ETHNICITY AND CREOLIZATION

When Europeans arrived in the South, they entered a region that had been inhabited for perhaps 13,000 years and was, by the 16th century, well peopled by a diversity of protostates and chiefdoms. Africans joined the people of the South in 1619. Their status as slaves or indentured servants on arrival remains ambiguous. Accounts of southern history and experience onward from that time have conventionally, and simplistically, discussed the region’s ethnic mix in terms of three broad categories relating to the three continents of colonial southerners’ origins. Further obscured by late 19th- and 20th-century binary racial categorization of institutions and worldviews, the diverse ancestral origins of early southerners have only recently become a subject for recovery among scholars and in popular culture.

A social, political, and scholarly focus on racial categorization has denied the cultural (ethnic) differences within what have been called “racial” groups. The American Indians inhabiting the South at the beginning of the historic period included speakers of at least five major language families, within which there were long-standing ethnic divides that caused some to ally with outsider Europeans against other Native Americans. While the majority of the first European southerners came from England, Scotland, and Ireland, they did not share a culture or worldview, and some Catholic Irish and Highland Scots spoke their own versions of Gaelic rather than English. German, Swiss, French, and Spanish settlers early added to the religious, linguistic, and social mix of the new colonies. Africans came predominantly from the nations between Angola and Ghana (the Gold Coast), but also from the Gambia (Senegambia), Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Igbo country. Just as European colonists maintained their distinct identities from their particular nations (or regions of their home nations), Africans continued to think of themselves as Yoruba, Mandingo, Fon, or Wolof for several generations. Some ethnic groups were less likely to socialize or partner with members of others. Religious beliefs, song, folklore, and artistic traditions also perpetuated national and cultural affiliations within slavery on ethnically heterogeneous plantations.

Recent scholarship has begun to uncover the ethnic diversity of the early South as well as to document the contemporary arrival of new cultural groups in the region. This volume reflects both trends. Eliding the metonyms and stereotypes of the South in strictly black and white, this collection of essays attempts to represent the panoply of ethnicities that combined to shape the region. As culturally constructed notions, racial identities are imposed generally by those with whom one does not share a designation. Ethnic identity one traditionally learns at a grandparent’s knee. Ethnicity lies in folktales, in tying fishing nets, in conceptions of the supernatural, in the music that delights multiple generations simultaneously, in the foods that mean home. Ethnic identities are cultural identities, and as such they are dynamic and renegotiated in different contexts and periods. Some consider southern identity, shared by black and white southerners (as opposed to “southern blacks and whites”), an ethnic identity within the United States. Since the 1700s the notion of the region as distinct has endured, although what is southern in any given period continues to evolve. Southern culture, or the multiple southern cultures of the South’s many subregions, is a complex amalgamation of disparate ethnicities and traditions from around the globe. After centuries of blending, the sum is undoubtedly greater than its parts but is hardly a finished product.

Ethnicity. The concept of ethnicity comes from the Greek ethnos, meaning “people” or “nation.” Herodotus flexibly described the Dorians, Kolophonians, Ephesians, and Ionians as ethne according to what festivals they celebrated, their language or dialect, their mythic genealogies tracing group origins to an eponymous ancestor, and sometimes their area of residence. Anthropologists today define ethnic groups similarly as having shared customs, linguistic traditions, religious practices, and geographical origins. Members of an ethnic group might also exhibit specific gender roles and inheritance patterns. Frederick Barth’s groundbreaking work Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Difference (1969) led anthropologists to describe “ethnic boundary markers” (the possession of a distinctive language or dialect, a particular style of dress, music, and cuisine, and religious expression), although no one of these alone defines an ethnic group.

Membership in an ethnic group often relates to kinship and descent, but even when a belief in shared ancestry is involved in ethnic identity formation, it can be what anthropologists call “fictive kinship” and is often mythic. When ethnic identities are oriented to the past, those who claim them may have an emotional investment in legend and renegotiate history in more appealing forms as heritage. Ethnic identities evolve over time and are often quite voluntary. Those claiming an ethnic identity form an ethnic group in contrast to “ethnic categories,” which are identities imposed from the outside (generally on a minority group). Occasionally an ethnic category goes through “ethno-genesis” and becomes an ethnic group—as with labels like “Hispanic.”

Ethnic celebrations, heritage tourism to ancestral homelands, and an interest in ethnic music, foodways, and material culture have become an increasingly accepted part of American life. Spurred by America’s bicentennial celebrations and popular books such as Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), genealogy is now one of the fastest-growing hobbies in America. Even those whose families have been in the South for over 300 years are looking for origins and reclaiming what they perceive as ancestral traditions from nations where they would never be considered anything other than American.

While many people may reject a familial ethnicity, others actively embrace one their parents, grandparents, or more distant ancestors relinquished. How one values or emphasizes ethnicity may relate to the prestige (or lack thereof) that such an identity carries and to context (a religious holiday rather than an average worship service, within the home rather than the office). An individual may have more than one ethnicity simultaneously and play on overlapping sets of loyalties depending on the situation. The situational selection of ethnic identity can be different from “symbolic” or “convenience” ethnicity (embracing an ethnic identity self-consciously at festival occasions without living an ethnic existence daily). One may emphasize one’s Mexican ancestry on Mexican Independence Day, and also acknowledge the Scottish branch of one’s family by learning a song in Gaelic or competing in Scottish athletics, but otherwise live a nonethnic life. One might even dress for heritage events and festivals to signify a personal creole combining a sombrero and a kilt. Affiliating with an ethnic group voluntarily may involve acquiring ethnic shibboleths or rediscovering those devalued or discarded by one’s ancestors.

Some scholars dismiss symbolic ethnicity as nostalgic yearning for a long-lost tradition and identity and as a superficial aspect of personal identity. However, such a perspective denies the deep emotional investment people make in voluntary or reclaimed identities. While individuals may not materially display their ethnicity to outsiders on a regular basis, scholars cannot simply assume it is not incorporated as part of their worldview or that it is detached, or even tangential, to their daily, nonfestival realities. Descendants of many of the groups in this volume may no longer be commonly identified as ethnic, but their origins and traditions (or invented traditions to commemorate those origins) may be quite significant in their family life and formative of a personal identity.

Many of the essays in this volume include information from the U.S. Census Bureau. In 1980 the census first included an “ancestry question” to collect selective information on ethnic origins and identity. In 1990 and 2000 the question simply read, “What is the person’s ancestry or ethnic origin?” According to the Census Bureau, “ancestry” refers to a person’s ethnic origins or descent, roots, heritage, or place of birth (although place of birth and ancestry are not always the same). The ancestry question does not measure to what extent a person is aware of ancestral origins. For example, a person reporting “German” on the census might be actively involved in the German American community or might only vaguely remember that ancestors centuries removed came from Germany. State-by-state census data is more useful than regional summaries in ascertaining which ethnic identities southerners claim, as the Census Bureau includes Oklahoma, West Virginia, Washington, D.C., Delaware, and Maryland within the southern region. Maryland was once culturally southern, and portions of Oklahoma and West Virginia still claim to be, but this inclusive mapping varies from both scholarly and popular specifications of the region.

Census data on ethnicity can be misleading, not only because numbers are based on a sample of the population, but also because ethnic identities and notions of “race” are conflated. Race categories on the census include both color designations and national origin groups. For example, Koreans are not listed on state ancestry charts because the census includes “Korean” as a choice under the “race” question. Tabulated numbers may often appear contradictory when, for example, more people specify “African American” in answering the census’s race question than those answering the ancestry question who may then report nothing or a different, more specific identity (Nigerian, Haitian, Sudanese). To find figures for Mexicans and Spaniards, Panamanians or Guatemalans, for example, one must look to special Census Bureau national reports rather than state-by-state ancestry charts in which Central and South American nationalities are oddly not listed. The Census Bureau now couples a question on ethnicity (“Is this person Spanish/Hispanic/Latino?”) with its question on race. The rationale as to why the bureau excludes specific Latino ethnicities from ancestry data—but collects information on Norwegians, Subsaharan Africans, Slovaks, and West Indians as ethnic groups—is not obvious, nor have such categorizations remained constant. Government definitions change with the evolving political and social implications of identities.

In the media and on government forms, ethnicity is incorrectly used interchangeably with “race,” although ethnicity does not mean race. Ethnicity refers to cultural and social aspects of identity, not biological aspects or phenotype (physical appearance), which is the most common meaning of “race” in the United States. In the 19th and even early 20th centuries, “race” often denoted national or regional origins or referenced a particular cultural group, commonly in connection with the spurious notion that there could be any biological predisposition to cultural distinctiveness. Based on cultural assumptions about physical appearance, “race” is socially constructed rather than biologically valid. As a species, we are too evolutionarily recent to have discrete “racial” populations. The human genome carries only superficial markers relating to aspects of appearance such as hair form and melanin production for skin and eye color (characteristics that often relate to long-term environmental adaptation); it does not distinguish separate subspecies like “breeds.” The continuum of human physical variation does not fall into three, five, nine, or more discrete groups, as scholars such as Johann Herder (1744–1803) and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) proposed in the drive for Linnaean classification, and as popular culture continues to do in order to define difference for social and political expediency. Social classifications of “race” focus predominantly on phenotype and have done so since the Ancient Egyptians divided the world’s people into “red” for Egyptian, “yellow” for people to the East, “white” for those to the north, and “black” for Africans from the south. However, since the writings of the ancient Greeks, “ethnicity” has properly referred to identity and culture.

The 20th-century conflation of “race” with ethnicity has led to the post–civil rights era racialization of distinct cultural groupings. The relatively recent category of “Asian Americans” provides a higher national profile for about 24 ethnic groups on the U.S. Census and on the American political scene. However, such a designation not only bundles East Asian groups such as Korean, Japanese, Malaysians, Vietnamese, and Chinese Americans into a shared grouping, it also absorbs Nepalese, Indian, and Pakistani Americans within one “racial” category despite their completely separate origins, histories, and cultural traditions.

While sociologist Max Weber had used the concept in work published in 1922 and other scholars had explored the notion in the 1940s, “ethnicity” did not enter public discourse and dictionary usage until the early 1960s. Today, the word is ubiquitous. Perhaps in reaction to globalization, scholars of many disciplines use “ethnic” or “ethnicity” when they might have employed “cultural” or “subculture” a quarter of a century ago. Ethnicity has come to mean distinctiveness, if variously defined. Many scholars view ethnicity as a political identity in relation to class, racial, or other potential social conflicts and discuss claims to ethnic identities as negative when embraced by a privileged group, but as a positive form of “resistance” when embraced by an unprivileged one.

However, class and power differentials exist within ethnic groups as well as between them. Ethnic identities are not necessarily exclusionary. Not only may one be a member of more than one ethnic group, one also may share an ethnic identity with those whom society designates as a different “race” from oneself. Increasingly, Americans are identifying themselves as multiethnic. Irish Americans not only celebrate their Irish roots; they may also claim to be German-, Mexican-, African-, or Italian-Irish Americans. Southerners may simultaneously feel southern and Chinese, or southern and Italian, and sometimes conflate the two. This is most obvious in expressive culture and at festivals, which are superb indicators of the evolution and recombination of ethnicities.

For those perceiving ethnicity as primarily political, the failure of the melting pot assimilationist ideal was considered a problem—an “ethnic problem.” The 1960s and 1970s then witnessed a move from assimilationist models for immigrants to ideas of pluralism (a coexistence and toleration of difference). In the 1980s and 1990s, multiculturalism (a celebration of difference) replaced pluralism. Ethnicity is a much more comfortable, if not beatitudinous, concept than it was a quarter of a century ago. Americans now find ethnic food aisles in grocery stores, wear ethnic clothes, decorate their homes in “international ethnic pastiches,” and often assume that multiculturalism means nonracism as if ethnicity meant race. While ethnicity may be “optional” for many Americans, the selection of identities and their renegotiation is revealing, not only of how Americans perceive each other, but also of our particular moment in history. Similarly, the recognition and study of ethnicities in the South communicates significant insights about the region’s place historically and currently within both national and global frames.

Creolization and Creole Groups. Southern culture is a product of nearly 20 generations of creolization (a blending of cultures after long exposure, coexistence, and interaction of multiple social groups). W. J. Cash, Ralph Ellison, and historian Charles Joyner have remarked that every white southerner has an African heritage as well as a European one, and every black southerner has a European heritage as well as an African one. This idea continues to resonate because southern culture is a complex hybrid of varied traditions. Although southern society created well-bounded public hierarchies around difference, southern culture is the result of heterarchical relationships between individuals with regular and intimate interactions. Despite slavery and Jim Crow, the flow of ideas, customs, and worldviews was not solely top-down. Those with the least overt power in southern society created the infrastructure, erected the buildings, produced the cash crops that once made the South wealthy, and carried out a variety of skilled occupations essential to the smooth working of any urban settlement or rural community. Those enslaved—or, after slavery, in domestic service—cared for the children of the elite, taught them manners, and shaped their speech and tastes. Such formative relationships, and more subtle, ongoing exchanges, produced the cultural creoles we conceive of as southern traditions.

What we think of as typically “southern” is a product of centuries of cultural blending. Bluegrass is a mix of Irish and British fiddle traditions and African-derived banjo. Jimmie Rodgers, “the father of country music,” combined Swiss yodeling with black field hollers in the 1920s to create his characteristic “blue yodels,” which Chester Burnett of the Mississippi Delta blues tradition subsequently adapted to his own style and earned himself the moniker Howlin’ Wolf. Southern spirituals merged the rhythm and structure of African music with elements of British text and melodies. Southern rock groups such as the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd produced fusions of rock and roll, blues slide guitar, jazz, soul, and rhythm and blues with southern dialect. Yale ethnomusicologist Willie Ruff has recently suggested that a distinct psalm-singing style in southern African American congregations called “presenting the line” derives from “line singing” or “precenting the line” in the Scottish Highlands. He argues that Gaelic-speaking enslaved Africans learned the singing style and notes a church in Alabama where their descendants worshipped in Gaelic as late as 1918. Employing an African American performance style and traditionally sung in French, zydeco music blends the blues with Afro-Caribbean rhythms and tone arrangements from Cajun music (the European American analogue to zydeco).

Cultural exchanges with American Indians transformed both Europeans and Africans in the South, yet such creolizations are perhaps less obvious today in part because of the colonial demographic revolution. As Peter Wood has noted, in 1690 approximately 250,000 people lived in the South (80 percent Native Americans, 19 percent Europeans, and perhaps 1 percent slaves). In 1790, after a century of introduced diseases and colonial expansion, just under 5 percent of the estimated 1.7 million southerners were Native Americans, 60 percent were Europeans, and 35 percent were of African descent (a large percentage despite historians’ estimates that only 6 percent of Africans crossing the Atlantic in the 18th-century slave trade came to North America). While Europeans enslaved some Native Americans and intensive contact between enslaved American Indians and Africans took place in Charleston in the late 17th century, the Tuscarora War of 1711 and the Yamasee War four years later pointed to the dangers of a possible alliance between them. European colonists forfended this by hiring native peoples to capture escaping African slaves and by sending enslaved Africans into battle against American Indians. While such policies were common, intermarriage and cultural exchange did continue.

Mississippi Choctaws playing stickball (Photograph courtesy of Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians)

American Indians assisted initial European settlement by teaching new settlers to clear the foreign forest and grow native crops such as squash, maize, beans, and tobacco. They influenced early patterns and locations of colonial settlements in relation to their defense of their own and shaped the course of southern history through their military alliances. Newly arrived southerners borrowed indigenous architectural traditions, buckskin, and canoes in settling what they considered the frontier. Southern foodways draw from indigenous foodways; Native Americans made the first cornbread (or pone), grits, and succotash (a mix of corn kernels and beans). European Americans also adapted native crops to their own traditions (their use of maize to produce whiskey, for example). American Indians taught new southerners herbal remedies, and soft drinks like root beer and Coca-Cola had precursors in indigenous sassafras Indian tonics. Few indigenous languages remain extant in the Southeast, but many groups developed their own dialects of English (regional variants that are distinctive for their grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation). For example, in North Carolina the vernacular English of the Lumbee employs unique vocabulary words such as juvember for “slingshot” and ellick for “coffee.” Like other peripheral dialect areas with a long history of insularity, their speech also retains centuries-old English terms such as mommuck (mess) and toten(ghost). Native American linguistic contributions to southern culture include many loan words such as squash, hominy, hickory, opossum, skunk, and, of course, southern place names such as Tallahassee, Okefenokee, Santee, Mississippi, and Tullahoma.

American Indians’ presence and impact on the southern cultural landscape decreased as that of African and African American populations increased. U.S. Census figures for 1860 indicate that European and enslaved African populations were very close in number in several southern states. That year, the population of Alabama was reported to be 54 percent “white” and 45 percent “slave”; similar estimates exist for Florida (55 percent and 44 percent), Georgia (56 percent and 43 percent), and Louisiana (50 percent and 46 percent). Two states had an enslaved population substantially larger than that of European Americans: in Mississippi “slaves” constituted 55 percent of the population while “whites” composed 44 percent, and in South Carolina the ratio was 57 percent to 41 percent. The increasing recognition of African influences on southern culture include linguistic contributions. Southern dialects evidence African contributions, including loan words such as goober (related to Kongo n-guba, or “peanut”), okra (a word of Bantu origin), yam (of West African origin), tote, gumbo, and boogie. Staples of southern foodways (including rice, types of squash, black-eyed peas, and okra) came from Africa, as did a preference for certain spices.

Foodways specific to enslaved African Americans—getting by on the less desirable cuts of meat and the vegetables they could grow on small plots—developed over time into “soul food,” including chitlins, mustard greens, ham hocks, ham salad, pigs’ feet, and hoppin’ John (a dish featuring black-eyed peas, rice, and ham). Food items once considered soul food, such as barbecue, fried catfish, candied yams, hush puppies, coleslaw, and pot likker, have long been common to southern tables across ethnic divides.

Africans of many ethnic groups brought a strong reverence for ancestors, a belief in spirits, and folk-healing traditions that led to hoodoo and conjure ( ju-ju) and the southern practice of voodoo (African traditions fused with folk practices of French Colonial Catholicism and the magicomedical knowledge and pharmacopeia of American Indians). Of the “queens,” “doctors,” or “workers” of voodoo, Marie Laveau was America’s most famous, and her grave is still a site of pilgrimage in New Orleans. Africans adapted Christian beliefs to African expectations of the divine. African trickster characters and deities populate African American folktales in which the rabbit (shared with Native Americans) and the signifying monkey figure largely. Echoing earlier traditions of storytelling and performances of ritual insult, today’s Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans sing carefully crafted songs in mock battles that involve verbal competition and boasting about the reputation of individuals and neighborhoods.

Across the Deep South, the shotgun house stands as one of the most-cited examples of African-influenced architecture. The narrow, one-story buildings have a front porch, a gabled roof, and rooms aligned in single file. John Michael Vlach has convincingly argued that the shotgun house derives from those of the indigenous Arawak Indians of Haiti and modified by Africans brought there and then, in the early 19th century, to the South. The southern front porch may also find its origins in the vernacular precolonial architecture of West Africa and the West Indies. The Georgian “I houses” of Charleston, S.C., are a part of this tradition and feature a porch running the length of one side of the house that can be closed off from the street by a formal door.

Some of the most noted cases of syncretic Africanisms in the United States are the folkways and linguistic traditions of South Carolina’s Gullah and Georgia’s Geechee peoples. While enslaved Africans retained ethnic identities for generations, their interactions with Africans of other nationalities produced cultural creoles. Eventually, a racialized identity replaced ethnicities and Africans created an African American culture. In the Chesapeake and North Carolina, slaves and European Americans interacted on a regular basis, and slave populations there became more anglicized than in the Lowcountry and Sea Islands. South Carolina planters often lived in Charleston and left overseers to run their rice plantations. Having less interaction with European Americans, slaves there retained and exchanged more of their ethnic traditions.

The Gullah and Geechee peoples of the Lowcountry and Sea Islands maintain traditions that are a syncretism of those of several different West and Central African ethnic groups (including the Mende, Limba, Temne, Fante, Fon, and others). Their language is not African but African American, being a creole of various African languages and English influences. In Gullah-speaking communities, individuals still have African “basket names” (nicknames) such as Bala, Jah, or Jilo. Names indicate the day on which a child was born (for example, Yaa for a girl born on Thursday and Yao for a boy), reference physical features, or indicate a kinship relationship (bubba would equate with “brother” in English). Hand clapping and foot stomping replaced African drums and still accompany shouts in Christian worship (Methodist and Baptist) in Gullah churches. Today, the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition encourages cultural revitalization and aims to achieve international recognition as a nation with self-determination like a Native American tribe. This goal is contested since the Gullah/Geechee are not indigenous to the Sea Islands but formed a Creole society there. Elsewhere, descendants of slaves from the Lowcountry and Sea Islands who joined a Native American tribe also find their status in question.

