Ask someone to describe the demographics of New Orleans, and the ‘gumbo analogy’ – that is to say, a bunch of different ingredients simmered together into something greater than their individual parts – is often invoked. And while we are wary of repeating clichés, that gumbo diagram works (it helps that allusions to food pretty much always go down well in this city). French, Spanish, Africans, Caribbeans, Germans, Jews, Irish, Vietnamese, Hondurans – and, perhaps most exotic of all, Americans – all come here and turn out New Orleanian.
The term ‘Creole’ refers to people of mixed ancestry in most of the post–French Colonial world. The implication is often that a Creole is mixed race, but this isn’t necessarily the case in Louisiana, although it can be. Long story short: Louisiana Creole usually refers to the descendants of the original European colonists who settled this area. Because of the shifting political status of the Louisiana colony (French, then Spanish, then French again), those Europeans were most often from France and Spain.
After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, New Orleans was absorbed into the USA. Unsurprisingly, there was tension between the largely Protestant Anglo Americans and Catholic Creole New Orleanians. The latter found the former uncouth and boring; the former considered Louisianans feckless and indolent, proving tired regional clichés stretch back centuries.
New Orleans has a habit of digesting its settlers and turning them into its own, though. Successive waves of immigration into New Orleans added layers to the city’s demographic, but the original Creole city teased something quintessentially New Orleanian – ie commitment to fun, food and music – out of each new slice of the population pie.
Take the Italians, who suffused local foodways and musicality with muffuletta sandwiches and crooners like Louis Prima. In a similar vein, the Vietnamese have brought both food and a penchant for festivals; the Vietnamese New Year (Tet) is now a major celebration point for New Orleanians of all creeds and colors. Creole implies mixture, and mixing is something this town excels at, even if it doesn’t always do so easily.
The most recent addition to the demographic pot are Hondurans; it is estimated the New Orleans metropolitan area has the largest Honduran American community in the USA (a little over 100,000 souls). However, a good chunk of these Hondurans have been here longer than many European-descended Americans. The first waves of Honduran migration came in the late 19th century when fruit companies with Central American plantations moved their corporate operations to New Orleans. Others arrived as part of the construction boom that followed Hurricane Katrina.
Native New Orleanians are affectionately deemed ‘Yats’ for their accents; their way of saying hello is the stereotypical, ‘Where yat?’
It’s an accent that feels closer to Brooklyn than the American South, one formed by a Creole population living in isolation from the rest of North America for decades. Sadly, the Yat brogue is, like many regional accents in the USA, a fading thing. It’s also a white thing; local African Americans have their own accent, a syrup-y slow drawl that is distinctive from other iterations of African American English. You may hear someone speaking Yat in New Orleans, but it’s easier to hear the dialect in neighboring St Bernard Parish, which has absorbed much of the city’s working-class white population.
Other Yat terms:
| Awrite | Alright |
| Berl | Boil |
| Bra | A man with whom you are friends, or, a male sibling |
| Catlick | A Christian denomination led by the Pope |
| Da, Dat, Dis, Dem | The, That, This, Them |
| Dawlin’ | A woman |
| Earl | Makes your car run |
| Ersta | A bivalve mollusk |
| Laginiappe | Pronounced ‘lan-yap.’ A little extra, like when the baker throws in another cookie. |
| Mirliton | Pronounced ‘mel-ee-tawn.’ A squash, also known as a chayote, that’s pretty great when stuffed with seafood. |
| Praline | That delicious, sugary baked good? It’s a prah-leen. |
| Turlet | Where one goes to the bathroom |
| YaMomInEm | Your family |
If you’re a Christian, imagine if the majority of the world discussed your faith through these terms: ‘They believe a dead man was brought back to life, and if you drink his blood and eat his body, you can live forever.’ The description is technically accurate, but it misses so much context, background and lived experience that it becomes insulting. It reduces a complex belief system to a sensationalistic cliché.
Such is the struggle practitioners of voodoo endure on a daily basis. To a voodoo follower, theirs is a religion like any other. The traditions and source of their faith may seem outlandish to a nonbeliever, but what religion doesn’t sound a little weird to someone who doesn’t practice it? And even as their religion is stereotyped as a source of witchcraft and sorcery, it is simultaneously commercialized, forming the marketing slogan of dozens of tours, T-shirts and store fronts.
Voodoo as a faith comes from West Africa. It is a belief system that stresses ancestor worship and the presence of the divine via a pantheon of spirits and deities. Slaves from Africa and the Caribbean brought voodoo to Louisiana, where it melded with Roman Catholicism. One faith stressed saints and angels, the other ancestor spirits and supernatural forces; all eventually fell under the rubric of voodoo. Hoodoo are the magical implements popularly associated with voodoo, but how much magic they provide and their import to daily worship is often exaggerated (to use the same Christian comparison, many would find it insulting to call a rosary or crucifix a magic talisman).
The most well-known voodoo practitioner was Marie Laveau, a 19th-century mixed race woman who married a Haitian free person of color. The legends surrounding Laveau are legion, but she is popularly associated with leading voodoo rituals near Bayou St John and providing magic spells for high-class New Orleans women. It’s a fair bet much of this folklore was sensationalized by the popular press of the time; stories of magic brown-skinned women performing devilish rituals sold newspapers and magazines, at least more so than a sober recording of a religion that mixed Western Christianity and African ancestor worship.
While many people feel the terms Cajun and Creole are interchangeable, they refer to two very different populations. The Creoles are the largely urbanized descendants of 18th-century French and Spanish colonists. The Cajuns descend from Francophone refugees who fled the maritime provinces of Canada after it was conquered by Britain during the Seven Years’/French and Indian War. This exile was known as Le Grand Dérangement.
The maritime provinces (New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia) were, under French rule, known as Acadie, and the refugees deemed themselves Acadians. A homeless population of Acadians searched for decades for a place to settle until seven boatloads of exiles arrived in New Orleans in 1785. The settlers spread out into the Louisiana countryside and mixed with early German peasant farmers, Isleños (Canary Islanders) and Americans. By the early 19th century some 3000 to 4000 Acadians, or Cajuns as they became known, lived in southern Louisiana. Some occupied the swamplands, where they eked out a living based on fishing and trapping, while others farmed rice.
Cajun culture is distinct within Louisiana. Older Cajuns still speak a distinct dialect of French, and the Cajun Mardi Gras, or Courir de Mardi Gras, is its own celebration, a ritual that involves medieval costuming and a drunken scrum over a runaway chicken (see the documentary Dance for a Chicken for more background).