"Loyalty to a place arises from sources deeper than narcissism. It arises from our need to be at home on the earth."
―Scott Russel Sanders, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World
"The traditional markers which have defined Cajun ethnicity in Louisiana have been language, food, music, and religion. A fifth could easily be added, attachment or lack of mobility."
―Dean Louder and Michael LeBlanc, “The Cajuns of East Texas”
Shortly after moving back to Louisiana, after forty-five years away, I met for coffee with an old friend who’d lived on the East Coast. When the conversation turned to living elsewhere, she asked, “Have you noticed that when you move away, your family doesn’t visit you?”
My heart skipped a beat. She’d unknowingly poked an old wound. “Tell me your story,” I urged.
Cajun culture is known for its curious language, spicy food, and foot-stomping music. Those who’ve lived here laud its warm embrace and laid-back style. Less visible is the culture’s tenacious hold on its people. Someone leaving the homeland is considered a profound loss and, in the eyes of many, a form of betrayal. At least it was through my generation.
Over the decades I’d felt bruised in small ways—most painfully by family members rarely visiting me. After returning late in life, I felt compelled to unravel the mystery of this centripetal pull, especially in light of the recent acceleration of out-migration.
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According to the census, South Louisiana has the highest concentration of native-born residents in the country. In some parishes nine out of ten adults were born in the state, and Louisiana leads the nation with 78 percent native-born. Nationally, only about half of residents twenty-five and older live in the state where they were born. Locals note with pride that most Cajuns live within fifty miles of their birthplace. To live near one’s family of origin is a badge of honor. Even in today’s mobile world, the pinnacle of Cajun success is the traditional family compound, both in rural areas and towns, where three or four generations live in close proximity.
A Moroccan-born French teacher, Mathé Allain, described these residential patterns as reflecting an esprit de clocher, the inward focus of a community absorbed in the affairs of the people who live within it. With little interest in the outside world, hence no reason to visit those who’ve left.
When I packed my bags in 1973 for graduate school in Kentucky, I wasn’t planning or excluding a return to my home state. Not so my fellow anthropology student Michael LeBlanc, who always planned to return and recently affirmed, “I was a patriot to my Cajun roots.”
I lived in four other states: Kentucky, Texas, Florida, and Oregon. My longest stint, twenty-five years, was in Tampa, where I taught at the University of South Florida. My suburban home was about an hour’s drive from Disney World. During the quarter-century I lived as a Floridian, all five of my brothers vacationed with their families at the theme park, some more than once, but none ever visited me on those trips. They never intended any harm. It is the duty of the one who leaves to come home for visits. So, dutifully I did, year after year, even as a recently divorced single mother with a toddler and a five-year-old in tow, driving sixteen hours over two days across mind-numbing interstate.
Eventually I could afford plane tickets for three. In 2003 I calculated that during the thirty years since leaving the fold, I’d spent more than $30,000 on travel to Louisiana, usually making one trip a year. This may account for my astonished disbelief when one relative suggested I should “save my pennies” and come home twice a year.
There were no rifts to explain my brothers’ disinterest in visiting me. They were friendly and welcoming when I returned, and I never doubted their love for me. When I voiced dismay and disappointment over being excluded on the Disney trips, they seemed perplexed that I was making such a big deal over it. As consolation, I was welcomed to visit them in their Orlando hotel rooms. One brother told another, “Well, if she wanted to spend more time with us, she shouldn’t have left.” Near the end of my time in Florida, I sent formal invitations to my brothers and their wives months in advance to spend Thanksgiving in Tampa. My eyes welled with tears of gratitude when four of them accepted.
The cultural norm of not visiting those who’ve left was noted by Louder and LeBlanc who interviewed Cajun migrants living in East Texas in the 1970s: "Louisiana Cajuns possess a profound sense of attachment to south Louisiana. They know where "home" is and exhibit little desire to leave, even to temporarily visit relatives in Texas. The visitation patterns between Cajuns of the two states are deeply skewed in favor of Louisiana, i.e., visits take place much more frequently in a west-east direction than in the other."
For decades I’d pondered the riddle of Cajun rootedness. When I returned in 2018 to live in Lafayette, where I’d attended the University of Louisiana at Lafayette as an undergraduate, I began to investigate the topic in earnest, searching scholarly articles, reading fiction, questioning people. A plethora of theories emerged—historical, economic, sociological, and psychological.
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Many readers may be vaguely familiar with the history of the Acadians, their expulsion in 1755 from Nova Scotia and neighboring areas (then known as Acadia, where they’d lived for over a century) by the British using the pretext of their refusal to take an oath of allegiance to the Protestant king—Le Grand Dérangement. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem Evangeline memorializes a fictional pair of lovers separated in the upheaval. More than 18,000 Acadians were dispersed along the Eastern Seaboard, in France and England, and across the West Indies. For years they wandered in exile, decimated by disease, with 3,000 eventually finding their way to Louisiana, where they settled and became known as the Cajuns. The geographic region of their new home came to be called Acadiana.