Perhaps as early as the late 1600s, Africans escaped plantations in what are now Gullah/Geechee communities and settled among the Florida Seminole, where they lived beyond the reach of British colonial administrators. Known as the Black Seminoles, they spoke Gullah and the Muskogee or Mikasuki languages of the Seminole, adopted many of their cultural attributes, and fought in the Seminole wars. Removed to Oklahoma with the Seminole, the Black Seminoles became known as “the Freedmen,” and their status and rights as tribal members have varied over the last century and a half. As exogamy has led people without active ties to the Seminole Nation to enroll as tribal members (for the benefits and services membership entails), the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma adopted a resolution in 2000 requiring proof of one-eighth “Seminole Indian blood” for enrollment. Such a requirement excludes the majority of Black Seminoles from tribal membership and would seem to dim the multiple-centuries relationship that yielded social and political exchanges and cultural creolization.

The term “creole” has multiple meanings. A creole replaces a pidgin, the form of communication in first contact between two or more groups speaking different languages. The francophone dialect of south Louisiana is one example. Creole also has indicated a descendant of the original French or Spanish settlers of the southern states, or a person of African or Caribbean and European ancestry who speaks a creolized language, especially French or Spanish. Creole cuisine in the South refers to a New Orleans–style tomato, onion, and pepper sauce or a dish like filé gumbo (a union of Choctaw and West African foodways). Creole cuisine and culture have long been staples of the Louisiana tourism industry, but they also inspire the devoted work of local preservation and heritage societies. Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, La., has developed the Louisiana Creole Heritage Center and has initiated a Creole Studies Consortium. Although “Creole” can apply variously to people of European or African descent, for some the term distinguishes African Americans of French-speaking Louisiana from their European American Cajun neighbors in south Louisiana. However, some people of African descent self-identify as Cajun today.

Immortalized in Longfellow’s Evangeline, Cajuns are descendants of Catholic French Acadians who settled in French Louisiana (some also went to Maine) after being expelled from Nova Scotia by the British in the mid-18th century. After centuries of mixing with other ethnic groups, Cajun surnames now include the German Hymel and Schexnider, the Spanish Castille and Romero, and the Scots-Irish McGee. Partly through interaction with southerners of African descent, Cajuns developed spicy dishes such as dirty rice, gumbo, and other foods reflecting their local resources and subsistence, such as boudin (Cajun sausage) and bouille (cane syrup pie).

Defining who is a “Creole” remains contentious. Most simply and inclusively put, the category of “Creole” may refer to anyone with African or European (but not Anglo-American) ancestry who was born in the Americas. The South has many creolized populations with ethnic identities original to the region, but it also has many populations that we would now call Creole groups that did have Anglo-American ancestry—some that were once called mulattos, triracial isolates, pardos, “mixed-bloods,” and worse.

Across America, a practice called hypodescent assigns children of mixed unions the identity of the socially and economically disadvantaged group. Categorized as “colored” by the Louisiana Bureau of Vital Statistics because her great-great-great-great-grandmother was black, Susie Phipps garnered international attention in 1982 by trying to have herself declared “white.” According to America’s “one-drop rule,” one black ancestor makes a person black, but one white ancestor does not make a person white. Following the death of over 600,000 combatants in the Civil War—the outcome of which made the abolition of slavery through the Thirteenth Amendment possible—“black codes” and then Jim Crow laws created a period of racial segregation across 29 states (the name “Jim Crow” originally applied to segregated facilities in the pre–Civil War North). In 1896 the U.S. Supreme Court approved the segregation of public facilities in Plessy v. Ferguson. In 1954 Brown v. Board of Education overturned that decision, but many “separate-but-equal” practices continued until the federal civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s. The biracial classification schemes of the New South replaced much more elaborate classification schemes from the colonial and antebellum periods.

Enslaved Africans and African Americans were sometimes freed, especially (but not always) when they were children of their mother’s master. They occupied an ambivalent position, frequently owning slaves but at risk of being captured and returned to slavery themselves if they traveled or moved out of areas in which they were known. By 1800 the majority of free people of color in America lived in the South (60,000). By the time of the Civil War, their numbers had grown nationwide to 488,000, with the majority (262,000) still living in the southern region. In the 19th century, free persons of color (gens de couleur libre) living along the Gulf Coast began calling themselves “Creoles of Color.” They maintained their identity and communities through the Jim Crow period in New Orleans, Mobile, Pensacola, and smaller enclaves throughout the Gulf South.

Creoles exemplify the complexity of ethnicity and how ethnic identities can cross and obfuscate social conceptions of racial categories. While long unused in academic circles, the word “mulatto” may still be heard among older generations in the South and still makes surprising appearances in popular films and music in the 21st century. Mulattos were regarded as a product of miscegenation, which referred to unions between whites and blacks, whites and mulattos, or blacks and mulattos and covered anything from single acts of intimacy to marriage. The first series of laws designed to discourage miscegenation passed the Virginia Assembly in 1662. Many Africans and their children were free before 1661, when the Virginia legislature passed laws making Africans slaves for life. By 1691 a European woman who gave birth to a mulatto child was required to pay a fine or, if unable, be sold into servitude for five years and thereafter banished to Barbados. European fathers of mulatto children needed only to do public penance one Sunday in their local churches, and even this practice was short lived as more and more white men sired mulatto children. By 1705 marriages between “white” and “black” persons invoked a jail sentence.

Strictly speaking, a mulatto was a person with one black parent and one white parent. Mulattos had different experiences depending upon the subregions in which they lived. In the Upper South their numbers were significant in the colonial period, and many were free, rural, and of poor or modest means. However, some, such as Sally Hemings, the half sister of Thomas Jefferson’s wife, were tied to the most powerful people in the land. In the Lower South, mulatto populations grew later but had more varied classifications; for example, a “quadroon” was one-fourth black and an “octoroon” one-eighth black. They lived in communities in Charleston and New Orleans and also had considerably more freedom, financial prosperity, and social status than mulattos in the Upper South. Additionally, they more often had sponsorship from white fathers. In New Orleans, through a practice called plaçage, publicly known relationships between free black women and white men lasted long after the man married a white woman. Children took the father’s surname, were supported by him, and could inherit from him. Sons were educated, sometimes abroad in France. Daughters born of plaçage often themselves became mistresses after debuting at “quadroon balls.”

Also in Louisiana, someone who was three-fourths black was considered a “sambo” (“zambo”) or a “griffe.” These terms often referred to a child of a mulatto and a black person, or an American Indian and a black person. Elsewhere in the South, especially in South Carolina, a child of American Indian and black parentage was called “mustee,” derived from the French mestis (métis) and Spanish mestizo. Occasionally, this also referred to combined Native American and European ancestries. Someone having seven out of eight great-grandparents who were black might be called a “sacatra” or a “mango.” These terms emerged when people thought that culture and character were transmitted “in the blood,” so that people of mixed descent posed a perceived social danger and often formed isolated and cohesive communities, some of which endure to the present.

Under Jim Crow, American Indian groups with mixed ancestry were variously unacknowledged, self-segregated, or classed with African Americans. Some such groups originated in the 17th and 18th centuries, when many American Indian chiefdoms had collapsed and towns and linguistically related groups tended to coalesce and gradually mingle with European and African populations. The Houma of the traditionally francophone areas of Terrebonne and Lafourche Parishes of Louisiana perhaps had this experience. They are one of many populations across the South that were neither “black nor white” during the Jim Crow era and are denied recognition by the federal government as American Indians today. The original Houma in Louisiana were displaced by the Tunica, and over the centuries they intermarried with European Americans and African Americans. Their ethnic identity now defies racial categorization. In the last census, almost 7,000 people self-identified as Houma.

Many similar groups (called “triple-mixes” by younger members) with American Indian, African, and European ancestries survive in pockets across the South, including the Melungeons of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina; the Brass Ankles, Santees, and Turks of South Carolina; the Red Bones of Louisiana; the Guineas of Barbour and Taylor Counties in West Virginia; and the Ahoskie Blues of northeastern North Carolina’s Hertford County. Not being black, white, or Indian, they often found themselves disdained by all three groups. Some “passed” as white or black and left their home areas. Many communities have long denied their ethnicity. However, in an age of multiculturalism, some members (usually those whose parents or grandparents had moved away from the original settlement areas) have begun to embrace a resurgent ethnicity and to claim a once-stigmatizing ethnonym as their own rather than as an imposed category.

Now identifying themselves as having American Indian, African American, and English, Scots-Irish, Tunisian, Portuguese, or other Mediterranean ancestry, Melungeons in the 1990s began holding reunions, publishing cookbooks, and promoting historic preservation efforts and heritage tourism to Turkey (another possible ancestral homeland). South Carolina’s Turks, sometimes called Free Moors, have a more specific origin story, tracing their ancestry to one man “of Arab descent,” Joseph Benenhaley, who fought with General Thomas Sumter in the American Revolution.

At times multiple ethnonyms existed for these groups—some more overtly disparaging than others, and some more comfortably euphemistic. Mountain people sometimes referred to their German neighbors as “Dutch” (for their language, Deutsch), so that Melungeons in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, where many Germans had settled, were also called “Black Dutch.” Some Brass Ankle communities in South Carolina preferred to emphasize their American Indian roots and call themselves “Santees.” These Creole groups problematize the usual binary categorization of “race.” Their ethnonyms’ self-ascription, or their application by outsiders, relates also to class and politics. Many communities and individuals lost more complex identities in the legal black/white caste system created by Jim Crow laws in the 1890s.

New South–Era Immigration. How did centuries of cultural creolization give way to the dichotomized society of the 20th century? After the Civil War and the end of slavery, social institutions and new laws prioritized “race” over class and ethnicity. The population of Brazil (where slavery lasted from the 16th century until 1888) has a far larger percentage of people with African ancestry than the United States. Brazilians also utilize over 500 recorded racial labels that are not applied through hypodescent, but are more flexibly related to a person’s changing phenotype (one appears lighter or darker depending on recent exposure to the sun, standing in the shade, the time of day, etc.), so that even full siblings may belong to different “races.” With so many intermediate categories, hypodescent rules did not develop in Brazil to keep “blacks” and “whites” separate. In the South, the antebellum color vocabulary (quadroon, octoroon, griffe, etc.), which reflected changing perceptions of difference as binary, passed mostly out of use in the 20th century. Segregation into “colored” and “white” carved separate domains in public facilities and buildings such as buses and trains, restaurants, restrooms, hotels, theaters, and even cemeteries. During Reconstruction, southern African Americans organized their own churches (which eventually fostered the civil rights movement). American Indians likewise set up their own churches and also church-sponsored schools rather than have their children attend segregated African American public institutions.

Despite such efforts to maintain their Indian identity, many groups faced legal attempts to abolish their peoplehood. Perhaps the most severe, and preposterous, actions were sponsored by Virginian eugenicists who wished to prevent miscegenation and limit access to white schools. The Racial Integrity Law of 1924 passed by the Commonwealth of Virginia (and not repealed until 1968) implemented a system of racial documentation to class all state residents as colored or white. Implementing the law meant denying the existence of any Indians in the state (despite their association with the oldest reservation lands in the country, granted in colonial treaties) and claiming that descendants of Pocahontas and John Rolfe were “white” and not Indians after all.

If indigenous peoples were denied their ancestral identity under Jim Crow–era legislation, what type of categorization did new immigrants face? Unlike Caribbean immigrants in the early 19th century who held a range of identities in relation to color and ancestry, “multiracial” immigrant groups, such as the Cubans, found themselves divided into separate categories in the South despite a shared nationality. As early as 1831, Cubans were making cigars in Key West. In the 1880s Vicente Martínez Ybor brought Cuban cigar manufacturing to Tampa, where Cubans founded Ybor City. More Cubans and Afro-Cubans arrived as exiles following the War of Independence from Spain (1895–98). Cuban writer José Martí had recruited support in Ybor City for that revolution (in which he died). Just over a century ago, Cuban immigrants founded the MartíMaceo Society (a mutual aid, social, and Cuban independence group) in honor of both the Euro-Cuban Martí and an Afro-Cuban hero, the revolutionary general Antonio Maceo. The society quickly divided at the turn of the 20th century along color lines. About 15 percent of the Tampa Cuban community at the time was Afro-Cuban, and they faced different assimilation challenges than other Cubans. In Florida, Afro-Cuban immigrants found a society in which they were separated from Euro-Cubans by Jim Crow laws and from African Americans by culture, language, and religion. “White” Cubans joined the El Circulo Cubano (the Cuban Club), and the two groups have yet to reunite even though, today, cousins sharing the same great-grandparents have memberships in different societies.

For several decades after the Civil War, new immigrants to the South settled on one side or the other of a single color line, but they did not encounter the organized nativism that new immigrants did in the North. Nativism—the political or social expression of hostility toward immigrants based on ethnicity, religion, class, politics, economics, or social constructions of race—had never developed in the South during the antebellum era as it did in the North because new immigrants were few outside urban areas, and they assimilated quickly. In the early New South period, southerners rejected nativist movements because of their association with the Republican Party and because southern state governments actively sought new immigrant labor. While Germans and Irish were treated as different “races” in the North, they did not arrive in large enough numbers in the South to provoke a similar interpretation or negative response (nor did the small groups of Slavic or Polish immigrants who came south). Southern Italians, however, were sometimes deemed black, and 11 Sicilians were lynched in New Orleans in 1891. Some scholars have argued that early 20th-century southern nativism against Sicilians and Jews (including the 1915 Atlanta lynching of Leo Frank) was more class- and economic-based than ethnic, but with the post–World War I xenophobia that swept the nation, the 1920s South adopted religious and racial nativism. The reborn Ku Klux Klan played on anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish sentiments as well as color prejudice. However, remarkably few new Catholic or Jewish immigrants came to the South compared with other regions as the New South remained financially devastated well into the 20th century.

Despite efforts to attract new immigrants to the region, the vast majority chose the industrial urban areas of the North or the farmlands of the Midwest and West. Some Swiss, Slavonians, Czechs, and Hungarians settled together in ethnic communities in the South, and some Irish joined older Irish communities in New Orleans, Savannah, Memphis, Charleston, Mobile, Richmond, and Augusta. By 1905 Italians had arrived in Lambeth and Daphne, Ala., and had come to Tonitown, Ark., and Texas to work in cotton and rice cultivation. Italians also took work in the sugarcane and strawberry fields of Louisiana and Mississippi. Construction on the Texas railroads attracted Chinese, who also worked in the cotton fields of Mississippi and Louisiana. Those newcomers to the postwar South started fresh in a region with the lowest standard of living in the nation.

In 1936 famed regionalist Howard Odum published Southern Regions of the United States, in which he analyzed social and demographic characteristics of the South compared with other regions. The economic legacy of the Civil War meant that the gross annual income of the average southern farm in the 1920s was half or less (under $1,500) that of farms in Iowa, North Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Montana, California, Nevada, or Arizona. In comparison with working wages across the country in 1929, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina had the lowest annual income on average (under $800). Sixty-five years after the Civil War, southern farms were the smallest in the nation—most averaging under 75 acres. Georgia and Florida had a slightly higher average, closer to 75–100 acres, but only Texas had farms closer in size to those of the western and northwest central states (150–300 acres); this partly explains why Texas attracted a higher number of immigrants in the postwar period, including Czechs, Bohemians, and Italians. However, Texas was more like the rest of the South in that fewer than 10 percent of its farms had tractors, and the percentage of its population living on farms (40 percent or more) was the greatest in the country. The South, then, had high percentages of its population living on the smallest and most underequipped farms, and making the lowest incomes from their farms, in the nation. Odum noted that between 50 and 90 percent of southern children suffered from inadequate diets leading to rickets, anemia, and the carious teeth found in about 50 percent of the schoolchildren examined. Such conditions were not what motivated immigrants to cross an ocean, and they kept European immigration to the region dramatically low.

Odum calculated that “foreign-born whites” constituted at least 17.5 percent of the population of the Northeast and between 12.5 and 17.5 percent of the populations of states such as California, Nevada, Washington, Montana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan, but that less than 2.5 percent of the white population of the southern states was foreign born in 1930. (Outside the South, only New Mexico and Oklahoma had a similar lack of new European immigrants.) Florida, such a magnet for Eastern Europeans in the late 20th century, had only 2.5 to 7.5 percent foreign-born whites, still making it the only state in the South with over 2.5 percent. Odum noted that the greatest numbers of African Americans were in the southern states, a statistic that remains true today. While seven cities in northern and midwestern states had African American populations of over 50,000, only southern states had black populations composing more than 10 percent of the state population in 1930. Mississippi’s population in that year was over 50 percent African American, and Texas and Tennessee were the only southern states to have populations that were less than 26 percent African American.

Many southern states saw their percentage of African Americans decrease during the mid-20th century, in part because of exodus. However, this trend just as quickly began reversing with African Americans’ return to the South. Since the mid-1990s, 8 of the top 10 metropolitan areas nationwide with black populations exceeding 200,000 are in the southern region. Florida was a favored destination of African American “returnees” to the South in the 1970s, attracting almost 16,000 new African American residents between 1975 and 1980, followed by a fourfold increase between 1985 and 1990. Orlando added 20,000 African American residents between 1995 and 2000 (a growth rate of over 60 percent in that segment of the city’s population), slightly more than Atlanta. In the last two decades African Americans have been more likely than European Americans to resettle in the southern region, and Georgia and North Carolina have also had especially high growth rates.

Because the South did not receive the numbers of immigrants the rest of the country did after the Civil War, creolized southern identities are some of the oldest American identities. Many black and white southerners have ancestry in the region reaching back multiple centuries. This—coupled with the fact that the U.S. Census does not indicate a date range for answering its ancestry question—in part explains why southern states had the highest numbers of persons reporting their ancestry as “United States” or “American” on the 2000 census. This identification was more common for southern states than one of the three groups most frequently self-reported for ancestral origins across the nation (German, Irish, or English, in that order). California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas were the only states in the country in which more than 1 million people reported their ancestry as American. Perhaps because of Texas’s border with Mexico, the influx of Mexican immigrants, and the accompanying emphasis on national identity, over 1,554,000 Texans claimed American ancestry alone on the 2000 census—more than in any other state (Texas also led the nation in this category in 1990). On the 2000 census, “American” was the most-reported ancestry group as a percentage of the total state populations in Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, and nonsouthern West Virginia. Over 20 percent of Kentuckians listed “American” for their ancestry, as did 17.3 percent of Tennesseans and 15.7 percent of the population of Arkansas.

That said, the censuses also strongly reveal the panoply of ethnic groups (old and new) across the South. On the 1990 census, 47 percent of those self-identifying as “Scotch-Irish” (Scots-Irish) were from the South. Of the four states whose largest ancestry groups were Irish on the 2000 census, two were in the South (Arkansas and Tennessee). Nationally, the highest percentages of African Americans remain in the Deep South. In 2000, 36 percent of Mississippi’s population was African American, followed by Louisiana (32.5 percent), South Carolina (29.5 percent), Georgia (28.7 percent), and Alabama (26 percent). The South has 69 percent of the nation’s Cuban Americans, 91 percent of its Acadian/Cajuns, 40 percent of its Hondurans, and over 40 percent of its Haitian immigrants and Haitian Americans.

Late 20th- and 21st-Century New Southerners. The largest numbers of new immigrants to arrive since the colonial period have come to the dynamic and economically sound South of the latter 20th century. After President Lyndon B. Johnson’s southern-focused War on Poverty, the South’s economic boom, and national immigration reform, the South has become particularly attractive to new immigrants who reflect current processes of globalization. Greeks and Irish continue to settle across the South, and Sudanese and Somali immigrants fleeing civil war in their homelands are establishing communities in Nashville and Atlanta; however, the bulk of the new southerners are not from Africa or Europe, but from South and Central America, the Middle East, and Asia. The 1965 Immigration Reform Bill abolished the national origins quota system and particularly favored Latin American and Asian immigration. Over the next decade almost 25 percent of new immigrants to the United States came from Asia and almost 40 percent came from Latin America (from 1980 to the mid-1990s, almost 35 percent came from Asia and over 45 percent came from Latin America).

