The Cajuns: Americanization of a People

Preface

xi This study resulted from personal exploration: I am a descendant of Acadian exiles who settled in Louisiana in the eighteenth century, who intermarried with other ethnic groups on the semitropical frontier, and who in the process became a new ethic group—the Cajuns. I am, however, an Americanized Cajun. Although I was born and reared in the heart of Cajun country, my mother is not Cajun but Anglo-American. By a twist of fate I was baptized Protestant, not Catholic, the traditional Cajun religion. And what little French I speak (“un ’tit peu”) is standard French, not Cajun French, which I learned in college or taught myself. Even the pronunciation of my Acadian surname has been Americanized (BERNARD , not BEAR-NAH). I grew up in suburbia, read comic books, built model airplanes, played Little League ball, and watched many of the same TV shows and movies that other budding Generation Xers watched throughout America. Most of my childhood friends were Cajuns, but like me none spoke French. Rarely did we join activities that might be considered traditional or ethnic: perhaps a fishing trip to the Atchafalaya Basin or Bayou Courtableau, an Easter game of pâcque-pâcque, or a family crawfish boil or gumbo. Regardless, when I visited my Cajun grandparents on Crochet Street in Opelousas, I heard Cajun French. They used it as a secret code, so that my PREFACE cousins and I could not understand what they were saying. They spoke English, too, of course. They had to speak it to survive in the modern world. Maw Maw worked for South Central Bell, Paw Paw, for the U.S. Postal Service. As I grew older, I became increasingly aware of the cultural rift between our generations. How was it, I wondered, that after more than three hundred years in the New World, our family had suddenly lost the ability to speak French? What had occurred between my generation and that of my grandparents to bring about this significant change? Americanization is what occurred—rapid, widespread Americanization, sparked by the onset of World War II and fueled by the convergence of several ensuing trends and events during the postwar period: the advent of mass communications, rampant consumerism, interstate highways, the jet age, educational improvements, even the rise of rock ’n’ roll, to name only a few major factors. The twentieth-century notion of progress had come to south Louisiana. I first explored the theme of south Louisiana’s postwar Americanization in my book Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm and Blues (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996). A musical genre invented by teenaged Cajuns and black Creoles during the 1950s and early 1960s, swamp pop combined rhythm and blues, country and western, and most importantly Cajun and black Creole music. The sound resulted from a collision of cultural elements : folk and mainstream, rural and urban, traditional and modern, French and English. Americanization made swamp pop music. In many ways this work extends from that book. My goal this time, however , is more ambitious: to examine the sweep of Cajun history during the last six decades of the twentieth century—for beginning in 1941 the Cajuns underwent a transformation so dramatic as to fundamentally alter their ethnic identity. In doing so, they redefined the meaning of the word Cajun. They were still Cajuns, but not the same kind: they were Americanized Cajuns. xii PREFACE ...