The early Acadians became farmers, trappers, fishermen, and traders. They intermarried and comingled with other French-speaking settlers, immigrants of other nationalities, Native Americans, African slaves, and free people of color, absorbing all into a richly textured cultural fabric.
The myriad contours of ethnicity in South Louisiana have shifted over the centuries. The term Creole has often been used to describe the region’s diverse French-speaking population, including Cajuns, and in other contexts it references racial or social class distinctions. The terrain remains complex and contested, with “Cajun” often associated with White and “Creole” with Black francophone heritage. Although this article focuses on Cajuns, the theme of rootedness applies to other ethnoracial groups of the region as well, as will be noted in one prominent example.
Some observers attribute the insularity of the Cajun people to Le Grand Dérangement, suggesting that the trauma of dislocation instilled a fear of the unknown, or that perhaps the joy of finding a new home in Louisiana extinguished any desire to ever leave. Alternatively, I wonder if, like Native Americans bereft of their ancestral lands, the former exiles found security in staying “on the rez” so to speak.
Native American writer Sherman Alexie eloquently speaks of betraying the tribe by leaving the reservation through his fictional protagonist Junior Spirit in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Quoting Euripides in Medea, Junior asks, “What greater grief than the loss of one’s native land?”
Alexie underscores the enormity of his own leaving in Junior’s narration of his family history on the Spokane Reservation.
"My mother and father both lived within two miles of where they were born, and my grandmother lived one mile from where she was born. Ever since the Spokane Indian Reservation was founded back in 1881, nobody in my family had ever lived anywhere else."
And yet Junior did leave, to get a better education in a nearby town, despite his mother’s warning that “the Indians around here will be angry with you.” Alexie himself never returned to the reservation and became a successful writer (although he remained in the state of Washington).
My parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and almost all the relatives I ever knew grew up in my hometown of Ville Platte, population 8,000. In a town where only a minority of youth went to college, our family stood out for the educational achievements of my sibling-set. My brothers, who all attended Louisiana universities, include a lawyer, a veterinarian, an orthodontist, a university chancellor, and an agrochemical executive. Three of them still live in our hometown. Two live in other Louisiana cities. Despite the plethora of academic degrees, we were not supposed to leave the state. My mother had hoped I’d return to Ville Platte and run the parish bilingual education program. But she supported my career choices and did visit me occasionally in Florida.
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The social and economic forces keeping Cajuns in South Louisiana are closely intertwined. In The Cajuns: Essays on Their History and Culture, historian Glenn Conrad noted that the core values of faith, family, and land are central to the Acadian experience.
Allegiance to the Catholic faith had roots in the original Acadian expulsion and through the centuries helped integrate other French-speaking immigrants into a shared identity. Catholicism remains the dominant religion and figures importantly in Cajun culture. One of the most successful Cajun/Creole cookbooks is titled Who’s Your Mama, Are You Catholic, and Can You Make a Roux?
Unlike other U.S. ethnic groups, which have experienced increasing intermarriage over time, Cajuns remain predominantly endogamous. Within the geographic core of Acadiana, between 80 and 90 percent of Cajuns marry co-ethnics. Even Cajuns who live in other parts of the state tend to marry partners who share their identity.
Outside of Acadiana, Catholicism is a minority religion. Parochial schools are hard to find outside large cities. Cajuns want to live where their neighbors are Catholic and identify as Cajun. And they want to marry other Cajuns. This has led to a high rate of intermarriage and some genetic diseases such as Friedreich ataxia, Tay-Sachs disease, Retinitis Pigmentosa, and Usher syndrome.
The Acadians are considered a “founder population,” a group started by a small number of isolated individuals who pass down genetic anomalies through the generations. The medical problems associated with these patterns are called autosomal recessive disorders, one of the better-known examples being sickle cell disease among African Americans. If both parents are “carriers,” they can pass on the full-blown disease to some of their children. That is the case with Cajuns, who have a higher than average prevalence of several rare disorders. Genetic counselors know to screen families for Acadian heritage.
In Cajun Country, authors Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre trace contemporary family organization to historical patterns of kinfolk living close together geographically. Groups of relatives often lived on adjacent lots and marriage between cousins and other relatives was common. In-marriage offered the advantage of keeping land and property within the family and providing cooperative labor for economic pursuits. It “was not uncommon for pairs of siblings from one family to marry those of another family; two brothers often married sisters. . . . Ideally, the newly married couple would set up a household within walking distance of one or both of their parents’ houses.”
My friend James’s grandmother and her sister married two brothers. In the 1950s their descendants resided contiguously along one block in the center of their hometown, a short distance south of Lafayette. Over the years, members of the younger generation were discouraged from moving too far away, but lack of space in the family hamlet required some relocation, at least within the hometown. And when James moved to a different part of town in the 1990s, and then to Lafayette in the early 2000s, both moves were opposed by his family.