The foreign-born population of the South quadrupled in the four decades prior to the year 2000. Atlanta is the nation’s ninth-largest metro population and one of its fastest growing. When the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture went to press in 1989, close to 25 percent of the metro Atlanta population was minority; by 2005 that figure was closer to 40 percent. Florida has the highest percentage of foreign-born residents (16.7 percent of its total population) and also has attracted migration from ethnic groups within the country. It is now home to one of every two people of Italian ancestry and to two of every three Jews living in the South. In numbers of foreign-born residents, Florida is followed by Texas (14 percent of its population is foreign born), Georgia, and North Carolina. Howard Odum noted that in 1930 Georgia had only 47 employed persons who were Mexicans, and North Carolina had only 10. The changes in the span of one lifetime are dramatic: the 2000 census records 224,000 (foreign-born) Mexican immigrants in Georgia and 199,000 in North Carolina, with some counties in each state experiencing between 200 to 400 percent increases.

Current demographic changes in the South make discussion of a biracial South outmoded. After the Southwest, the South has the highest proportion of Hispanics/Latinos in the nation. The Census Bureau considers “Hispanic” to mean a person of Latin American descent (including persons of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Central and South American origin) living in the United States who may be of any “race” (which the bureau oddly defines as “White,” “Black or African American,” “American Indian,” “Asian,” etc.). The term “Hispanic” refers to the influence of Spanish language and culture. “Latino” arose in the late 1980s and 1990s to emphasize the indigenous cultures and identities of Central and South America independent of Spain (many Latinos have Indian identities in their nations of origin). Across the nation in the 1990s, the Hispanic population increased by 57.9 percent (at a time when the U.S. population on a whole saw an increase of 13.2 percent). Hispanics now compose a larger proportion of the American population than do African Americans. Despite these trends, the general public, the media, and academics remain comfortable discussing the labels “black” and “white” as a kind of default categorization of all things southern. Although such a categorization of the region is intellectually habitual, it is shorter lived than the history of the South and is month by month becoming more passé.

The surge in North Carolina’s Latino population over the last decade is in part due to the North Carolina Growers Association and other employers recruiting thousands of workers through the 1989 federal H2A “guest worker” program. Prior to the 1990s the state’s farmworkers were predominantly African American. They are now 90 percent Latino—a rapid demographic change apparent in other southern states. As African Americans increasingly leave farmwork for service sector jobs, they are replaced predominantly by Mexicans. They are also displaced in poultry plants, other agricultural processing positions, and light manufacturing and construction by Mexican laborers (these trends are also common in Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama). In addition to documented guest worker program recruits, perhaps 50 percent of migrant laborers in North Carolina are working illegally. Their numbers are much more difficult to confirm, as are the percentages of such guest workers who remain and make the South their permanent home. As the labor force has changed, wages have declined. Neither expecting nor demanding benefits, Mexican laborers have accepted such low wages that the average farmworker in North Carolina now earns less than $8,000 a year.

Before the recent surge of Mexican immigrants, Cubans had been one of the largest, and oldest, Latin American groups in the South. In the 2000 census, two-thirds of all Cubans in the United States live in Florida. Old enclaves such as Ybor City remain. Today, Ybor is within the metropolitan area of Tampa and is still home to Cuban social clubs, Catholic churches, grocery stores, bakeries, and Cuban restaurants such as the Columbia. Opened in 1905 by Cuban immigrant Casimiro Hernandez Sr., the restaurant seats 1,700 guests, features flamenco dancing performances, and serves favorite Cuban dishes such as yellow rice and chicken, boliche, and flan. Ybor still has a residential area, but the main street shopping area is now an art district and a popular venue for weekend nightlife. A statue of an immigrant family stands in Ybor’s Centennial Park, and a museum to cigar factory workers is located near preserved workers’ cottages. Many Cuban Social and Mutual Aid Society buildings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries remain (El Pasaje, or the Cherokee Club; El Centro Asturiano, a society for both Italians and Cubans; and the Cuban Club).

Descendants of these early Cuban immigrants to Tampa remain ethnically aware, but they were quickly upwardly mobile and became quite distinct from newer Cuban communities in south Florida. After the Castro revolution of 1959 and until the mid-1970s, approximately 16,000 Cubans risked their lives to come to Florida as balseros (on homemade rafts) without permission from the Cuban or American governments. Many more came in the famous 1980 Mariel sealift. The last large influx of Cubans came in 1994 when Fidel Castro announced that anyone wanting to leave Cuba was free to do so. Faced with assimilating the over 35,000 Cubans who did, the U.S. government returned rafters collected by the U.S. Coast Guard to Cuba.

Fourth and fifth generations of the Hernandez Gonzmart family who operate the Columbia Restaurant in Tampa, Fla. The original restaurant opened in 1905 as a corner café frequented by Cuban cigar workers (Photograph courtesy of the Columbia Restaurant)

South Florida Cubans remain deeply committed to political goals for their homeland and to bringing relatives to the United States, as sadly demonstrated by the 2000 case of Elian Gonzalez, a six-year-old boy who was returned to his father in Cuba after his mother drowned trying to bring him to Florida. Cubans have transformed Miami into a Cuban city in a relatively short time. Once the destination of Yankee developers, Miami is now the center for Caribbean culture in America. Calle Ocho (Eighth Street) features Cuban restaurants, freshly squeezed guarapo (sugarcane juice), late-night mambo music, and salsa and merengue dancing. In Hialeah and Little Havana in Dade County, specialty shops and caterers provide dresses and festive Cuban foods for quinceañera parties (coming-of-age celebrations for 15-year-old girls). Diverse religious practices from Cuba also characterize Cuban populations in south Florida, including Santeria (the Way of the Saints). Estimates suggest that 90 percent of Cuban Jews came to the United States in the 1960s. Approximately 5,000 to 6,000 Hispanic Jews live in Miami. Members of the Circulo Cubano-Hebreo (the Cuban-Hebrew Social Circle) emphasize themes of homeland and diaspora from Cuba in their ethnic identity.

In 2000 Florida had one of the largest non-Mexican Latino populations in the nation. Although Puerto Ricans have established communities in every southern state since 1980, more live in Florida than in any other state in the region. South Florida has the largest Nicaraguan population outside Managua, and Nicaraguans are perhaps the second-largest Hispanic population in south Florida. Fleeing political upheaval at home, Nicaraguans are ethnically diverse. Those of Miskito identity descend from indigenous Nicaraguans who speak their own language in addition to English and Spanish and mostly come from the Atlantic Coast. Creole/Miskito Nicaraguans speak English and often Spanish, were missionized by Moravians, and their community in south Florida remains organized around the Moravian Prince of Peace Church in Miami. Of Nicaraguan immigrants to Florida, the Creoles came earliest, beginning in the 1950s, and many are now professionals. Mestizos speak Spanish primarily, are Catholic, and come from the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua. Most arrived only after the Sandinistas came to power in 1979, but estimates of their population in the Miami area reach as high as 400,000. In south Florida the various Nicaraguan ethnic groups mix less with each other than with other Latinos. They often live in neighborhoods with Hondurans and Costa Ricans, but also near Salvadorans and Guatemalans.

New groups of immigrants from the Central and South Americas are shaping new identities in the South with members of other Latino nations, with Jamaicans, Haitians, and other Caribbean new southerners, and through their assimilation with preexisting southern ethnic groups. The next few decades will see the emergence of new Creoles and mestizo cultures in the South’s subregions. The 1970s saw some of the first Spanish-speaking Protestant churches in the South, and just 30 years later, Latino evangelicals outnumber Episcopalians and Presbyterians in the South. In North Carolina and other southern states, Roman Catholics outnumber Methodists (one of the three main evangelical denominations in the region). Fiestas are becoming as common on the southern cultural landscape as barbecue cook-offs, peanut festivals, and blue-grass jamborees. Across the South, annual Hispanic festivals—like the Gran Fiesta de Fort Worth, the Fiesta Latina in Asheville, N.C., the Hispanic Festival in Augusta, Ga., and the Festival Hispano in North Charleston, S.C.—are also increasingly appealing to non-Hispanic participants. The character of such festivals demonstrates how immigrant communities assimilate to the southern region and also gauges how our perceptions of what is “southern” continue to evolve.

The U.S. Census reveals that the Asian population of the South grew dramatically in the latter half of the 20th century. The Census Bureau’s “Asian” category racializes what are very distinct ethnic identities by subsuming Asian Indians as well as Chinese, Filipinos, Nepalese, Japanese, and Samoans and other Pacific Islanders into the same category, and it is important to note which particular South and East Asian groups have favored the South. While East Asians more commonly settled in California and Hawaii, since the 1970s Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese, Hmong, and Asian Indians have been immigrating or migrating to the South so rapidly that close to 20 percent of all Asian Americans now reside in the region. (This figure is almost double the number in the Midwest and about the same as the percentage in the Northeast.) Asian Americans now constitute approximately 4.2 percent of the American population, and this national average was exceeded in one southern state (Virginia has 4.3 percent). However, in only nine states did Asians represent less than 1 percent of the total population, and three of those were in the South (Alabama, Kentucky, and Mississippi).

Nationwide, South Asian Indians are one of the top-five immigrant groups in the early 2000s after Mexicans and along with Filipinos, Chinese, and non-Mexican Latin Americans. Indians also form some of the most highly educated immigrant communities (about 70 percent have a college degree and 40 percent have a master’s degree or doctorate). Arriving mostly after immigration reform in 1965, Indians have one of the highest per capita incomes for any ethnic group and have become a significant presence in the medical, engineering, technology, and computing professions as well as the hotel industry. Texas, Georgia, and Florida have developed particularly significant populations, but Hindu temples dot the southern landscape from Baton Rouge to Nashville to Richmond, and celebrations of India’s Independence Day are making appearances across the region. Houston is home to multiple Hindu cremation service providers, at least 20 sari boutiques, 15 Indian-owned hair salons, and 20 jewelers in addition to numerous Indian groceries and over a dozen video stores that import the latest Bollywood productions. Known as the Bible Belt or the Sunbelt, the South also has been called the “beauty pageant belt,” and first- and second-generation immigrants sponsor an annual Miss India Georgia pageant in Atlanta (the subject of a 1997 documentary). Dallas, Houston, and other southern cities also hold annual Indian and South Asian beauty pageants.

South Asia includes India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Burma (Myanmar), but many immigrants from varied nations and cultures join Indian American communities in the United States. When India alone has over 500 distinct languages and five major religions (Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, and Jainism), diversity is thus reduced by embracing a “South Asian” identity in a new land. In 2005 the University of Florida established the country’s first Center for the Study of Hindu Traditions. (The only other center of its kind globally is at Oxford University in England.) Numerous Indian American associations exist across the South from Austin, Tex., to Columbia, S.C., and at many universities.

Until the arrival of Korean war brides and adopted war orphans in the 1950s, the Chinese of Texas and the Mississippi Delta were the earliest and most significant East Asian presence in the South. Most Koreans coming to the South came after the 1965 immigration reform and settled in urban areas, where they own small businesses or work in manufacturing or professional and technical fields. Between the 1990 and 2000 censuses, the Korean population of the South grew nearly 53 percent. Virginia is home to the largest number, followed by Georgia and Florida. While many arrive directly from Korea, others are moving south from the American West. Korean Baptist churches are increasing in numbers, while Korean Presbyterians constitute one of the fastest-growing Protestant denominations in the South.

The Vietnam War, of course, spurred Vietnamese immigration to the United States. After California and Texas, Louisiana, with its Catholic French heritage, was a particularly attractive destination for immigrants from a former French colony. One of the largest Vietnamese enclaves in the United States is the Versailles community in New Orleans, home to multiple Vietnamese churches, Buddhist temples, and Vietnamese groceries. Approximately 12,000 Vietnamese lived in New Orleans in the early 2000s. Many Vietnamese also settled along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi in the early 1980s to work as fishers and in seafood plants. Many of the estimated 10,000 Vietnamese in the area have opened successful restaurants and coffeehouses.

With a population of 135,000, the Vietnamese are the largest East Asian group in Texas, followed by the Chinese and the Filipinos, the latter of whom number to 60,000 in that state. The first significant Filipino immigration to Texas followed the Spanish-American War in 1898, when the United States acquired the Philippines. Many immigrants to the United States at that time chose Texas because of its climate. After World War II, Filipino men who had served in the U.S. armed forces could become citizens, and some of them immigrated to Texas. English had long been one of the Philippines’ official languages, and Filipino professionals familiar with the language quickly followed. Filipino Texans have formed their own ethnic associations and continue to teach their children Filipino art, embroidery, dance, and musical forms, but they also have long joined in wider community events—for example, by sponsoring floats in the Fiesta San Antonio. Nationwide, Filipinos are one of the largest immigrant groups, and in two southern states they compose the largest percentages of East Asian populations: in Florida they number just over 54,000 and in Virginia almost 50,000. The next-largest Filipino populations in the South are in Georgia (11,000) and North Carolina (almost 10,000).

The Japanese have come south quite slowly. By 1940 a few hundred Japanese were living as rice farmers in Texas, but no other concentrated communities were noted in the census of that year. Two of the World War II internment camps for Japanese Americans, holding more than 15,000 people, were located in Arkansas, but the vast majority left at the war’s conclusion. The 1950 census recorded only 3,000 in the South. Today, North Carolina alone is home to over 5,600 Japanese Americans, almost twice as many Filipinos, 12,600 Koreans, 15,600 Vietnamese, more than 18,000 Chinese, and over 26,000 Asian Indians.

Muslim Arab Americans have also become more visible in the South in the last few decades, although Christian Arab and Middle Eastern Americans have been a part of southern communities since the late 19th century. Florida and Texas are home to Syrian and Lebanese Americans whose ancestors immigrated between the 1880s and the 1940s. During that time period, most immigrants called themselves “Syrian” (Lebanon only achieved independence in 1946) and came to the rural South for farmwork or to establish businesses in Atlanta, Birmingham, New Orleans, and eventually Miami. Now called “Lebanese Americans,” the descendants of these original immigrants constitute a significant proportion of Arab Americans living across the country. Ten percent are from a variety of Muslim sects, while the majority are Christian. Their churches include the Chaldean Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Maronite, and Melkite, and in the South many Arab Americans have joined Roman Catholic as well as Baptist and Methodist congregations. Jacksonville, Miami, Palm Beach, and Tampa have some of the largest communities in Florida, and Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio are home to those in Texas. In Vicksburg, Miss., the focus of the Lebanese community is the St. George Antiochan Orthodox Church. In Mobile, Ala., some of the best-known Lebanese surnames include Kahalley, Kalifeh, Saad, Sudeiha, Naman, and Zoghby.

From 1990 to 2000 the Arab population increased by over 50 percent in North Carolina and Virginia and by almost 60 percent in Florida. In 2000, 26 percent of the Arab population in the United States lived in the South. While Arab Americans have more commonly settled in urban areas of California, New York, and Michigan, three southern states have become home to new, large Arab American populations: Florida foremost, followed by Texas and Virginia. The Arab American populations of Florida and Texas have more than doubled since the 1980 census, in part because of a growing presence of Egyptians, Jordanians, and Palestinians. Having a smaller population than Florida or Texas, Virginia has nonetheless quadrupled its Arab American population since 1980, largely because of the immigration of North Africans. More than 8,000 Kurds live in Nashville (more than any other American city) and affectionately call their new home “Little Kurdistan.”

Arab Americans place a strong emphasis on education, and almost 40 percent obtain a bachelor’s degree (compared with the national average for Americans of 24 percent). In many cases, new Arab Muslim women immigrants are more likely to assimilate aspects of southern and American culture than are males. Many Muslim women live as professionals in America yet, within their ethnic communities, are expected to succumb to cultural visions of their inequality if they maintain a faith that does not readily syncretize. Rejecting (for women) many of the opportunities that immigrants have intentionally sought, some Muslim men have attempted to erect physical barriers in front of women’s prayer space in southern and Appalachian mosques. Young women have instead made attempts to blend their faith with southern traditions. In 2005 the first recognized chapter of the Muslim sorority Gamma Gamma Chi was established in Alexandria, Va. A chapter is also planned for the University of Kentucky in Lexington (a city with a Muslim population of almost 2,500) to blend studying the Koran with sisterhood.

As immigrants do around the world, new immigrants to the South often maintain links with their homeland. They frequently foster the immigration of friends and extended family to join them in their new home. They may also import religious practitioners, educators, and performers of the expressive arts to teach their children their own cultural traditions and to create a focus for a community with other nationals. Many immigrants save money to send to relatives in the homeland and to return there for visits. When people maintain a cultural identity and social, economic, and political links to their homeland but establish a new home abroad, social scientists refer to the processes involved as “transnationalism.” Immigrants from the same country may have had different ethnic identities within their home nation states but, finding a newly shared ethnic identity with other nationals in a new land, create social and benevolent associations to foster community and assist recent arrivals. The form and focus of transnational communities entails particular worldviews and shapes the extent to which a new immigrant group assimilates and new syncretized cultural forms develop.

Of the many groups now establishing transnational communities in the South, some have been more surprising to their new neighbors than others. Nationwide, Hmong immigrants from Laos (by way of Thailand) have earned the reputation of the “least assimilatable” immigrants. They have settled in specially chosen communities across the rural South in towns like Mount Airy, N.C., and their animistic traditions (sometimes involving the slaughter of animals in the front yard or the living room of rented apartments) have provoked astonishment. However, many Hmong immigrants have also joined local Christian churches or formed their own congregations. In Mount Airy, Andy Griffith’s hometown, they enjoy their new community’s annual Mayberry Days festival, which celebrates the Andy Griffith Show. Haitians have burgeoning populations in south Florida and the Carolinas. Miami has received the most immigrants of rural peasant backgrounds. To support Vodou rituals in Miami’s working-class Little Haiti, goats and poultry are brought from agricultural markets as far away as south Alabama. Yet, many immigrants from Haiti are middle-class and are also successfully integrating into Floridian society at the highest levels. In 2001 Josaphat (Joe) Celestin became the first Haitian-born mayor of a U.S. city, the city of North Miami. In 2000 Phillip Brutus became the first Haitian-born elected representative to the Florida legislature, and Fred Séraphin, a native of Haiti, is now a judge in the Miami-Dade County Courts system.

In addition to new Asian and Latino immigrants, the 21st-century South also attracts newcomers from nations whose immigrants either have not traditionally sought a home in the region or whose predecessors had come before only through slavery (south Florida, for example, now has Icelandic and Igbo cultural associations). In the early 2000s, Eastern Europeans, especially those from Ukraine, Poland, and Russia, have the highest rates of immigration (among Europeans generally) to the United States, and increasing numbers are coming south. Since the terrorist attacks of September 2001, longer Immigration and Naturalization Service processing times for popular destinations such as New York City and Washington, D.C., have led to more immigrants choosing southern cities such as Nashville, Tampa, and Charlotte. Charlotte, a city of slightly more than 600,000, has over 65 ethnic associations engaging, among other groups, French Americans, Arabs, Iranians, Jamaicans, Cambodians, Somalians, Finns, Turks, Ethiopians, Welsh, Armenians, Nubians, Eritreans, and Ecuadorians. Among African immigrants to the United States, Nigerians have had the highest numbers in the early 2000s. After New York, Texas attracts the most Nigerians of any state, and of the 12 top destinations for new arrivals, Georgia ranks sixth, Florida seventh, and North Carolina eleventh. Ethnic identities such as Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba (just the most prominent of hundreds of ethnic groups in a nation created by colonial administrators rather than from within) remain strong in Nigeria and translate into distinct cultural associations across the Atlantic. However, despite a recent history of ethnic civil war (1967–70) in their native land, even these newcomers sponsor a united and national Miss Nigeria U.S.A. Pageant out of Atlanta.

Current studies of globalization focus on economic and social trends that enhance the mobility of people, the exchange of ideas, and the rapid increase in communication and trade internationally. Anthropologist James Peacock has noted that current trends in globalization are in some ways a return to colonial and post-Revolutionary patterns. Southern ports linked trade routes between North America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa, constituting early globalization in the 17th and 18th centuries. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the South was less globally and more regionally focused on an identity and way of life that was in contrast to what was “northern.” In the later 20th century, as cultural dualism evolved to pluralism and now multiculturalism, the South reglobalized through commercial exports such as Coca-Cola, CNN, Bank of America, Delta Airlines, and FedEx, through the export of political leaders such as Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, and through the reception of new southerners from around the world. Global influences are now reshaping the South and southern identity as they once shaped the colonial region. This volume offers a sampling from the four centuries of immigration, creolization, and ethnic life that have forged, and continue to define, the South and its many subregions.

