You'll find many different meanings . The great majority of them continue to place the Title of the First Creoles upon the Original Colonial European inhaditants of the New World..

.Many People .who are not familiar with Creoles or their Culture will tend to agree.This is far from the truth and yet this Lie has been perpetuated since the Discovery of the New World .

For some odd reason no one is willing to accept the fact that the Word Creole was a Word bestowed upon the First generation of African slaves born in the New World..So, lets see for Ourselves what is the truth...

 

Are the offsprings of the pure European exployers really the first Creoles ? If the Word Creole is defined as someone who is neither White nor Black but a Mixture then certainly it would not include the European Spanish conquerors as they did not bring Spanish women with them, which would then mean that their opffsprings in the New World would be a Mix of Spanish, Native Americans, and/ or of African slaves.;. Conclusion ... Therefore it is right to assume that the offsprings of the first Spanish were mixed Race(Mestizo) and not Of Pure European stock....The Creoles of Color are of Mixed Race parentage and therefore also fit this well documented description...As in the Case of the Louisiana European Creoles how can they be considered the Orinal Creoles when the French Women came after the creation of the Louisiana Colony and certainly after the arrival of the Slaves (In some cases French Women such as indentured servants, Prostitutes,and The Less desirable ones were sometimes kidnapped and brought against their will to the French Colonies but they were few and far between) Creole : ( Criollo) in Spanish means " to create " The Word Creole does not necessarily mean that it's exculsive Use was for only one of African Lineage...It can also mean Offsprings of the Original Spanish conquerers as it pertains to their Mestizo offsprings:

 

Quote of the day A person without a History is like a person lost in the wilderness

Well documented from 16th Centuary text

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

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

More on the definition of a Creole..You decide

1. A person of European descent born in the West Indies or Spanish America.

2. 1. A person descended from or culturally related to the original French settlers of the southern United States, especially Louisiana.
   2. The French dialect spoken by these people.

3. A person descended from or culturally related to the Spanish and Portuguese settlers of the Gulf States.

4. often creole A person of mixed Black and European ancestry who speaks a creolized language, especially one based on French or Spanish.

5. A Black slave born in the Americas as opposed to one brought from Africa.

6. creole A creolized language.

7. Haitian Creole.

 

19th Century Creole	Dr. Roudanez

 

Mulatto

 

The term Mulatto originally applied to a person 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.

Rosa Parks	American Mulatto

Good links

The Atlantic Creoles

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