CELESTE RAY
University of the South

Roger Abrahams, Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South (1992); Charles S. Aiken, in Homelands: A Geography of Culture and Place across America, ed. Richard Nostrand and Lawrence Estaville (2001); Frederik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference (1969); Mark Bauman, Dixie Diaspora: An Anthology of Southern Jewish History (2006); Shane K. Bernard, The Cajuns: Americanization of a People (2003); Marilyn Dell Brady, The Asian Texans (2004); Carl A. Brasseaux, Keith P. Fontenot, and Claude F. Oubre, Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country (1994); Allan Burns, Maya in Exile: Guatemalans in Florida (1993); Edward Campbell, ed., Before Freedom Came: African-American Life in the Antebellum South (1991); Barbara Carpenter, ed., Ethnic Heritage in Mississippi (1992); Robert Chaudenson, Creolization of Language and Culture (2001); Lucy Cohen, Chinese in the Post–Civil War South: A People with out a History (1984); Ceclia Conway, in Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation, ed. John C. Inscoe (2001); Clare Dannenberg, Southern Anthropologist (Fall 2004); Virginia Domínguez, White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (1986); James H. Dorman, ed., Creoles of Color of the Gulf South (1996); Toyin Falola and Matt Childs, eds., The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (2004); Leon Fink, The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (2003); Andrew K. Frank, Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier (2005); Jack Forbes, Black Africans and Native Americans: Color, Race, and Caste in the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (1988); Jillian E. Galle and Amy L. Young, eds., Engendering African American Archaeology: A Southern Perspective (2004); Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (1998); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (2005), Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1992); Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803 (1997); Arnold Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, eds., Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (1992); Joseph Holloway, ed., Africanisms in American Culture (1990); Thomas Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718–1819 (1999); Samuel C. Hyde, ed., Plain Folk of the South Revisited (1997); Charles Joyner, Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture (1999); Sybil Kein, ed., Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color (2000); David La Vere, Contrary Neighbors: Southern Plains and Removed Indians in Indian Territory (2000); Daniel C. Littlefield, in Bridging Southern Cultures, ed. John Lowe (2005), Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (1981); Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas, eds., The Creation of the British Atlantic World (2005); Jesse McKee, Ethnicity in Contemporary America: A Geographical Appraisal (2000); Gary B. Mills, The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color (1977), National Genealogical Society Quarterly (December 1990); J. Kenneth Morland, ed., The Not So Solid South: Anthropological Studies in a Regional Subculture (1971); Howard Odum, Southern Regions of the United States (1936); Ted Ownby, ed., Black and White Cultural Interaction in the Antebellum South (1993); James Peacock, Harry Watson, and Carrie Matthews, eds., The American South in a Global World (2005); Theda Perdue, “Mixed Blood” Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (2003); William S. Pollitzer, The Gullah People and Their African Heritage (1999); Robert Seto Quan, Lotus among the Magnolias: The Mississippi Chinese (1982); Celeste Ray, Southern Heritage on Display: Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism (2003); Ben Sandmel and Rick Olivier, Zydeco (1999); Jon F. Sensback, A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763–1840 (1998); Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (1987); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (1992); Thomas Tweed, Southern Cultures (Summer 2002); Thomas Walls, The Japanese Texans (1996); Sheila S. Walker, ed., African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas (2001); Martha Ward, Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau (2004); Walter Williams, ed., Southeastern Indians since the Removal Era (1979); Peter Wood, Southern Exposure (Summer 1988).

 

American Indians

People first came to the South about 13,000 years ago in the Paleoindian period as nomadic hunters and gatherers who used Clovis stone tools, erected temporary dwellings or camped in rock shelters and caves, and hunted mastodons and ground sloths. With the extinction of such megafauna at the end of the Pleistocene, southerners of the Archaic period (about 8000 B.C. to 1000 B.C.) became less migratory and eventually more sedentary through their use of horticulture. They grew sunflowers (for seeds), squash, and gourds and also left huge middens from shellfish consumption both in coastal areas and along southern rivers. The Woodland period (about 1000 B.C. to 1000 A.D. and until European contact in some areas) saw the introduction of corn, the construction of mortuary mounds, and the beginnings of a hierarchical society that developed into chiefdoms.

When Juan Ponce de León arrived in Florida in 1513, some native southerners were living with Woodland traditions while others had embraced a Mississippian lifestyle, a culture unique to the South and dating from about 1000 to 1600 A.D. Mississippian people lived in square houses, used shell-tempered pottery, made cane basketry, had a symbolic system scholars call the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, and built flat-topped pyramidal mounds on which they erected religious structures or dwellings for their male and female chiefs (as at Etowah and Ocmulgee in Georgia, Moundville in Alabama, Emerald Mound in Mississippi, and Town Creek in North Carolina). A sedentary lifestyle and growing populations depended on intensive agriculture and a staple diet of corn, beans, and squash. Competition for valley farmlands led to increased warfare. Labor specialization led to the development of religious and artistic classes, and because of such stratification and the possibility that some chiefdoms were paramount over others, many scholars believe the Mississippian societies are more aptly called protostates than chiefdoms.

Native southerners first encountered Europeans through the explorations and colonization attempts of Ponce de León and Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón. Arriving at Bradenton on Florida’s west coast in 1539, Hernando de Soto’s expedition through the South to the Mississippi River brought bloodshed, enslavement, and disease. Native southerners’ susceptibility to introduced European diseases (smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, typhoid, diphtheria, and others) was a prime factor in depopulation rates, which, by some conservative estimates, accounted for well over one-third of the population in the 18th century alone and for perhaps as much as 70 percent in the period from 1500 to 1600. With depopulation came a loss of political and religious leaders, and the Mississippian towns declined. Not all societies had documented epidemics; the chiefdoms of the Calusa and Apalachee of Florida were noted exceptions. Indigenous societies in the Southeast were very culturally diverse; those in the interior were most markedly different from coastal cultures. As chiefdoms collapsed and recombined, social organization became more focused on language-related ethnic or national groupings. The main cultural groupings that survived the colonial era (1600–1776) included Algonkians (probably some of the oldest southerners), speakers of Iroquoian languages (thought to have moved into the Carolinas and southern Appalachian Mountains during the Woodland period), Caddoan speakers (concentrated in western Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma), Siouans (scattered across the South from the Gulf Coast to Georgia and the Carolinas), and Muskogean speakers (speakers of the most dominant language group who lived from the Gulf Coast to Kentucky).

While small, coastal native nations were often destroyed through disease, warfare, or enslavement, larger nations in the southern interior endured through their greater population numbers and distance from European settlements. Some prospered through the deerskin trade of the 18th century, and groups such as the Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Catawba raided other native communities to sell captives to English, French, and Dutch slavers who shipped them to the Caribbean and to coastal plantations in Virginia, South Carolina, and French Louisiana. American Indians’ abilities to play European powers against each other ceased with the Treaty of Paris in 1763, through which Spain lost Florida and France lost its North American empire. While the Catawba supported the Patriots in the Revolution, many Native American tribes fought against them, and when the British left the South in 1781, American Indians were faced with the new United States and its zeal for expansion.

American Indians of European American descent, who were not uncommon because of intermarriage with frontier traders, became a new “mixed-blood” class and were expected to mediate between Native American communities and the new Americans. While such persons were considered Indians because of American Indians’ use of matrilineal descent, they were sometimes able to avoid losing their homes during the Removal Period by, for example, claiming to be “Black Dutch” or through their Scottish ancestry and kin. They were often enculturated to American ways of thinking, adopted Christianity, established schools, shaped national governments imitative of those of European Americans, and grew cash crops using black slave labor. Those American Indian groups most outwardly assimilated became known as the Five Civilized Tribes (the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and eventually the Seminole), and their “mixed-blood” members often signed away their lands in disastrous treaties with the U.S. government.

Alfred Boisseau, Louisiana Indians Walking along a Bayou, 1847, oil on canvas (New Orleans Museum of Art, gift of William E. Groves, 56.34)

With President Andrew Jackson’s “Indian wars” and his Indian Removal Act of 1830, native southern nations suffered the loss of ancestral homelands and further depopulation. The first to be removed west of the Mississippi under the 1830 act, the Choctaw, lost perhaps a third of their people, and estimates suggest at least a quarter of the Cherokee died who embarked on the 1838–39 Trail of Tears. Several hundred Seminoles managed to remain in south Florida after resisting Removal through war, but most were marched west. In Indian Territory, removed members of the Five Civilized Tribes reestablished communities and national governments and many attended mission schools. At the beginning of the Civil War, all five tribes signed treaties with the Confederacy, but opinions about the war were greatly divided among the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole. The Reconstruction government deemed all previous treaties with the tribes—and the rights the tribes had held therein—to be forfeit, and each nation was required to negotiate new treaties, through which they suffered significant land losses. These losses continued after the 1887 Dawes Act reallocated lands of American Indians to non-Indians under the pretense of enabling the Indians “better assimilation.” The survival of any Indian Territory outside U.S. government control ended when Oklahoma became the 46th state in 1907.

Those native southerners who had avoided Removal most often retained their identity, language, and community through isolation in an increasingly biracial South. In the Jim Crow period they avoided segregated schools and churches by creating their own. Since the 1960s, ongoing cultural revivals have heightened their profile once again on the southern cultural landscape and renewed the efforts of many tribes to achieve state and federal recognition. While emphasizing their local traditions and identity, southeastern Indians also share many cultural traditions. Most play stickball or the oldest game in the United States, chunkey, in which players throw long, greased sticks at smooth granite or quartz disks rolled across the ground. Stomp dances, religious dances performed on ceremonial, or stomp, grounds, are also common to southeastern tribes with variations. In most stomp dances, men dance and sing while women provide the rhythmic accompaniment to the songs by dancing with “shell-shakers,” which are box tortoise shells that are filled with pebbles, laced together, and strapped to the lower legs (although banned on some ceremonial grounds, tin cans often replace tortoise shells today).

Many southeastern tribes had clan systems. Most clan systems are exogamous and, among the Cherokee and the Seminole, endogamous marriages are still discouraged. Clans are matrilineal; a mother must have clan membership for her children to have a clan. Some tribes have largely forgotten their clans. However, recent cultural revival (related to a general emphasis on identity in America’s multicultural age) has inspired efforts to return to clan systems. Many American Indian tribes have adopted the Plains-style powwows fostered by Pan-Indianism, yet blend this tradition with their own southeastern songs, clothing, tribe-specific dances, and other public rituals. Through powwows, tribes of contested status reassert their own local customs and identities to other American Indians and to non-Indians. Both tribe-specific and intertribal powwows have become potent means for tribes to regain control of their own representations and the interpretation of their own heritage.

Today, American Indians constitute just under 1 percent of the U.S. population, but several of the largest American Indian groups are in the South, including the Chickasaw, Seminole, Lumbee (not a federally recognized tribe), and Cherokee. The Cherokee is the largest group in the South, according to the U.S. Census (which includes Oklahoma in the southern region). The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in western North Carolina, which strictly requires one-sixteenth Cherokee ancestry for membership, has almost 13,000 tribal citizens, with 7,400 living on reservation land. The Eastern Band is far outnumbered by descendants of those removed to Indian Territory who can claim Cherokee citizenship by simply tracing an ancestor listed as Cherokee on the Dawes rolls (lists compiled between 1898 and 1914 of members of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole tribes in Indian Territory). The Cherokee tribal government recognizes close to 260,000 citizens, with approximately 90,000 of these living within the jurisdictional boundaries of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians (also in Oklahoma) has approximately 16,000 citizens. However, hundreds of thousands more Americans consider themselves of Cherokee descent or claim a Cherokee ancestor, although most are too far removed to qualify for tribal membership.

MAP 1. Precontact Southeastern Tribal Locations (Adapted from Rachel A. Bonney and J. Anthony Paredes, eds., Anthropologists and Indians in the New South [2001])

MAP 2. Officially Recognized American Indian Tribes of the South (Adapted from Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southeast [2001])

Southerners are more likely to assert American Indian ancestry than European or African Americans in other regions. As sociologist John Shelton Reed has noted, the most common genealogical lore entails a mythic “Cherokee Princess in the family tree.” In the late 1990s only 2 percent of southerners identified as Indian, but 40 percent claimed some native ancestry, almost double the number (22 percent) who claimed descent from a Confederate soldier. Close to 725,000 southerners claimed American Indian identities on the 2000 U.S. Census, and well over 1 million more claimed to be American Indian and another identity, but relatively few of either category are actually enrolled members of a tribe.

Of the 562 federally recognized American Indian nations in the United States, only 13 are in the South (excluding Oklahoma). The southern states are home to about 60 of the almost 230 tribes lacking federal recognition. Despite a history of Jim Crow laws that in effect denied the continued existence of Indian communities, southern states are also home to the majority of the tribes that have state recognition alone. Among these, Alabama has 9 state-only recognized tribes, followed by Virginia with 8 and North Carolina with 6 (and 14 other groups that have petitioned for recognition). Louisiana has at least 5 tribes recognized only by the state and a Biloxi-Chitimacha Confederation of Muskogees that encompasses three communities located in Terrebonne and Lafourche Parishes. In 2005 two tribes became the first to be recognized by the South Carolina Division of Vital Records: the Waccamaw and the Pee Dee Nation of Upper South Carolina.

To force rapid assimilation during the 1940s and 1950s, the federal government pursued a program to terminate relations with Indian nations and end both their self-government and federally sponsored social services. However, by the early 1960s a policy of self-determination had replaced termination, and tribes began regaining their sovereignty and reestablishing government-to-government relations with the United States. Today, federal recognition of tribal status requires demonstration that a tribe has existed as a distinct community since first contact with Europeans. In the case of combined tribes, evidence must confirm that members descend from historic tribes. For example, the Tunica and the Biloxi of Avoyelles Parish, La., merged with remnants of the neighboring Avoyel, Ofo, and Choctaw tribes over the centuries to form a new group with identifiable traditions and gained recognition as the Tunica-Biloxi in 1981.

To receive services from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a tribe must have federal recognition. Such recognition also signifies status to non-Indian neighbors and to other Indian nations. Federally recognized tribes have sovereignty and form their own governments. They have the power to make and enforce both civil and criminal laws; to tax; to license, zone, and regulate activities; to engage in commercial activity; and to exclude persons (Indian and non-Indian) from tribal territories. The federally recognized tribes in the southern states include the once “terminated” Catawba Indian Nation of South Carolina, the Eastern Band of Cherokee (North Carolina), the Mississippi Band of Choctaw (Mississippi), the Seminole and Miccosukee (Florida), and the Poarch Band of Creeks (Alabama). Of the three tribes recognized in Texas—the Tigua, the Kickapoo Traditional tribe, and the Alabama-Coushatta—only the latter are considered part of the southeastern culture area. Louisiana has four sovereign nations: the Chitimacha, the Coushatta, the Jena Band of Choctaw Indians, and the Tunica-Biloxi.

CELESTE RAY
University of the South

James Axtell, The Indians’ New South: Cultural Change in the Colonial Southeast (1997); Karen Blu, The Lumbee Problem: The Making of an American Indian People (1980); Cecile Elkins Carter, Caddo Indians: Where We Come From (1995); Robert Conley, The Cherokee Nation: A History (2005); Clyde Ellis, Luke Eric Lassiter, and Gary H. Dunham, Powwow (2005); Robbie Ethridge and Charles Hudson, eds., The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540–1760 (2002); John Finger, The Eastern Band of Cherokees, 1819–1900 (1984); Raymond Fogelson, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 14: Southeast (2004); Andrew Frank, Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier (2005); Patricia Galloway, Choctaw Genesis, 1500–1700 (1995), ed., The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and “Discovery” in the Southeast (1997); Arrell Gibson, ed., America’s Exiles: Indian Colonization in Oklahoma (1976); James B. Griffin, Archaeology of the Eastern United States (1952); Charles Hudson, The Catawba Nation (1970), The Southeastern Indians (1976), Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South’s Ancient Chiefdoms (1997); Alice Kehoe, America before the European Invasions (2002); Patricia Lerch, Museum Anthropology (June 1992); Scott Malcolm-son, One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (2000); Bonnie G. McEwan, ed., Indians of the Greater Southeast: Historical Archaeology and Ethnohistory(2000); Jerald T. Milanich, Florida’s Indians from Ancient Times to the Present (1998); Christopher Oakley, Keeping the Circle: American Indian Identity in Eastern North Carolina, 1885–2004 (2005); Anthony J. Paredes, ed., Indians of the South eastern United States in the Late Twentieth Century (1992); Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southeast (2001); Timothy Pertulla, The Caddo Nation: Archaeological and Ethnohistoric Perspectives (1992); John Shelton Reed, Southern Cultures (Spring 1997); George Roth, in Anthropologists and Indians in the New South, ed. Rachel Bonney and Anthony Paredes (2001); Helen Rountree, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture (1989); Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (2004); Gerald Sider, Lumbee Indian Histories: Race, Ethnicity, and Indian Identity in the Southern United States (1993); John R. Swanton, The Indians of the Southeastern United States (1946); Brent Weisman, Unconquered People: Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee Indians (1999); Walter Williams, ed., Southeastern Indians since the Removal Era (1979); Peter Wood, Gregory Waselkov, and Thomas Hatley, eds., Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast (1989); J. Leitch Wright, The Only Land They Knew: The Tragic Story of the American Indians in the Old South (1981).

 

Europeans

Spanish explorers were the first Europeans to contact native southerners and initiate settlements that make the South the oldest European-inhabited region of the United States. Juan Ponce de León discovered La Florida in 1513. The first European to discover the Chesapeake Bay, Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, founded the unsuccessful colony of San Miguel de Gaundape in South Carolina (thought by some scholars to perhaps be the first place to have African slaves in North America). He died there in 1526. Hernando de Soto arrived on Florida’s west coast in 1539, explored the South from the Carolinas to Texas, and died in present-day Arkansas near the Mississippi River in 1542. Prior to English settlement in Jamestown, Spanish Jesuits tried to establish a mission in the area in 1570. Spaniards established America’s first city in 1565 at St. Augustine in Florida and developed a quite ethnically heterogeneous society. After three centuries of colonial endeavors, Spain ceded Florida to the United States in 1821. The largest Spanish American enclave for late 19th-century and 20th-century Spaniards was Tampa, Fla., portions of which the U.S. military occupied during the 1898 Spanish-American War.

Despite Spaniards’ significance in shaping subsequent European interactions with American Indians in the region and their enduring contributions to southern culture, the category “Spanish” does not appear in the ancestry sections of southern state-by-state social characteristics profiles. (Between the 1980 and 1990 U.S. Censuses, the “Spanish origin” category was subsumed under “Hispanic origin.”) However, several Spanish enclaves endure to the present. During Spanish control of Louisiana (1763–1800) settlers represented various Spanish ethnic groups, including Andalusians, Basques, Catalans, Galicians, and Canary Islanders. The Canary Islanders (Los Isleños), who have lived in St. Bernard’s Parish, La., since the 1770s, maintained domestic use of their Spanish dialect well into the 20th century, despite living among Acadians, African Americans, and Anglo-Americans, and despite significant exogamy. Surnames still common in the area include Alleman, Caballero, Falcon, Fernandez, and Molero. The Isleños Heritage and Cultural Society (formed in 1976) encourages bilingualism and Isleños foodways and has organized heritage pilgrimages to the Canary Islands and an annual fiesta with flamenco dancing. The Canary Islanders Heritage Society of Louisiana was formed in 1996 to promote genealogical research, the study of traditional crafts, the construction of monuments commemorating Isleños ancestors, and ongoing cultural links with the people of the Canary Islands. In Florida close to 10,000 descendants of another Spanish ethnic group, the Minorcans from one of the Baleric Islands, retain a sense of identity and community in St. Augustine. The Minorcan Quarter of that city exhibits vernacular architectural styles, and their fishing traditions, religious festivals, and foodways still influence St. Augustine life.

Although some British sailors had been set ashore in Texas in 1567 after defeat by the Spanish, the first successful English colony in the South was established four centuries ago, in 1607, at Jamestown, Va. Of the three main colonizing powers in the South—the Spanish, the French, and the English—the English still have the largest number of descendants who indicate an awareness of their heritage on U.S. Censuses, but nationwide rank only as the fourth most-reported ancestry group. The English were so numerous and influential in southern history that they are sometimes dismissed as “the nonethnic norm,” yet in 2000 only 8.7 percent of the U.S. population self-identified as being of English descent (down from 13 percent in 1990). Despite the cavalier image prominent English settlers in Virginia imparted to southern aristocrats in general, census identification with German ancestry marginally overtakes that with English ancestry in the state. While in the 1990 census the South had the highest percentage of any region of respondents claiming English ancestry (35 percent of all those across the country), in 2000 residents of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont were twice as likely to claim English ancestry as were residents of any southern state.

In the South identification of English ancestry remains highest in easternmost states, especially in towns and cities, and on the eastern coast (except Savannah, where more persons identify as being of Irish descent). For example, Fredericksburg and Richmond, Va., New Bern, N.C., and Aiken and Charleston, S.C., all report English as the largest ancestry group. Further west, in Nashville, Tenn., Florence, Ala., and Little Rock, Ark., English is the second-largest group (although English ancestry is only the fourth-largest group indicated for the states of Arkansas, Texas, and Kentucky, in sync with the national average). Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama report the highest percentage of their state populations as having English roots. Louisiana has the lowest representation, with English being only the fifth-largest ancestry group in the state; Louisianans most commonly report a French identity.

French settlers of the colonial period settled predominantly in Louisiana, where 16 percent of residents still report French descent. In the 2000 census 546,000 residents of Louisiana reported French ancestry, followed by 467,000 in Texas, 445,000 in Florida, 143,000 in Virginia, 128,000 in North Carolina, and 126,000 in Georgia. In 1682 René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, reached the mouth of the Mississippi River, naming the lands he had passed “Louisiane” for King Louis XIV. He founded a failed settlement on the eastern Texas coast, but in 1699 Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, established the first permanent settlement of Fort Maurepas (now Biloxi) and became the first governor of Louisiana. His brother, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, founded New Orleans in 1718. The French influence on southern foodways, linguistics, architecture, and religion has proved enduring. French members of the Capuchin and Ursuline orders set up some of the oldest school systems in the United States (only Harvard, William and Mary, and Yale are older). French Mardi Gras traditions include the rural courir (run), in which costumed men perform songs as they travel by horse from house to house collecting the ingredients for a communal gumbo.

The two main French identities to endure to the present are the Creoles, whose ancestors came directly from either Spain or France, and the Cajuns, who moved south from Acadia in maritime Canada. Cajuns or Creoles compose the majority of Louisiana residents who reported speaking French in the home on the 1990 U.S. Census. To have fostered such an ethnically diverse colony in Louisiana, the French settlers in the South were less ethnically diverse than the Spanish. Walloons (French-speaking Belgians) settled in Louisiana in the 18th century, but the Protestant Huguenots (Calvinists) were one of the largest French groups to settle outside of French territory.

Huguenots arrived in Florida in 1564 and established a settlement called La Caroline at the mouth of the St. Johns River, but the Spanish massacred these settlers the following year. The Fort Caroline National Memorial (about 45 miles north of St. Augustine) remains a testimony to their quest for religious freedom. The 1598 Edict of Nantes granted rights to French Protestants, but its revocation in 1685 by Louis XIV further spurred emigration. Huguenots had landed in Virginia as early as 1619 and had asked Charles I for refuge in the English Carolinas as early as 1629, but it was his son, Charles II, who made significant settlement possible by granting lands in 1663. The first Huguenots arrived in South Carolina in 1670, but after 1685 Charleston (founded as “Charlestown” or “Charles Towne”) became a favored destination. Many settled at Goose Creek (20 miles inland from Charleston) and Santee (about 40 miles north of Charleston), where their plantations produced silk, olive oil, wine, and naval supplies, and still others moved to tideland areas, where they built rice plantations.

Charleston’s Huguenot Church is the oldest continuously active Huguenot congregation in America. Congregants hold an annual service commemorating the Edict of Nantes and take pride in wearing the Huguenot cross (a Maltese cross with a dove attached), which is believed to have identified French Protestants to one another in public places as early as the 1600s. Typical surnames of Huguenot descendants in the area include Chastain, Du Val, Gourdine, Fuion, Fuqua, Lemay, LaRue, Martin, and Rambout.

Many other European groups came to the South seeking freedom from religious persecution. Almost 50 percent of arrivals in the first 10 years of Georgia’s settlement (1733–42) were non-English Protestants, including Palatines, Scots, Swiss, Moravians, and Salzburgers. About 200 of the 19,000 Protestants expelled from the Austrian archbishopric at Salzburg in 1731 came to settle in the colony of Georgia. The Georgia trustees began the last of Britain’s 13 American colonies “to provide a home for impoverished Englishmen and persecuted foreign Protestants.” Salzburgers settling northwest of Savannah in 1734 named their community Ebenezer, attempted to convert the Yamacraw and Creek Indians to Christianity through mission work, and built the Jerusalem Evangelical Lutheran Church, which still stands on the banks of the Savannah River. They were later joined by Swiss and Palatine settlers. These German-speaking Georgians engaged in lumber processing and silk production. Surnames of these settlers, such as Arnsdorff, Gnann, Lastinger, Rahn, and Zittrauer, are still common in the area.

Thousands of German Lutherans, Anabaptists (Mennonites), and members of other Protestant sects also immigrated to the South in the early 1700s. Many came from the Palatinate of southern Germany along the Rhine (the modern state of Rhineland-Pfalz) and were called Palatines or Palatinates. German Dunkers from the original congregation, formed in 1708 near the village of Schwarzenau along the Eder River in Germany, came to Virginia and the Carolinas by the late 1700s. Settling near rivers (convenient for full-immersion baptisms), the Dunkers created Dutchman’s Creek Settlement near the Yadkin River about 20 miles north of Salisbury, N.C. (the home area of Daniel Boone, who was of Quaker background).

Waldensians (also known as Waldenses) from the Cottian Alps of northern Italy settled Valdese, N.C., in 1893. The Waldensian Church is the oldest evangelical Protestant church in existence, predating the Reformation. Persecuted over several centuries in Italy and France, the Waldensians eventually found haven in Switzerland until their return to the Cottian Alps in 1689. This return from exile is celebrated in Valdese on the second Saturday of August with the annual Waldensian Festival, first held in the American bicentennial year of 1976. The Waldensians were quick to organize bakeries, a mutual assistance society, and a hosiery mill, while continuing to make Waldensian wines and ciders, preserve their architectural traditions and foodways, and speak their language (French, not Italian). Many Waldensians are now Presbyterians and Methodists.

The Protestant Moravians also settled in North Carolina. Persecuted for their faith in Bohemia and Moravia, the Moravians found a sponsor in the Saxon Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf. They formed an unsuccessful settlement briefly near Savannah, Ga., in 1733–40. By 1753 they had settled near what is today Winston-Salem, N.C. They called their new home Wachovia—a name adopted by the huge North Carolina banking firm that originated there—in honor of the Zinzendorf family estate in the Austrian Wachau Valley. Their first communities were at Bethabara and Bethania, but the central Moravian town, founded in 1766, was Salem.

As did the Quakers who migrated in significant numbers to North and South Carolina, and to Georgia beginning in the mid-1770s, the Moravians emphasized education and set up a school for the Cherokee in the first decades of the 19th century. The Quakers still maintain Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C. (begun in 1837), and the Moravian settlement at Winston-Salem remains home to a girl’s boarding school and a women’s college. Old Salem attracts many domestic and international tourists with its living history museum interpreting the 18th- and 19th-century Moravian lifestyle. Several blocks of the settlement preserve the architectural style of their homeland, employing Fachwerk (half-timbering, or timber-framed buildings infilled with brick or wattle and daub and often covered with plaster). Moravian spiced cookies and sugar cakes are marketed across the state and beyond. Residents of Winston-Salem decorate for the Christmas holidays with the Moravian multipointed star, which appears on porches and in hallways from the first Sunday of Advent through 7 January (Old Christmas).

Jews also came to the South in significant numbers in the colonial period. The first Jewish immigrants to the South were Sephardic, descendants of Jews expelled from Portugal and Spain in the late 1400s. Two of the oldest Jewish communities in America began in the 1730s in Charleston and Savannah. By the late 18th century nearly one-quarter of America’s Jewish population had settled in these cities. By the mid-19th century Ashkenazi, Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern and Central Europe, had come to predominate both Charleston and Savannah congregations. The first Jewish governor in America was David Emanuel, elected governor of Georgia in 1801. In 1819 Moses Elias Levy, of Sephardic heritage, purchased 92,000 acres near Gainesville, Fla., and developed an agricultural community for European Jews escaping persecution. Named Pilgrimage Plantation, the colony was destroyed at the outbreak of the Second Seminole War in 1835. Between 1850 and 1880 northern Florida became home to several more enduring Jewish communities. One of the earliest was at Jacksonville, where Democrat Morris A. Dzialynski became mayor in 1881. Jews fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War and occupied political offices such as surgeon general and secretary of state. Judah P. Benjamin filled the latter position, had his image on the Confederate two-dollar bill, and escaped Union troops by hiding in the Gamble Mansion in Florida’s Manatee County.

While Jewish women joined southern organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, exclusion of Jews from country clubs and New Orleans Catholic Mardi Gras krewes persisted into the 20th century. However, the Krewe du Jieux now follows the annual Zulu parade with Jewlu, a marching club with a jazz-infused klezmer band that tosses painted bagels to parade crowds. Jewish communities in southern cities have involved themselves in surprising ways in other civic traditions and hybrid foodways (for example, Creole matzoh balls and Pesach[Passover] fried green tomatoes). German Jews settling in Memphis, Tenn., founded Reform Judaism congregations, and later arrivals from Eastern Europe formed Orthodox congregations. While these congregations continue to maintain different levels of observance, they cooperate in the ASBEE-Kroger Annual Kosher BBQ Contest and Festival—a pork-free event that also involves other Memphis Jewish organizations such as B’nai B’rith Youth, the Jewish Boy Scouts, and Chabad Lubavitch of Tennessee, a Hasidic organization.

Today, Jews constitute about 2.2 percent of the U.S. population. Twenty-one percent live in the South, and about 10 percent of all American Jews reside in Florida. Some of the largest concentrations of southern Jewish populations are in Fort Lauderdale (215,000), Miami (135,000), South Palm Beach County and West Palm Beach, Fla., and Atlanta (80,000).

The first Germans had come to Virginia in 1608, the year after the founding of Jamestown and 12 years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, but some of these first arrivals left the English settlement to join Chief Powhatan. Along with those seeking religious freedom, Swiss and German speakers from Alsace in France also settled in the piedmont in the first half of the 18th century at places called Germantown, Frankford, and Germania—place names that reappeared with frequency when Germans later settled west of the Appalachian mountains. With the Scots-Irish, they were the predominant settlers on the Virginia frontier and in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The culture that Scots-Irish, German, and English settlers shaped in the Virginia frontier spread across the Backcountry and into the Midwest.

So many Germans came to 18th-century Louisiana that the area on the Mississippi River in today’s parishes of St. John and St. Charles acquired the appellation “German Coast.” Most came from the German Rhineland, but some also came from Switzerland. Near places such as Bayou des Allemands (Germans’ Bayou) they intermarried with Acadians, which explains why some Germanic surnames (such as Folse, Himel, Toups, and Stelly) are now considered Cajun. Louisiana was home to more German arrivals in the 1850s, but by the 1890s many Germans were once again going to Virginia, where they were the largest immigrant group at that time. These new Germans settled across the state, with significant numbers choosing Richmond. Many were second- and third-generation Americans who moved to Virginia from Maryland, Pennsylvania, or New York but still spoke German. A German-American association formed in 1890 in Richmond and sponsored an annual German Day. President Ronald Reagan officially proclaimed 6 October 1987 German-American Day, as approved by Congress, and Virginia’s governor also issues an annual proclamation. Today, German heritage societies are active beyond the Tidewater across the South. German architectural and farming traditions are interpreted at many southern museums, such as the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, Va., and the 19th-century German pioneer village at New Braunfeis, Tex.

Germans are the largest ethnic group in the United States. Twenty-three percent of the population reported German ancestry in the 1990 census. A smaller number (42.8 million, or 15 percent of the population) reported German or part-German ancestry in 2000. Although now surpassed by Latinos, Americans of German ancestry still count for nearly one out of every six Americans responding to the census. However, only a few of the 29 states in which German was the largest ancestry group (in terms of percentages of state populations) in 2000 were in the South. Virginia had 828,644 residents, or 11.7 percent of its population, self-identify as German, West Virginia (tangentially southern) had 14 percent, Kentucky had 12.7 percent, and Florida had 11.8 percent. However, in Florida, Virginia, and Texas, German was the ancestry reported more frequently than “American,” and Texas had the highest number of respondents, with 2,068,981 self-identifying as German (although this figure is only 9.9 percent of the Texas population).

Although German is the nation’s largest self-reported ethnic group, few German Americans now exhibit ethnic boundary markers. Exceptions include the Amish and Mennonites (often of Swiss or Dutch origin), who have also settled throughout the South in the last century. Amish and Mennonites moved to Punta Gorda and Sarasota, Fla., originally to grow celery in the 1930s. Their settlement at Pinecraft is now a neighborhood within the Sarasota city limits. In addition to a Saturday farmers market, they operate at least five Amish restaurants in the city (Dutch Oven, Sugar & Spice, Yoder’s, Dutch Haus, and Der Dutchman), offering shoofly pie and spaetzle (noodles). Beginning in the 1960s Amish and Mennonites also began settling in the Ozarks and in Tennessee at small rural communities like Belvedere, Tenn., where they still rely on farming and woodcrafting, maintain a distinctive style of religious faith, wear plain clothing, continue traditional foodways, and are endogamous. Yet, other Mennonite communities, such as that associated with College Hill Mennonite Church in Tampa, Fla., or the Iglesia Menonita Encuentro de Renovacion in Miami, are ethnically and occupationally diverse.

The Dutch and the Swiss have also had an impact on southern states in their formative periods. While Dutch merchants had come to Jamestown in the 1640s, Dutch settlers first arrived in Kentucky in the early 1780s from Pennsylvania and built meetinghouses in the tradition of the Dutch Reform Church. In Mercer County, Ky., the Old Mud Meeting House of timber framework with wattle and daub still stands near Harrodsburg. Swiss and German settlers led by Baron Christoph von Graffenried settled the second-oldest town in North Carolina, New Bern, at the confluence of the Trent and Neuse Rivers in 1709–10. Over 12,000 North Carolinians claim Swiss descent today, including members of Charlotte’s Swiss Society, which regularly holds Jass (a Swiss card game) tournaments. The Swiss Descendants’ Club of London, Ky., commemorates those who settled the Kentucky frontier.

In 1869 the Tennessee Colonization Agency recruited close to 100 Swiss families to the Cumberland Plateau. Finding the proffered land unimproved and remote from railroad access, half of the would-be colonists left. Those who remained settled in the area around Beersheba Springs and formed the community of Gruetli-Lager, where Baggenstoss, Bahnholzer, Bouldin, Segrist, Nussbaum, and Zaugg are still common surnames. As elsewhere in the South, their German language, Deustch, caused them to be called “Dutch” by neighbors, and when these Swiss opened a bakery in Grundy County just over a century ago, they named it the Dutch Maid. The bakery still offers traditional pastries and imported Swiss candies. Descendants of these Swiss settlers continued to produce traditional Swiss cheeses into the 1970s and also founded the Marugg Company, which produces traditional scythes for haying. The annual Swiss Historical Society Celebration takes place each July at the Stoker-Stampfli Farm Museum and features tours of the old farm buildings, local musicians, and, of course, bratwurst and sauerkraut. Other Swiss settled in Hohenwald near Columbia, Tenn. Just over 10,000 Tennesseans reported Swiss ancestry on the 2000 census.

The experience of the Irish in the South aptly illustrates how ethnic, rather than racial, politics have been largely ignored in studies of antebellum southern life. A significant escalation of Catholic Irish immigration to America began in the second decade of the 19th century, prior to the famines. Much has been written about their negative experiences in the Northeast, but those 10 percent who settled south of the Mason-Dixon Line have received less attention. Settling largely in urban areas, the Irish helped maintain urban growth rates in the South, with 65 percent of South Carolina’s Irish living in Charleston and 58 percent of the Irish living in Alabama choosing Mobile. In Georgia, Augusta and Atlanta had sizable Irish populations and Savannah was home to almost 5 percent of the South’s antebellum Irish born. Common surnames of Irish settlers in Georgia included Thompson, O’Neill, Ryan, Griffin, Luckett, and Darden.

Louisiana, the most Catholic of southern states, attracted the most Southbound Irish, 60 percent of whom lived in New Orleans by 1860. Many Irish came to New Orleans on ships used to transport cotton to Liverpool (Irish passengers made the return trip more lucrative for shipping merchants) and continued to work in the shipyards or worked digging canals along the Mississippi River. Although they never had a “Quarter” in New Orleans, their cultural and occupational solidarity fostered the notion of the city’s Irish Channel neighborhood, which still references their unique New Orleans Irish identity.

In the Northeast, social conditions caused Irish immigrants to turn inward and refuse to assimilate. Irish immigrants to the South, never seriously threatening the status quo or dominating the population of any city, had a greater opportunity for acceptance and, in some cases, social mobility despite a rigid class system. They also met with greater acceptance in the antebellum South because of their contributions to the urban work force (depleted by demands for rural slave labor) and their willingness to take on potentially high-mortality occupations deemed too dangerous for slaves. Hibernian societies and other immigrant-aid organizations formed in Atlanta, Charleston, New Orleans, and Savannah. In each city, Irish Catholic communities also found a focus in church life: New Orleanians erected St. Patrick’s Church in 1833, and Savannahans began the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in 1799.

The Civil War hastened the decline of ethnic distinctiveness for many groups, as regional loyalties reshaped ethnic as southern identities. Seeking parallels between their southern experience and their Irish history, Irish immigrants’ ethnic activities in the 19th century (parades, fund-raisers, and other events) placed a celebration of Irishness firmly within a southern context. Likewise, contemporary celebrations of Irishness tend to blend with southern themes. For example, in 2003 the town of Erin, Tenn., celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with a fish fry, wildlife display, and parade incorporating Confederate battle flags, beauty pageant queens, Shriners dressed as stereotypical hillbillies, pots of “gold,” a regiment of Irish Confederate reenactors, slogans in the Irish language, bagpipe bands, and even a float with a young man posing as the crucified Christ. Since 1854 the town of McEwen, Tenn., has held an annual Irish Picnic (now each July) that features music, Irish dancing, and a flea market, but it is best known for being named in 1988 by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s largest outdoor barbecue. Savannah is home to one of the largest St. Patrick’s Day parades in the country. First organized in 1824, the parade now winds through the city’s historic squares for over four hours and attracts close to 400,000 visitors. Irish and Celtic festivals featuring Irish folk music and Irish step-dancing competitions take place annually throughout the South, and Gaelic sporting clubs are becoming more prominent on the southern cultural landscape with the arrival of new immigrants in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2000, 10.8 percent of Americans self-identified as Irish on the census and were the second-largest ancestry group nationally. Of southern states, Florida reported the highest percentage (10.3 percent) and Mississippi reported the lowest (6.9 percent).

While the Welsh were not prominent in the settlement of the South (their immigration to Pennsylvania is better known), a number of Welsh heritage societies flourish today, such as the Welsh Society of the Carolinas, the St. David’s Welsh Society of Georgia, and the Alabama Welsh Society. Florida is home to two St. David’s Societies, and Knoxville, Tenn., and Fredericksburg, Va., also have Welsh societies. The 2000 census reveals that many southern towns with total populations of 30,000–40,000, such as Florence, Ala., and Lynchburg, Va., report modest populations (100–200) that indicate an active awareness of Welsh ancestry. Cornish heritage societies are also forming in Texas, and Cornish Cousins of the Southeast is an eight-state society designed to unite Cornish descendants living in Florida, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. In 2005 the Cornish Cousins of the Southeast sponsored a gathering at Mars Hill College in western North Carolina, a location selected because of the Cornish presence in relatively nearby Duck-town, Tenn., Gold Hill, N.C., and Dahlonega, Ga.

Scottish immigrants to the South were members of three distinct ethnic groups: Highland Scots, Lowland Scots, and the Scots-Irish (or Ulster Scots), who had settled in Northern Ireland before immigrating to America. On America’s first census in 1790, people of Scottish birth or descent represented 8.3 percent of the population. The South had the highest percentage of residents with Scottish origins, led by Georgia (15.5 percent), South Carolina (15.1 percent), North Carolina (14.8 percent), and Virginia (10.2 percent). Some of the first St. Andrew’s Societies, Scottish immigrant aid societies, formed in Charleston (1729, the first in North America), Savannah (ca. 1737), and Alexandria, Va. (ca. 1760). Solicited by the Trustees for Establishing the Colony of Georgia, hundreds of Highlander families immigrated to the pine barrens of the Georgia coast beginning in January 1736 to settle and protect the new British colony under military governor James Oglethorpe.

North Carolina was such a popular destination for Highlanders that it earned the epithet “land of the God-blessed Macs.” Highlander immigration, especially from the Western Highlands and Isles, began in the early 1730s and increased through the late 1760s, peaking in the two years before 1776. Induced by bad harvests and the oppressive social and political climate following the failed Jacobite Risings, whole communities immigrated together. Descendants of Cape Fear Valley Highlanders pioneered settlement in Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Texas. Well over 1,200 had settled Argyle in Florida’s Panhandle (near DeFuniak Springs in Walton County) by the mid-19th century.

Close to 100 communities across the South host annual Scottish Highland games, with their accompanying clan society gatherings and dancing, bagpiping, harp, and fiddle competitions. Southern Scottish Americans annually celebrate Tartan Day on 6 April, St. Andrew’s Day on 30 November, and the birthday of 18th-century poet Robert Burns on 25 January. All southern states have active Scottish country dance groups and Scottish heritage societies.

The first Lowland Scots were transported to Charleston, S.C., in 1682–83 for being Covenanters (Presbyterians seeking political and religious liberty in Scotland). Many later immigrants (even those among the landed and professional classes) arrived as indentured servants. Lowlanders assimilated most rapidly of the three Scottish ethnicities. They did not as often settle in groups, and while Highlanders retained Gaelic for generations, Lowland Broad Scots tended to give way within one generation to more American, upwardly mobile accents and dialects.

In part because of repressive trade laws, famine, and a decline in the linen industry, more than 100,000 Ulster Scots came to the colonies between the second decade of the 1700s and about 1760. They were considered Irish until the Revolution when, as Patriots, they named themselves Scots-Irish to convey their distinctiveness from Loyalist Scots-Highlanders. Later the name served to distinguish them from Celtic or native Catholic Irish, who came to America in the hundreds of thousands in the 19th century.

The Scots-Irish remained a separate group in America through religion, politics, a tendency to settle on the frontier, and choice, rather than by any continuing affinity with Ulster, where they had always been marginal (even among other Protestants). They famously brought Jack tales, ballads, and fiddle traditions to their new country and, with Germans and Scandinavians who also settled on the frontier, forged a vernacular architectural style.

The Scots-Irish comprised the largest number of non-English Europeans coming to the colonies during the 18th century. More than half of the European settlements in Appalachia and the Ozarks were those of Scots-Irish, with relatively isolated, individual family homesteads employing a mixed economy of animal husbandry and diversified crops. Along with the Germans, the Scots-Irish were the largest ethnic group to enter America in colonial times and remain the largest ethnic group in the South today. Approximately half of all Scots-Irish in the United States (47 percent) live in the southern region.

In the late 19th century, the United States received new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, but the war-devastated South drew comparatively few of them. Those immigrating to the South after the Civil War retain some of the most distinctive traditions and enduring communities but compose significantly lower percentages of the southern population than older, established European and African groups (although their numbers are sometimes larger than American Indians in southern states).

The South had become home to small numbers of Italians before the late 19th century. Italians arrived in Jamestown in 1622, they accompanied French explorers on the Mississippi River in the 1680s, and southern Italians fought in the American Revolution. In 1850 Louisiana had the largest Italian-born population in the United States. Before Italian unification in 1861, New Orleans was one of the primary destinations of Italian immigrants to America, especially immigrants from the Kingdom of Sicily. Southern Italians and Sicilians continued to prefer predominantly Catholic Louisiana; almost 16,000 had taken on farm-work in the state by the beginning of World War I. Italian immigrants came in significant numbers from 1880 to 1920, especially farmers who found employment with southern plantation owners. In Texas they worked in the railroad and mining industries and farmed cotton and rice, and in Louisiana and Mississippi they worked on sugar and cotton plantations—often displacing African American workers there. Children frequently worked in the fields alongside both parents.

The experiences of Italian Americans in the South were not always happy: their dark complexions led them to be subjected to Jim Crow discrimination and, even in New Orleans (where a portion of the French Quarter became Little Sicily and Little Palermo), there were lynchings. Some owned small grocery stores, and many Louisiana Italians eventually bought land in Tangipahoa Parish and grew strawberries for which the area is still famous. The industrial centers of Birmingham, Ala., and Chattanooga, Tenn., also attracted Italian immigrants after the Civil War, as did more rural areas in Arkansas that became home to settlements of northern Italians. Several hundred Genoese settled Tonitown, Ark., where an annual grape festival still honors their main crop and where surnames such as Ardemagni, Bariola, Ceola, Maestri, Morsani, Pianalto, Sbanotto, Taldo, and Zulpo remain common. By the first decade of the 20th century, Italians also lived at Daphne and Lambeth, Ala., and Valdese, N.C. Italians constitute the seventh-largest ethnic group according to the 2000 census (5.6 percent of the U.S. population), yet they compose less than 3 percent of the populations of many southern states. Louisiana still has one of the highest percentages, with Italians numbering 4.4 percent of the state population, outnumbered by Florida with 6.3 percent.

Louisiana Italians often sponsored St. Joseph’s Day altars on 19 March (the feast day of the saint); these were also once popular in Tampa, Fla., where Italians (particularly Sicilians) had come to work in the cigar industry. Communities held processions, and families constructed altars with baked goods and other foods in anticipation of Saint Joseph’s intervention for a particular need. While this tradition has declined in the last two decades, ethnic organizations such as the Sons of Italy and local branches of the National Italian American Foundation remain popular across the South, as do heritage societies such as the Italian Cultural Association of Greater Austin, Tex., and the Italian-American Club of Venice, Fla., which sponsor annual festivals. Many Italian American men are also involved in Catholic fraternities such as the Knights of Columbus. In Tampa’s neighboring Ybor City, historic Italian social clubs, such as the century-old L’Unione Italiana, endure. Ybor had a Latin American Fiesta (of which Elvis Presley was honorary king in 1961) and now has an association of that name that operates as a krewe in Tampa’s pre-Lenten, pirate-themed Gasparilla festivities. (When the original fiesta began in 1927, the term “Latin” meant “Spanish, Cuban, or Italian,” not “Central or South American,” as “Latino” implies today.)

Other southern Europeans who became southerners in America include the Greeks, who first arrived at St. Augustine, Fla., in 1768. Greek merchants and sailors also settled in New Orleans in the 1700s and founded the first Greek Orthodox Church in America there in 1864. While Greeks settled in south Alabama and coastal Mississippi, one of the largest Greek settlements in America began north of Tampa at Tarpon Springs in 1895. The sponge harvesting industry on the Gulf of Mexico had attracted well over 2,000 Greeks by the first decade of the 20th century. Floridian Greek communities also exist in Miami, West Palm Beach, Orlando, and Jacksonville. Today, over 18 percent of Greek Americans live in the South, with population concentrations also in urban areas of Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, and Virginia. Ethnic identification remains strong. More recent immigrants speak at least some Greek in the home. Traditional music is common both at home and at public events, and Greek musicians are available for hire in southern cities such as Columbia, S.C., Gulf Shores, Ala., Biloxi, Miss., and Little Rock, Ark. Greek restaurants are plentiful from southern Appalachia to the Lowcountry, and Texas Greek communities sponsor food festivals in Houston, Waco, Fort Worth, and Dallas. Many such events occur at local Greek Orthodox churches, which provide a strong community focus for Greeks in the South.

Many Eastern Europeans went to the North or Midwest in the 19th century, but Texas (with its larger, productive farms) attracted more of these newcomers than other southern states. The Slavic Lutheran Wends came to Texas in 1855 from Lusatia in eastern Germany to avoid forced Germanization. The Wends, who called themselves Sorbs, settled in Lee County in a town they named Serbin. Their descendants still hold a Wendish festival, participate in a Wendish heritage society, and create traditional Easter eggs using wax batik and embossing.

In the early 1800s, non-Moravian Czechs began forming small communities in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and, in particular, Texas (home to 250 of them). Today, almost 190,000 Texans claim Czech ancestry. In 2006 Caldwell, Tex., held the 22nd annual Kolache Festival, celebrating Czech heritage and Texans’ favorite stuffed pastry. At Caldwell’s Czech Heritage Museum, visitors may view displays of “Tex-Czech” heritage, including shepherds’ equipment, bagpipes, flutes, and Wallachian beekeeping traditions (Wallachia now being in Romania). The central Texas city of West claims to be the “Czech heritage capital” of Texas and since 1976 has hosted the annual Westfest celebration, which attracts as many as 25,000 attendees. The festival features a Catholic “Polka Mass” with hymns sung to polkas and waltzes, “Miss Westfest” and baking contests, a parade, horseshoe and washer pitching, and demonstrations of 19th-century Czech settlers’ crafts. Taroky, a Czech card game, remains popular in West, and tournaments regularly take place in Temple, Victoria, and Fort Worth.

While many southern Czechs and Hungarians have joined Protestant denominations, others in Texas and Louisiana remain Catholic. In Louisiana’s twin towns of Libuse and Kolin, annual festivals celebrate Czech dancing, food-ways, music, and needlework. Of the more than 5,000 who now claim Czech ancestry in the state, only the elders speak the language. Livingston Parish, La., is home to the largest rural Hungarian settlement in the United States. Socially isolated and largely endogamous through the early 20th century, Hungarians there became assimilated Hungarian Americans by the nation’s bicentennial year, and at today’s Hungarian heritage events participants are as likely to hear New Orleans jazz as Hungarian folk music.

The most recent Europeans to enter the South have come in significant numbers since the collapse of the Soviet Union (most significantly Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles). A large proportion have chosen Florida (the southern state with the largest percentage of foreign-born residents after Texas; 13.3 percent of Florida’s foreign born are from Europe). Bulgarians, Hungarians, Estonians, Romanians, and Poles have multiple cultural associations in Florida. However, many have also settled in Virginia and Texas. Nearly 3 in every 10 European-born immigrants between 1990 and 2000 had a bachelor’s degree or higher. Bulgarians had one of the highest labor force participation rates of the total foreign-born population, and 53.9 percent of immigrants had a bachelor’s degree or higher (the percentage for Russians was 51.7). These new immigrants are more likely to work in professional and management occupations than the foreign-born population from outside of Europe.

By 2000 almost 500,000 Russians had come to the South, settling mostly in urban areas. Russian Jews readily join local congregations, and Russian Orthodox parishes are growing rapidly in Houston, near Atlanta, and especially in Florida. Even tiny towns such as Dover in central Florida (population 2,800) have Ukrainian congregations, and larger cities, such as Charlotte, also have Ukrainian American cultural societies. Cities such as Atlanta and Orlando now have schools of Russian ballet. Specialty food shops run by new immigrants (and predominantly patronized by new immigrants) abound, and even chain grocery stores in areas with high rates of recent Russian settlement now stock borscht, Kindzmarauli wine, and Ukrainian cookies and candy. Many southern communities are now seeing the growing popularity of Russian and Turkish steam baths, which are also catching on with non-Russian clientele. While some playful creolizations such as deep-fried cabbage rolls might not endure, these new European immigrants are sure to contribute cultural traditions that may one day be deemed southern, or at least be celebrated in a southern style.

CELESTE RAY
University of the South

Valentine Belfiglio, The Italian Experience in Texas (1995); Carl A. Brasseaux, ed., A Refuge for All Ages: Immigration in Louisiana History (1996); Barbara Carpenter, ed., Ethnic Heritage in Mississippi (1992); Gilbert Din, The Canary Islanders of Louisiana (1988); Leonard Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson, eds., Jews in the South (1973); Walter Edgar, South Carolina: A History (1998); Marcie Cohen Ferris, Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South (2005); Peter Steven Gannon, Huguenot Refugees in the Settling of Colonial America (1985); Henry Glassie, Patterns in the Material Folk Culture in the Eastern United States (1969); David Gleeson, The Irish in the South, 1815–1877 (2001); Patricia Griffin, Mullet on the Beach: The Minorcans of Florida, 1768–1788 (1991); David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989); Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov, The Upland South: The Making of an American Folk Region and Landscape (2003); James Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (1962); Ella Lonn, Foreigners in the Confederacy (1940, 2000); Duane Meyer, The Highland Scots of North Carolina, 1732–1776 (1961); Earl Neihaus, The Irish in New Orleans (1965); Maida Owens, in Swapping Stories: Folktales from Louisiana, ed. Carl Lindahl, Maida Owens, and C. Renne Harvison (1997); Anthony Parker, Scottish Highlanders in Colonial Georgia (1997); Celeste Ray, Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South (2001), Transatlantic Scots (2005); John Shelton Reed, One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture (1982); Robert Rosen, The Jewish Confederates (2000); Claus Wust, The Virginia Germans (1969); Joseph Zierden and Martha Zierden, eds., Another’s Country: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on Cultural Interactions in the Southern Colonies (2002).

 

Historic African Ethnicities

During the past few decades, scholars have made great progress in pinpointing patterns of introduction of African ethnicities into four major regions of the American South: the Chesapeake, the Carolinas, lower Louisiana, and the Gulf South. This progress has been mainly the result of the creation and use of relational databases as innovative tools in history. The two major relevant databases are the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database and the Louisiana Slave Database, 1719–1820. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database gives very substantial information about Atlantic slave-trade voyages, which brought enslaved Africans directly from African regions and ports to colonies, states, and ports in the United States. However, this database contains little information on ethnicity, nor does it take into account the transshipment of slaves to other ports and regions after they arrived at their initial port of sale in North America. Its use therefore involves considerable speculation about which ethnicities were exported from particular African ports and regions during particular times, as well as about their final destinations. This drawback can be overcome to a significant extent by studying the African ethnicities of slaves listed in documents elsewhere in the Americas (the British West Indies, Brazil, and Spanish America) during particular time periods. The Louisiana Slave Database gives more precise information about African ethnicities. It was constructed from documents recording self-reported ethnicities of African slaves located in particular times and places in lower Louisiana. These largely self-identified African ethnicities were found in documents written primarily in French, secondarily in Spanish, and the remainder in English.

Documents generated in English colonies contain comparatively little information about African ethnicities. Neither English colonies nor the United States required notaries to record and keep documents involving slaves as public records. Therefore many sales of slaves, inventories of slaves after the death of masters, wills, marriage contracts, and other types of documents were private papers of individuals. Many of these documents have not been preserved. Few of these English-language documents recorded the African ethnicities of the slaves. Newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves are the major source of information about African ethnicities. Daniel Littlefield pioneered the study of such advertisements for South Carolina, and Michael A. Gomez effectively used them for runaway slaves in his study of African ethnicities in the United States. Margaret Washington Creel pioneered a predatabase study of the origins of slaves in the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. However, slaves who ran away were not necessarily representative of the slaves who were present in any particular colony or state.

Studies of the African Diaspora in the Americas began mainly during the early 20th century among anthropologists, most notably Nina Rodriguez in Brazil, Fernando Ortiz in Cuba, and, a generation later, Frances and Melville Herskovits in the United States. Fieldwork was a primary methodology. They often studied communities of African descent in the Americas, linking them with particular regions or ethnicities in Africa by seeking out shared cultural traits. Their work is useful, informative, and fascinating and their methodologies more sophisticated than some recent critics have credited. Nevertheless, their approach poses problems for the study of the African Diaspora in the Americas. Religion, worldview, and aesthetic principles—including the styles and social role of the plastic arts, music, musical instruments, and dance—are among the most enduring and resilient cultural heritages. But they are also the most generalized. There are many common cultural features in Africa. It is not always easy to disaggregate which features are characteristic of any particular ethnicity or region. Very few scholars are familiar with a substantial number of African languages. Some seize upon a word or name they recognize and extrapolate it widely to prove the presence and influence of a particular African ethnicity in America. But the same or similar names and words exist in several African languages and can have the same, a similar, or a different meaning.

The result is sometimes romanticized and inaccurate views of the influence of particular African ethnicities and languages. In the United States, Swahili becomes the African language, but few speakers of Swahili were brought to the United States. Yoruba becomes the African ethnicity, although Yoruba (written “Nago” or “Lucumí” in American documents) presence was not very substantial anywhere in the Americas before the late 18th century. Except for Louisiana, where Nago (Yoruba) were 4 percent of identified African ethnicities, Yoruba presence in the United States was insignificant. The numbers and proportions of African slaves brought from the Gold Coast/Ghana to the United States have been exaggerated. Thus, the mythology about the African ethnicities of slaves brought to the United States endures.

African ethnicities from Greater Senegambia/Upper Guinea played a major role in populating the South. Greater Senegambia extends from Senegal through Sierra Leone. Bamana, Fulbe, Mandingo, and Wolof were prominent among Africans shipped from Senegal. Kanga, Temne, and some Gola were shipped from Sierra Leone. The skills of these Africans were especially needed in rice and indigo production and in the cattle industries of Carolina, Georgia, the Florida Panhandle, and lower Louisiana. During the 18th century, Greater Senegambians were more clustered in colonies and states that became part of the United States than anywhere else in the Americas. These states include Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, the Lower Mississippi Valley, and the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico extending across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida Panhandle. Senegambians also appear in large numbers in the early Chesapeake (Maryland and Virginia).

From the study of transatlantic slave-trade voyages, it appears that the United States was the chief 18th-century destination of Greater Senegambians after the Northern European powers legally entered the Atlantic slave trade. Studies of transatlantic slave-trade voyages to the United States are reasonably revealing about trends in ethnic composition because there was no large-scale, maritime transshipment trade to other countries. This conclusion must be qualified because of the unknown (and probably unknowable) number and ethnic composition of new Africans transshipped from the Caribbean to the East Coast ports of the United States. But it is likely that Greater Senegambians were quite significant in this traffic because of selectivity in the transshipment trade from the Caribbean. Regarding African ethnicities arriving in Carolina, the artificial separation between Senegambia and Sierra Leone obscures the picture. Thus, the role of Greater Senegambians was very important in Carolina and probably elsewhere as well, including the Sea Islands off the coast of Carolina and Georgia and other rice-growing areas of Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

The patterns for Louisiana are clear and not at all speculative. In the French slave trade to Louisiana (1719–43), 64.3 percent of the Africans arriving on clearly documented French Atlantic slave-trade voyages came from Senegambia. Using the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database for English voyages to the entire northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico—as well as additional Atlantic slave-trade voyages found in Louisiana documents that were included in the Louisiana Slave Database—reveals that slave-trade voyages coming from Senegambia composed 59.7 percent of all voyages coming directly from Africa to Louisiana and the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico between 1770 and 1803. Nevertheless, the African coastal origin of Louisiana slaves during the Spanish period was much more varied than what is reflected in Atlantic slave-trade voyages. The vast majority of new Africans arriving in Spanish Louisiana had been transshipped from the Caribbean, especially from Jamaica, where Gold Coast Africans were preferred and retained. Very few Gold Coast/Ghana Africans were found in Louisiana documents. Under Spanish rule (1770–1803), 30.3 percent of Louisiana Africans were from Senegambia and 20.8 percent were from Sierra Leone, totaling 51.1 percent from Greater Senegambia (see Table 1). If we exclude slaves described as “Guinea” or “From the Coast of Guinea” from the Sierra Leone category, Africans from Sierra Leone drop to 6.7 percent. The result is a minimum of 37 percent of Africans of identified ethnicities from Greater Senegambia in Spanish Louisiana. Africans listed as Guinea were likely to be from Sierra Leone.

The large numbers of Greater Senegambians brought to Carolina, Florida, and lower Louisiana involves technology transfer from Africa to the Americas. In the two major rice-growing states of Anglo-United States, 44.4 percent of Atlantic slave-trade voyages arriving in Carolina and 62.0 percent arriving in Georgia listed in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database brought Africans from Greater Senegambia. But the number of slaves on voyages arriving from Greater Senegambia was substantially smaller than on voyages arriving from other African regions.

TABLE 1. Eighteen Most-Frequent African Ethnicities by Gender in Louisiana, 1719–1820
Ethnicity		Male	Female	Total
Bamana	Individuals	413	53	466
	Percentage	88.6	11.4	100
	Percentage of total Africans	4.9	.6	5.5
Mandingo	Individuals	617	305	922
	Percentage	66.9	33.1	100
	Percentage of total Africans	7.3	3.6	10.9
Nar/Moor	Individuals	101	35	922
	Percentage	74.3	25.7	100
	Percentage of total Africans	1.2	.4	1.6
Poulard/Fulbe	Individuals	160	50	210
	Percentage	76.2	23.8	100
	Percentage of total Africans	1.9	.6	2.5
Senegal/Wolof	Individuals	363	234	597
	Percentage	60.8	39.2	100
	Percentage of total Africans	4.3	2.8	7.1
Kisi	Individuals	51	35	86
	Percentage	59.3	40.7	100
	Percentage of total Africans	.6	.4	1.0
Kanga	Individuals	210	129	339
	Percentage	61.9	38.1	100
	Percentage of total Africans	2.5	1.5	4.0
Aja/Fon/Arada	Individuals	126	117	243
	Percentage	51.9	48.1	100
	Percentage of total Africans	1.5	1.4	2.9
Chamba	Individuals	276	139	415
	Percentage	66.5	33.5	100
	Percentage of total Africans	3.3	1.6	4.9
Hausa	Individuals	122	11	133
	Percentage	91.7	8.3	100
	Percentage of total Africans	1.4	.1	1.6
Mina	Individuals	430	198	628
	Percentage	68.5	31.5	100
	Percentage of total Africans	5.1	2.3	7.4
Nago/Yoruba	Individuals	247	111	358
	Percentage	69.0	31.0	100
	Percentage of total Africans	2.9	1.3	4.2
Edo	Individuals	38	28	66
	Percentage	57.6	42.4	100
	Percentage of total Africans	.5	.3	.8
Igbo	Individuals	287	237	524
	Percentage	54.8	45.2	100
	Percentage of total Africans	3.4	2.8	6.2
Ibibio/Moko	Individuals	61	21	82
	Percentage	74.4	25.6	100
	Percentage of total Africans	.7	.2	1.0
Calabar	Individuals	88	59	147
	Percentage	59.9	40.1	100
	Percentage of total Africans	1.0	.7	1.7
Kongo	Individuals	2,064	924	2,988
	Percentage	69.1	30.9	100
	Percentage of total Africans	24.4	10.9	35.4
Makwa	Individuals	67	35	102
	Percentage	65.7	34.3	100
	Percentage of total Africans	.8	.4	1.2
Total	Individuals	5,721	2,721	8,442
	Percentage	67.8	32.2	100

Source: Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (2005); calculated from Hall, Louisiana Slave Database, 1719–1820.

These gross, static figures are impressive enough. But when we break down calculations for Anglo-United States colonies and states over time and place, we see a wave pattern clustering Africans from Greater Senegambia. In Carolina, 50.4 percent of all Atlantic slave-trade voyages to that colony entered into the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database arrived between 1751 and 1775, with 100 (35.2 percent) coming from Senegambia and 58 (20.4 percent) from Sierra Leone—a total of 55.6 percent coming from Greater Senegambia. Mandingo and Fulbe were being exported from both of these regions. During this time period, Britain had occupied the French slave trading posts along the coast of Senegambia. Close to half (44.7 percent) of the English Atlantic slave-trade voyages from Senegambia (narrowly defined as excluding Sierra Leone) went to Britain’s North American mainland colonies. Five out of six Atlantic slave-trade voyages to British West Florida ports along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico came from Senegambia. It is safe to say that between 1751 and 1775, the majority of slaves loaded aboard English ships leaving from Senegambia were sent to regions that would become part of the United States. As northern traders and Euro-African suppliers took over the Atlantic slave trade on these coasts during the Age of Revolutions (1750–1800), voyages bringing Africans to the United States from Greater Senegambia originated mainly in various ports on the American side, were heavily involved in smuggling and piracy, were never documented in European archives, and were unlikely to be included in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. There is little doubt that most of these voyages brought Greater Senegambians to the United States as well as to the British Caribbean and Saint-Domingue/Haiti.

MAP 3. Select Ethnic Groups of Greater Senegambia/Upper Guinea (from Senegal to Sierra Leone) and Lower Guinea East (from the Ivory Coast to Cameroon)

There was a clustering of Atlantic slave-trade voyages from the same African coasts to regional ports in the Chesapeake. The Igbo from the Bight of Biafra had a significant presence in the Chesapeake, but slaves from Greater Senegambia contributed a formative culture for some areas of the Chesapeake, as well. Nearly half of the voyages bringing about 5,000 Africans to Virginia between 1683 and 1721 came from Senegambia (as narrowly defined). The Igbo were valued there for several reasons. Like the Wolof and the Fon, but in contrast to most other African ethnicities, there were as many women as men among them. Igbo women mated freely with men of other ethnicities and they generally had more surviving children than women of other ethnicities. Thus, they were valued in regions that placed a high premium on natural reproduction of the slave population, but Igbo men and women did not adjust well to gang labor. Rice and sugar planters generally refused to buy them. In the Chesapeake, however, tobacco was the major crop and it was grown on small estates.

West Central Africa was at times a significant source of slaves brought to South Carolina. In English-speaking regions they were generally called “Angolans.” (In French and Spanish regions they were generally called “Congo.”) The Stono Rebellion of 1739 (the largest slave rebellion in the colonies prior to the Revolution) has focused attention on West Central Africans. But a majority of Atlantic slave-trade voyages arrived in Carolina from West Central Africa only between 1730 and 1739. The Stono Rebellion, well described as a Congo revolt, evidently discouraged Carolina planters from bringing in more West Central Africans. For the rest of the 18th century, Greater Senegambia became the major source of Atlantic slave-trade voyages to South Carolina. West Central Africa did not become a significant source of Africans for Carolina again until 1801, only six years before the foreign slave trade to the United States was outlawed on 1 January 1808. Many of these late-arriving West Central Africans were transshipped to Louisiana to work its burgeoning sugarcane plantations. Throughout the 18th century, some Congo could be found in Louisiana, and Africans from Mozambique (almost entirely Makua) were transshipped to Louisiana from St. Domingue/Haiti. During the Spanish period, the Congo were clustered in New Orleans, but in the early United States period, more Congo were brought to Louisiana’s new sugar-producing areas—rural Orleans and St. Charles Parishes. Increasing numbers of the Igbo from the Bight of Biafra were brought to Louisiana, especially after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in 1808. The Atlantic slave trade remained legal below the equator, and enslaved Africans smuggled into the United States generally came from slave-trade ships heading for Cuba captured by pirates. The ethnicities of these Africans were heavily Igbo and Congo.

There is clearly a generalized, and sometimes more specific, African influence on religion, music, and culture of the South. Senegambian cultural influences in Louisiana are clear. These include the Louisiana Creole language and the style, social role, and forms of Creole music and cooking (especially gumbo). Evidence of African-influenced religious practices include reverence for ancestors, spirit possession, herbal medicine, and, especially, Bamana names (from Mali) for amulets. Voodoo practices in Louisiana came from two main sources. First, the early and persistent presence of African ethnicities from the Bight of Benin clustered upriver from New Orleans, mainly Fon, Mina, and Nago/Yoruba; and second, from the massive immigration of French Haitians with their slaves, which took place during 1809–10 following the Haitian Revolution of 1807. In both Senegal and Louisiana, there is a large and growing consciousness of common demographic, historic, and cultural ties, and cultural tourism now moves in both directions.

New research continues to refine our perceptions of African origins. In the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands, the myth of Yoruba ancestry is being challenged. The Gullah language derives from Sierra Leone, and the word “Gullah” comes from the Gola ethnicity of that land. In religion, reverence for ancestors, the ring shout (a song employing West African dance patterns in which participants shuffle in a single file and clap out a complex counterrhythm), and spirit possession are clearly African in origin, but they are difficult to trace to any particular African ethnicity. Research, especially that by Douglas B. Chambers, continues to trace the Igbo influence on the culture of Virginia. There is an escalating fascination among African-descended peoples to find the ethnicities of their ancestors.

GWENDOLYN MIDLO HALL
New Orleans, Louisiana

Douglas B. Chambers, Slavery and Abolition (April, 1997); Margaret Washington Creel, “A Peculiar People”: Slave Religion and Community-Culture among the Gullahs (1988); David Eltis, David Richardson, Stephen D. Behrendt, and Herbert S. Klein, eds., The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM Set and Guidebook (1999); Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (1998); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1992), Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (2005); Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (1981); John K. Thornton, American Historical Review (October 1991); Lorena Walsh, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (1997).

 

Latinos

The term “Latino,” often used interchangeably with “Hispanic,” refers to people who identify with a Latin American origin or ancestry. The South currently has the fastest-growing Latino population in the United States. Between 1990 and 2000 the Latino population in the South doubled from over 6.5 million to more than 11.5 million, with states like Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia experiencing the most growth. Latinos represent a great diversity of national, socioeconomic, regional, and ethnic differences. While most Latinos in the region are from Mexico or are of Mexican descent, other groups, such as Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, El Salvadorans, Colombians, Peruvians, and Ecuadorians, also have a strong presence in urban and rural areas. Latinos’ citizenship status in the United States varies: they are U.S. citizens; immigrants with student, tourist, and work visas; agricultural guest workers; and undocumented individuals. They all share the common bond of the Spanish language, although a significant number of Latin American immigrants also speak an indigenous American language.

While some southern states such as Texas and Florida have had a Latino presence for over a century, most Latinos today—especially in southeastern states like Georgia, North Carolina, Arkansas, Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee—have immigrated within the last 20 years or are the children of immigrants. States with the highest national rates of increase of the Latino population between 1990 and 2000 include North Carolina (394 percent), Arkansas (337 percent), Georgia (300 percent), Tennessee (278 percent), South Carolina (211 percent), and Alabama (208 percent). In some counties—like Mecklenburg County, N.C., which encompasses Charlotte—the Latino population has increased by 500 percent since 1990. A majority of the newcomers were young, foreign-born males seeking job opportunities in cities, towns, and rural areas previously unsettled by Latin Americans. In this regard, southern Latino communities differ from those in other regions of the country.

Of all the southern states, Texas has the longest history of Latino settlement and migration. More than one-third of contemporary Texans have Latin American (predominantly Mexican) ancestry. Texas was a territory of Mexico before its annexation by the United States through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Many Tejanos, or people whose forebears lived in Texas when it was still part of Mexico, are proud of this heritage. As a state bordering Mexico, Texas, predictably, has experienced the recent immigration of many Latinos, especially in its southern and western parts and in large cities like Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. In these cities, Latino festivals are common and the local cuisine reveals a heavy Mexican influence. Texas’s Latino population is the largest in the South, with over 6.5 million people.

Florida also has a history of longtime Latino settlement by Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans. As early as the 1940s and 1950s, Mexicans migrated seasonally to Florida to work in orange and other citrus fruit orchards. While Cubans had come to Florida for over a century, the majority living there today are part of the refugee movement that began in the 1960s, when many Cubans started migrating to Miami and other cities to escape the dictatorial regime of Fidel Castro. Throughout Florida, almost 1 million Cubans have built communities and gained political representation as the largest Latino group, making the state attractive to other Latino immigrants. Nearly 100,000 Dominicans live in Florida, which is also home to the second-largest concentration of Puerto Ricans (half a million) in the United States. Jacksonville has a particularly large community of Puerto Ricans. Florida’s fast-growing Latino populations are located in Orlando, Miami, and along the Gulf Coast.

In other southeastern states, Latino migration is more recent. States like Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina have experienced an unprecedented influx of Latino immigrants in the past 20 years. While some are highly skilled workers with employment and student visas for working in academic institutions and corporations, the majority of Latinos work in the low-skilled sector, and many are undocumented. Their United States–born children form a rapidly growing subgroup of Latinos in the South. Other Latino populations include refugees from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Cuba that the federal government has relocated to cities in the South. A rising number of Latinos have also relocated from other parts of the United States, as in the case of Mexicans who lived in California before moving to the Southeast or Dominicans who have moved to the Charlotte area from New York and Massachusetts. In the South, where there are fewer urban areas than in other parts of the country, Latinos often concentrate in communities by nationality, region, or even by the towns in which they were born. In North Carolina, for example, Costa Ricans have settled in Lincolnton, Guatemalans in Morganton, and Mexicans from the town of Celaya in Orange County.

Bus depot in the city of Celaya, Guanajuato, Mexico, with all destinations listed being in the American South (Niklaus Steiner, photographer)

A number of factors have contributed to this recent demographic change. Economic instability in origin countries is the root of many migrants’ desires to seek a better life in the United States. In Mexico, for example, the 1994 devaluation of the peso under President Ernesto Zedillo and the ensuing economic crisis exacerbated widespread poverty in the country and incited a wave of migration to the United States. Today, the U.S. minimum wage is seven times higher than Mexico’s minimum wage. Political conflict and environmental disaster are also factors behind the presence of Latino refugee communities in the South. In countries like El Salvador, a bloody civil war between 1980 and 1992 claimed the lives of approximately 75,000 people and caused thousands of refugees to seek asylum in the United States. Armed conflict in Colombia has also displaced thousands, many of whom moved north. In 1998 Hurricane Mitch devastated Honduras, and many of those left homeless have chosen to emigrate.

Perhaps the most important reason why the South has become a new Latino migrant destination is the economic boom of the 1990s and subsequent growth in the region. The South has become an increasingly popular recipient of foreign investment and corporate relocation because of the development of technological, communication, and transportation infrastructures. Notable growth has occurred in North Carolina, where the Charlotte area intensified its banking and finance infrastructure and the Raleigh-Durham area became home to a number of high-tech companies. In Georgia, Atlanta’s suburbs have swiftly expanded into the rural areas of counties to the north.

Southern economic prosperity of the 1990s created job opportunities that attracted Latinos living in other regions of the United States as well as Latin American countries. The construction industry relies heavily on Latino labor; in North Carolina, for example, Latinos make up 29 percent of the labor force. The 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta created a demand for construction workers that attracted thousands of Latino workers and their families. In addition to construction, a number of other industries and agricultural sectors recruit primarily undocumented immigrant labor. As urban areas grow and salaries increase in areas like Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham, Nashville, and the suburbs of Washington, D.C., the service industry has also expanded, creating jobs for Latinos in restaurants, hotels, elder care, cleaning, and landscape companies. A visible minority own or manage businesses, restaurants, landscaping companies, or small tiendas (stores).

In the South, as in other regions of the United States, agricultural production is reliant upon Latino labor. Meat-processing plants in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia employ thousands of Latinos to slaughter and clean chickens and hogs. In Florida, Latinos form the base labor for the seasonal citrus fruit industry, where most oranges are picked by hand by undocumented immigrants for wages that average less than half of what private, nonfarmworkers earn. Other crops harvested include tobacco, Christmas trees, apples, sweet potatoes, and cucumbers. Not all farm labor is undocumented; the federal H2A program, created in 1986, is a temporary guest worker program that allows farmers to hire foreign laborers after documenting a shortage of American workers. One-third of the nation’s 30,000 guest workers, primarily Mexican in origin, work on North Carolina farms. A common misconception about undocumented Latino immigrants is that they deplete public resources and do not pay taxes. To the contrary, studies increasingly show that underpaid Latino labor significantly boosts local and state economies. In North Carolina, for example, Latinos have contributed more that $9 billion to the state’s economy through their purchases, taxes, and labor.

Strong connections persist between Latino communities in the South and their home countries. Innovations such as the Internet and cheap international phone cards make regular communication possible between family members and friends. The globalized media industry allows the same telenovela (soap opera) to be broadcast by the Univision channel in Knoxville, Tenn., and Celaya, Mexico. In cities like Durham, N.C., Latinos are filming soap operas that chronicle life in America. The proliferation of money-sending businesses like Vigo and Western Union also allows migrants to send their paychecks back home electronically, the funds arriving in Mexico within hours.

Physical travel between Latin America and the South has become easier, as bus companies have created routes from anywhere in Mexico to dozens of small-town and large-city destinations in the South. Many Latinos travel seasonally to follow agricultural cycles or to visit family members scattered across North and Central America. A bus trip from the Mexican state of Michoacán to Richmond, Va., takes 24 hours and may stop in Fort Worth, Jacksonville, Athens, and Charlotte before heading north to Virginia. (Such a trip typically costs between $300 and $500.) Another popular mode of travel to and from Latin America involves an extensive network of “coyotes,” or guides who illegally transport migrants across the Mexican border to destinations in U.S. cities. Because the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services has increased fortification of the United States–Mexican border in recent years, the job of a coyote has become increasingly dangerous but more lucrative. Coyote fees for border crossings have increased from $500 in the late 1990s to $1,500 by some accounts in 2004. Travel routes also facilitate the transport of Mexican food products (fruits and vegetables as well as nonperishable goods) by truck to markets in the southern United States.

The strength of migrant communication networks and daily arrival of new immigrants in communities throughout the South constantly reinforce Latino identity and its essential component of Spanish-language use. Spanish radio stations are easily accessible, and Spanish-language newspapers have wide dissemination in cities and rural areas. In cities like Miami, Spanish is spoken everywhere. Some cities have even introduced bilingual education programs in which instructional languages in schools are divided evenly between Spanish and English.

With these transnational connections, Latinos are able to import Latin American products to the United States. Latino-owned tiendas sell goods from Mexico and Central America, such as avocados and nopales (prickly pear cactus); candles with images of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico and the Americas; and Goya brand canned products. Restaurants buy imported foods and are able to feature national cuisine. El Salvadorian eateries serve pupusas (corn flour and cheese tacos), Mexican taquerias (taco stands) offer the cinnamon rice drink horchata, and Cuban cafés have meat-filled sandwiches cubanos. While some Latino foods share commonalities with traditional southern cuisine (for example, the Mexican version of hominy is called pozole), migrants have also brought new foods to the South that vary from traditional “Tex-Mex” cuisine found in fast-food restaurants like Taco Bell. In addition to cheesy beans, fajitas, and nachos, Latinos have introduced handmade corn tortillas, fresh green chile sauces, and plantains (a relative of the banana eaten in the Caribbean), which are quickly becoming a part of southern menus.

While Latino identity is reinforced by transnational connections and frequent arrivals, immigrants also integrate into U.S. society. Latin Americans and their United States–born children learn English, identify themselves as “American,” and permanently settle in the United States. Their presence also creates changes in “native” southern communities. Latinos challenge traditional measures of diversity and the always-inadequate oppositions of “white” and “black.” Schools and civic organizations are increasingly celebrating Latino Heritage Month in October, and enrollment in Spanish courses is at an all-time high for community colleges in the South.

A number of Latin American religious holidays and traditions are celebrated in the South with variations. Catholicism is the official religion of many Latin American countries, and 70 percent of Latinos in the United States are Catholic. Twenty-three percent of Latinos are Protestant, the majority of which are Pentecostal Evangelical Christian. In the United States, worship services are an important way for Latinos to meet and reconnect with people from home, and areas with high Latino populations have multiple churches offering Spanish-language Masses or church services.

Popular traditions celebrated include the quinceañera, in which girls celebrate their fifteenth birthday with a religious ceremony and party. In the United States, as in Latin America, many Latina girls wear elaborate dresses and hire bands to celebrate the event. El Día de los Reyes (Three Kings Day), also known as Epiphany, is a Christian holiday celebrated in Mexico and in Mexican American communities in the South on 6 January. Children receive gifts of candy and toys, and families eat a traditional bread roll called rosca de reyes with tamales (a cornmeal snack wrapped in corn husks) and hot chocolate.

El Día de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead) is a Mexican holiday honoring deceased loved ones, celebrated on the first day of November. Cinco de Mayo (the Fifth of May, often confused with the Mexican Independence Day) commemorates the defeat of the invading French army at Puebla, Mexico, in 1862 and is celebrated in many American cities with Mexican populations. El Día de la Raza is celebrated on Columbus Day by many Latinos in recognition of the injustices of European conquest of the New World.

Notable Latino festivals celebrated in the South include the world-famous Calle Ocho (Eighth Street) Festival in Miami, the grand finale to Mardi Gras, which is known as carnaval in Latin America. Many southern cities have Latino festivals such as the Gran Fiesta de Fort Worth (15–17 July), the Festival Peachtree Latino in Atlanta (August), the Fiesta del Pueblo in Raleigh (October), Fiesta Latina in Asheville (April), and the Puerto Rican Cultural Parade of Tampa (April).

Music is an important part of Latino identity that is reproduced, improvised, and blended with American southern musical genres. A number of regional and national genres are popular with Latino groups in the South. Tejano music is the folk-derived music of Mexican-descended Texans. Now internationally popular, Tejano music (of which there are a number of subgenres, including polka-influenced norteño music) represents the blending of rock and roll, blues, and Mexican accordion music. After breakout Tejano performer Selena Quintanilla Perez and her band Los Dinos added cumbia music (a Colombian four-beat rhythm) to Tejano music, the genre began to attract Latino audiences outside of Mexico and southern Texas. Today, Tejano bands routinely tour southern U.S. cities.

Other musical genres popular among Latinos in the South and throughout the world are reggaeton, a music influenced by Caribbean drumming rhythms of Puerto Rico and Jamaica, and hip-hop. Latinos also enjoy salsa, a dance music popular among Cubans and Puerto Ricans; merengue, a two-beat, hip-swaying dance from the Dominican Republic; and the slower bachata music, also of Dominican origin, with a cumbia beat and electric guitar instrumentation in its contemporary form. Many Latinos consider dancing to be an important part of their culture and identity, and it is nearly always present at festivals, social events, nightclubs, and family gatherings.

HANNAH GILL
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Gastón Espinosa, Virgilio Elizondo, and Jesse Miranda, Hispanic Churches in American Public Life (2003); Leon Fink, The May a of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (2003); Ramona Hernández and Francisco L. Rivera-Batiz, Dominicans in the United States: A Socioeconomic Profile, 2000, in Dominican Research Monographs (2003); John Kasarda and James H. Johnson, The Economic Impact of the Hispanic Population on the State of North Carolina (2006); Rakesh Kochhar, Roberto Suro, and Sonya Tafoya, The New Latino South: The Context and Consequences of Rapid Population Growth (2005); Paul A. Levengood, in The American South in a Global World, ed. James Peacock, Harry Watson, and Carrie Matthews (2005); Raymond Mohl, in Globalization and the American South, ed. James C. Cobb and William Stueck (2005); Arthur D. Murphy, Colleen Blanchard, and Jennifer A. Hill, eds., Latino Workers in the Contemporary South (2001).

 

South Asian and East Asian Ethnicities

In 1989, when the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture appeared, Asians in the South were largely an underappreciated group. In 1965 Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act that removed barriers for Asian immigrants, thus enabling the staggering growth of Asian groups in America. Over the next two decades, the South would lag behind West Coast states, the Midwest industrial centers, and the port cities of the Northeast in attracting Asian immigrants, but the 1990s became a watershed period for the emergence of Asian groups in the region. In that period, for example, the growth rate of Asian Indians in Dixie became second only to Latinos.

The 2000 U.S. Census showed that the total Asian population in the South had grown from 1.3 million in 1990 to 2.3 million. By 2000 Texas, Florida, and Virginia were among the top 10 states in Asian population, and during the 1990s the number of Asians in Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina had doubled. Among southern states in 2000, Virginia showed the largest percentage of Asians (4.5 percent), followed by Texas (3.2 percent) and Georgia (2.8 percent). The Chinese, whose history in the South goes back to the first half of the 19th century, represented the largest group, with Indians the second largest. The 1990s also saw the near doubling of the South’s Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Korean populations. Only the Japanese failed to experience these tremendous growth rates (see Table 2).

The growth of Asian communities coincided with the recent population boom in many parts of the South, including the major metropolitan areas, like Atlanta and Houston, and the burgeoning suburbs, like Northern Virginia. An unavoidable trope, the term “Asian” encompasses lands and nations that may have little connection to one another except for their eastern location. The label erases the voluminous distinctions between them and works to racialize what are different ethnic groups. National labels such as “Korean” and “Indian” also ignore the tremendously diverse ethnic backgrounds of immigrants from those countries. The term “Indian” indicates a national identity more than an ethnicity, encompassing groups such as Gujaratis, Bengals, Telegus, Tamils, or Rajasthanis. In the South alone, there may be more Gujaratis than Laotians or Japanese. Similarly, the term “Chinese” lumps together families from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Malaysia. Names like “Asian” or “Indian” express a panethnicity that enables assimilation into American culture.

One could explain the Asian presence in the South prior to 1965 as a byproduct of two forces: Christian missions and military campaigns and bases. With the possible exception of dislocated Vietnamese and Cambodians who came to the South in the 1970s, these factors hardly account for the recent dramatic increase of Asians; nor do they explain why individuals choose Dixie over California or New England. Among new arrivals, one observes a variety of social, economic, and educational backgrounds. Indians, Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans generally occupy the top end of the economic scale, with many involved in white-collar businesses, engineering, medical professions, computer science, and hotel management. The involvement of Indians in hotel management is well known and is depicted in the 1991 film Mississippi Masala, set in Greenwood, Miss. By one estimate they manage about 20 percent of the hotels in South Carolina. In Atlanta, Ga., the Korean population has more than doubled in the last decade, with over 500 Korean-owned businesses and 40 churches. A seven-mile stretch of the Buford Highway that runs through Atlanta’s Doraville suburb has become known as Koreatown, with a Korean shopping center called Seoul Plaza, the largest in the South. In the Carolina Piedmont, Vietnamese and Cambodians generally arrived in the South with fewer immediate financial resources, taking on jobs in the textile, poultry, and furniture industries. They have also been innovative in starting small-scale businesses, restaurants, and convenience shops.

TABLE 2. State Populations of Asian Southerners, 2000
State	Total	Indian	Cambodian	Chinese	Filipino	Hmong	Japanese	Korean	Vietnamese
Alabama	30,868	6,900	552	6,039	2,727	3	1,966	4,116	4,628
Arkansas	19,869	3,104	23	2,971	2,489	27	1,036	1,550	3,974
Florida	261,672	70,740	2,447	44,546	54,310	118	10,897	19,139	33,190
Georgia	170,469	46,132	2,905	25,749	11,036	1,468	7,242	28,745	29,016
Kentucky	29,400	6,771	314	5,171	3,106	10	3,683	3,818	3,596
Louisiana	54,022	8,280	310	6,936	4,504	14	1,519	2,876	24,358
Mississippi	18,396	3,827	59	3,022	2,608	9	766	1,334	5,387
North Carolina	111,817	26,197	2,232	18,017	9,592	7,093	5,664	12,600	15,596
South Carolina	35,521	8,356	538	5,723	6,423	519	2,448	3,665	4,248
Tennessee	55,890	12,835	1,139	8,939	5,426	146	4,304	7,395	7,007
Texas	552,580	129,365	6,852	98,898	58,340	347	17,120	45,571	134,961
Virginia	256,673	48,815	4,423	35,403	47,609	45	9,080	45,279	37,309

Source: 2000 U.S. Census.

The expansion of interstate highways throughout the South has been critical for networking among Asian groups. The majority of Hindu and Sikh temples, mosques, Buddhist centers, and Asian churches scattered throughout the South are located in cities or near interstate highways, which enables greater accessibility. Even families in more remote places make the occasional journey to religious centers, which have become social centers as well, reflecting a traditional southern pattern. Such religious centers, along with the multiple Asian-related associations sprouting up throughout the South, have effectively sponsored national, ethnic, and religious holidays, bazaars, concerts, and workshops. The Indian Association of Charlotte states that its mission is “to share Indian culture with the people of the Carolinas and to foster a better understanding of the cultural diversity of India in its local community.” Indians sponsor a variety of festivals, including Diwali (Indian New Year) and Indian Independence Day; Chinese celebrate the Harvest Moon festival and the Chinese New Year; and, in the spring, devout Buddhists of many backgrounds observe a special Buddha Day.

One can identify many reasons why Asians in large numbers recently came to the South and, having once arrived, why they choose to stay: warm climate, hospitality, family values, a preference for smaller cities and towns, abundant rural areas, the availability of cheaper land, job relocation, escape from the stress of big city life, the slower pace, and the appreciation of religion. One can argue that the Confucian value of filial piety, which many East Asians embrace, finds a more receptive home in the South. The South Carolina folk saying that both natives and Chinese love rice and worship their ancestors has new relevance. In general, Asian traditions place a premium on family obligations, such as taking care of aging parents. Among Indian and Southeast Asian families, three generations also often make up a household—a practical, economic consideration, but also expressive of the close ties encouraged between children and grandparents. A generation ago, such domestic patterns were hardly uncommon among native southerners, who have found them increasingly difficult to maintain.

The history of Asian groups in the South reaches much farther back than normally assumed. During the antebellum period, the port cities of New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston received Indian, Filipino, and Chinese seamen. The first significant interface with Asia began in the early 19th century through the work of Baptist and Episcopal missionaries. This endeavor reflected a major trait of southern cultural experience—the impact of evangelical Christianity. Southern churches contributed greatly to missions in China, which would continue until the dawn of the communist revolution. During the antebellum period, some of the first Chinese individuals visiting the South came through missionary sponsors, who believed that biblical and theological studies in America would benefit their work among Chinese churches.

After the Civil War, planters and businesspeople interested in replacing slave labor entreated Chinese workers in California to move to the South. This endeavor, they believed, would bring about “the elevating and saving influence of our holy religion” to Chinese people. Though some Chinese, mostly male, did take up the offer, the plan was largely unsuccessful. In general, Chinese labor came at a higher price. Chinese males came to Texas to work on railroads and cotton plantations. Many stayed and married into white and black families. The Chinese families arrived in postbellum Mississippi Delta towns and started grocery and supply stores, often within African American communities. They were effective in adhering to traditional customs and to their identity as Chinese. They founded separate schools and churches; but, in the Jim Crow South, they were often identified as “colored.” In 1943, when Congress repealed the Chinese exclusion laws of 1882, there were only about 5,000 Chinese living in the South. By 1950 the number had doubled.

One of the most fascinating stories about Asian individuals who settled in the South in the 19th century is that of Chang and Eng Bunker, the original “Siamese twins.” After many years touring America and Europe, Chang and Eng made their homes in North Carolina, married local women, had 21 children between them, and operated a plantation with about 30 slaves. The Bunker twins also embraced the Baptist faith and contributed land for the White Plains Baptist Church, which they helped build. During the Civil War, two of their sons would serve in the Confederate army. Today, their descendants in North Carolina commemorate Chang and Eng with an annual reunion.

From 1990 to 2000 the growth rate among Indians has exceeded any other Asian group, nationwide increasing from 815,447 to 1,899,899. Today, Texas ranks fourth among all states, with 142,689 Indian citizens; the heaviest concentration live in the Houston area. After the 1965 Immigration Act, Indians took advantage of the growing Texas economy. Punjabi Sikhs are well represented in San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston. They were among the most active groups in sponsoring peace workshops in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 2001. In Texas, Gujuratis are perhaps the largest Indian ethnicity. Many embrace the Swaminarayan form of Vaishnava devotion, one of the most global forms of Hinduism. Houston is also home to many South Indians, who have built the largest temple in Texas. The temple is eponymous for the presiding deity, the goddess Meenakshi, and is located in Pearland, outside of Houston.

Dennis Bunker, last surviving grandson of Chang and Eng Bunker, and his wife Hero stand in front of an image of the famous twins, 1992 (Celeste Ray, photographer)

Significant interface between Asians and southerners involves food and music. Unlike 10 or 20 years ago, small southern towns now often host Indian or Chinese restaurants. At local festivals and fairs, Chinese dishes may appear along with barbecue, assorted fried foods, and boiled peanuts. Chinese and Vietnamese favor pork and chicken; their restaurants may feature barbecue dishes “Vietnamese style.” In a recent food issue of the Oxford American, chef Wally Joe, owner of a fine-dining Chinese restaurant in Memphis, speaks of “pig’s feet brazened Chinese style” as among his favorite southern dishes. Spiced iced tea now frequently appears on menus in Indian restaurants. By and large, the southern proclivity for deep-fried foods, sauces, and rice has received a boost from Asian additions. For generations, South Carolinians and Louisianans have led the country in rice consumption, a rate that has increased with the introduction of other rice-centered cultures.

The exchange between Asian and southern music holds creative promise. Indian musical ensembles have formed throughout the South, making appearances at numerous venues, including weddings, religious festivals, community fairs, and college campuses. In Greenville, S.C., the Indian Association sponsors an annual bazaar that features both classical and contemporary music and dance in order to raise money for Meals on Wheels. Indian dance associations have sprung up throughout the South and increasingly attract non-Indians. Musical festivals such as the Leaf Festival in Black Mountain, N.C., MerleFest in Wilkesboro, N.C., and South by Southwest in Austin, Tex., have showcased world music, including Asian forms. Some researchers in southern colleges have produced settings that juxtapose varied musical genres and instruments: pairing the Appalachian fiddle with a Tibetan folk song, the banjo with Indian tabla. The Asian presence, then, may yet stimulate another musical genre in the long list of southern hybrid forms. Of course, in the South religion and music have gone hand in hand. An innovative example of this is the work of John Herrmann, a Zen roshi and “old-time” banjoist living near Asheville, N.C., who integrates meditation with the clawhammer technique of playing banjo.

Among recent Asian immigrants, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians relate the strongest to themes of loss, cultural alienation, and a haunted past, which historically have reverberated in southern culture. The Vietnamese Montagnards (“mountain people”) served with American forces and came to America after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Today, North Carolina has the highest concentration of Montagnards (about 5,000) living anywhere outside of Vietnam. Former U.S. Special Forces officers in North Carolina often helped in the resettlement of Montagnard families. In their novels and stories, writers Wayne Karlin and Robert Olen Butler intertwine the experiences of Vietnam veterans from the American South with those of Vietnamese relocated to southern places. In an interview, Butler stressed that the landscape and ambience of southern Louisiana is critical to his stories of the Vietnamese in a way that California—although home to the largest number of Vietnamese in the United States—could never be. Of the 60,000 Asians who live in Louisiana, almost half are Vietnamese. In the coastal and Delta areas, many are involved with the fishing industry. They have formed tight-knit communities in which Vietnamese remains the household language. On the Gulf Coast, Vietnamese have been active participants in the shrimp industry, which, in the late 1970s, created conflict with Euro-American fishers (becoming the subject of Louie Malle’s 1985 film Alamo Bay). At the fishing town of Seadrift, Tex., the conflict resulted in the death of a white shrimper and galvanized threats from hooded Ku Klux Klan members, who were targeted by a successful lawsuit from the Southern Poverty Law Center. In recent years, Vietnamese and Euro-American fishers formed an alliance to protest the importing of low-priced shrimp from other countries, including Vietnam and China.

In the post–World War II period, many Japanese immigrants also arrived in America with a “war-haunted past,” but the South received few of these. Among the approximately 17,000 Japanese who were interned in two Arkansas camps during the war, almost all chose to locate elsewhere afterward. One family settled in North Little Rock and started a nursery, and their descendants have recently raised money for the restoration of camp cemeteries. During the American occupation, and later when stationed at military bases in Japan, some southern soldiers married Japanese women and returned home with “war brides.” Asian wives groups (Korean, Filipino, and Vietnamese, as well as Japanese) are not uncommon at military bases, like Fort Bragg in North Carolina. In recent years, perhaps the most significant Japanese contribution has come through the business sector. The interface between Japanese and southern business ventures has been the subject of a work by Choong Soon Kim, a Korean anthropologist living in Tennessee, who finds some common social values between Japanese and southern society. In Greenville, S.C., the Tsuzuki family, which owned a company supplying patented technology to local textile mills, generously donated to the Greenville Symphony and the building of a performing arts center that has helped revitalize downtown Greenville. More recently, the Tsuzuki family donated a family Buddhist temple to Furman University. The temple was dismantled and shipped from Japan, secured in storage, and is scheduled to be reassembled on a lot near the campus’s Japanese gardens. With a chapel on one side of campus and a Buddhist temple on the other, this former Baptist school now experiments with landscaping religious pluralism.

In the first half of the 20th century, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the Protestant group most actively involved with missions, sent more missionaries to China than to any other country. With the end of China missions, the SBC in Asia directed its energies to Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Philippines, and Japan. Their history with SBC missions explains, at least in part, why more Chinese Christian Churches in America are affiliated with the SBC than any other denomination. Various factors play into the attraction that the Baptist denomination has for the Chinese, including its conservative theology, the autonomy of the local congregation, and the accenting of ethnicity. Chinese, as well as Korean and Vietnamese, churches in the South tend to promote ethnic identity and are more likely than mainstream groups in California to maintain ethnic names for churches.

In the last two decades Asian groups in the South—especially Chinese, Koreans, and Laotian Hmong—have done their share of church planting. Perhaps the Koreans provide the best example of this development. Most Koreans who arrived in large numbers in the 1970s and 1980s were already Christians, the majority of them Presbyterians. They became active in creating distinctive Korean church communities, as in the growing district of Koreatown in Doraville, Ga. Korean Presbyterians are among the fastest-growing Christian communities in the South. Baptists have also had important gains among Koreans. Second-generation Koreans have become more Americanized and less concerned about Korean identity, but they remain highly evangelical. Korean Christians and southern evangelicals share critical cultural features, such as patriarchy, focus on family, discomfort with gay marriage, the conversion experience, and a general critique of secular values.

Southerners have not discouraged the establishment of non-Protestant Asian communities, be they Catholic, Buddhist, Muslim, or Hindu. Most Laotians, Cambodians, and Vietnamese are Buddhists, though of different schools. Laotians and Cambodians are Theravadan Buddhists, while Vietnamese belong to Pure Land or Chan schools. Cambodians value filial piety and express this through annual rites, such as Chol Chnam (New Year in mid-April), when children give gifts to their parents; and Pchum Ben, a festival for ancestors observed in mid-September. The few Buddhist monks and nuns living in temples scattered throughout the South dedicate themselves to a life of contemplation, but they also assume pastoral duties among the laity, including teaching Sunday school classes and performing house and business consecrations and rites for ancestors.

For some Buddhist arrivals, however, evangelical Christianity has become a viable option. Its message rings with a sense of assurance and finality that many undoubtedly find comforting. Such churches provide a framework for selecting what is good and useful from the host culture. Embracing a Christian identity can be seen as a step toward becoming more American, yet it does not entail rejecting all that is Asian or Buddhist. Indeed, one may remain in some sense a Buddhist while worshipping as a Christian. Vietnamese Catholics have also made the South their home. Undoubtedly, the Catholic sensibility contributed to the attraction that southern Louisiana holds for this group. Interestingly, the Vietnamese, who respect both Buddhist and Christian models of renunciation of the world, now supply a disproportionate number of American seminarians studying for the Catholic priesthood.

The relation between religious identity and southern culture appears to be the most problematic among Indian religious groups. The majority of Indians are Hindu. Throughout the South, one finds the vast range of Hindu devotional and philosophical perspectives represented. Probably the most challenging aspect of Hindu practice for native southerners is the role of murti (meaning “form” or “statue”) in devotion, which may appear to evangelical Christians to be a form of idolatry—an impression unfortunately reinforced by the Hindu proclivity to call the image an “idol.” But Hindus and Christians differ strongly in how they interpret that word. In the Protestant South, Hindus make special efforts to highlight their monotheist perspective and to interpret the murti as symbols of divinity. Still, the visual component of worship, strongly expressed by the word darsan (to see the sacred), stands out in a culture that in matters of worship has often privileged “word” over “image.”

Among Asian groups, Indian Hindus have been least likely to convert to Christianity. However, Hindus have creatively drawn from other aspects of church life, such as tithing, fund-raising campaigns, Sunday schools, teenage camps, reunion dinners, and building recreational and educational facilities. Rather than undermine Hindu practice, southern religiosity actually reinforces its seriousness through the adaptation of new patterns. Many temples are found in the suburbs, even on blocks adjacent to Christian churches. As Christians have done in the past, Hindus now are claiming the landscape through names. In the newsletter of a temple community in Cary, N.C., board members suggested naming their neighborhood Balaji Colony (“Balaji” being a form of the God Vishnu). Balaji devotees, in particular, are active in creating Sanskrit hymns that praise southern states and cities (such as Atlanta and Houston) with temples dedicated to Venkatasevara (another name for Balaji). A hymn titled “Appearances of Venkatesavara” praises Texas as “the majestic state garlanded by the Rio Grande River, a land where Venkatesavara sports with the Goddess Lakshmi.” Along with such hymns, Hindus consecrate their homes, fields, and communities with sacred water from India. In new subdivisions of Houston, Atlanta, Greenville, and Charlotte, house consecrations help meaningfully commingle tradition and living in a new place.

If Asian ethnicities challenge the traditional white/black paradigm, they also remind us of what has always been the creole character of southern life. Undoubtedly, matters of ethnicity, race, and religion will continue to affect the region’s character. Despite the persistence of ethnocentric attitudes and Asian groups’ ambiguous position in a stereotypically biracial society, these new southerners are increasingly laying claims to the southern landscape. This happens less through any deliberate attempts to refashion self-identity than through an evolving ethos that unites place and family. For instance, this can be expressed through the respect given to the dead through funerary rites and care for gravesites. The Cambodian Buddhist who buries (rather than cremates) a loved one in the town cemetery, or the Hindu who cremates but chooses to scatter grandmother’s ashes in a Carolina river rather than take them back to India, has staked some lasting claim on southern places.

SAM BRITT
Furman University

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