A woman in my Lafayette neighborhood grew up in the flatlands of Louisiana known as the Cajun Prairie. She fondly recalls how two of her brothers married sisters who lived across the street. One of the couples now lives a stone’s throw from their son’s family. They interact with their grandchildren daily and often help with childcare, an arrangement that all three generations consider a blessing.
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For much of the twentieth century, Cajun communities faced relentless assimilation into the dominant society, most notably through the loss of language. Members of my parents’ generation were forbidden to speak French at school, so they avoided speaking the language with their children, who they wanted to succeed in the world. My generation grew up passively bilingual, understanding more than our parents realized but unable to speak fluently. By 2010, less than 3 percent of Louisiana’s population spoke French at home.
The decline of spoken French in Acadiana continues to this day, despite preservation efforts, but ethnic pride has never been stronger. Within the younger generation, Cajun and zydeco bands have proliferated, the musicians learning the lyrics to songs in a language they don’t speak. Cajun cuisine has become a global staple. The marketing world has capitalized on the Cajun brand (some would say exploited) to sell every product imaginable.
But my generation grew up ambivalent toward Cajun culture. We rejected the old-style chanky-chank music of our elders in favor of rock ‘n’ roll. Then slowly embraced it after high school as the cultural revival movement took root in the 1970s. We developed pride in our ethnic heritage but remained wary of pejorative stereotypes presented in the national media.
I wasn’t even aware I was a Cajun until watching television around age six. A segment being broadcast about Cajun culture showed locals dancing at a traditional fais-do-do. My mother commented bitterly, “They always show us as backward people.” I wondered for a moment what was backward about dancing. Then I asked her what Cajun meant and she explained. Until then I’d considered myself an American and our quaint language as French.
Cajun attachment to place, in part, constitutes a bulwark against assimilation, maintaining strength in numbers to bolster the political will to resist the melting pot. Each “tribal member” who leaves diminishes the reservoir of social and economic resources for maintaining identity.
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In fall of 2020, an obituary for a man I’ll call Evan Latiolais appeared in the local newspaper of Gueydan, population 1,400. Following the introductory sentence about date and cause of death, the notice stated that “Evan was born in Gueydan, LA and was a true Cajun.” I studied the rest of the notice to discern what aspects of the man’s life garnered that accolade. As best I could tell, the markers were his love for Community coffee and hunting, his education at UL-Lafayette, and his having lived his entire life in his hometown.
In a series of exchanges on Cajun rootedness, Michael LeBlanc offered this insight. “Cajuns are much like Native Americans in that both feel that they cannot express their true identity unless they are in their place of birth. They may leave the reservation, but they are alienated from the wider culture; as a result, they return to their home even though the economics don’t justify the move.”
That no local scholars had addressed Cajun attachment to place in depth surprised me. Sometimes it’s the ones who leave for extended periods and return later in life, like me, who notice the deep homing instinct most acutely.
Through his fictional characters, African American novelist Ernest J. Gaines conveys the weight of guilt borne by those who leave, and the fierce ties of love that summon them back. Although he wasn’t Cajun and didn’t identify as Creole, he grew up in a Creole-speaking family and was influenced by the multicultural milieu of South Louisiana.
Born on a plantation in the northeast corner of Acadiana and raised by his aunt, Gaines left the state at age fifteen to join his parents in California, where they’d relocated for wartime work. His first novel, Catherine Carmier, written at age seventeen but not published until 1964, tells the story of native son Jackson Bradley, who returns after an absence of ten years. Jackson’s Aunt Charlotte anxiously waits to greet him.
"Charlotte’s heart beat faster. Her mouth began twitching uncontrollably. A heavy lump rose up in her throat, and her legs became weak. Overcome with joy, she thinks he’s returned for good."
The story unfolds with Jackson dreading the day he’ll have to tell his aunt that he doesn’t plan to stay. He’s afraid the news will break her, so he postpones the inevitable as long as possible. Meanwhile, he falls in love with the stunning Catherine Carmier, a light-skinned Creole, and tries to convince her to leave with him. She struggles with the idea of parting with her father, to whom she is fiercely attached. Readers are left wondering if she will be able to break those bonds and eventually join Jackson in California, or if he can even bring himself to leave without her.
In Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying, Grant Wiggins is a young man who’s left his hometown for the university and returns to teach at the depressing plantation school in the 1940s. Like Jackson, Grant struggles with the decision to stay or escape to another state. His aunt convinces him to stay long enough to visit a man wrongly condemned to death and impart his learning and pride to give the man a death with dignity. In Grant’s many ruminations about his predicament, he points to poverty as the paramount source of the centripetal pull on his people. “People want to keep a local boy for themselves because they have so little.”
After graduating from Stanford and establishing himself as a successful writer, Gaines himself returned to South Louisiana and was appointed writer-in-residence at UL- Lafayette. In interviews he professed a deep attachment to the small community where he grew up. He bought land near his birthplace, moved his childhood church onto his property, and chose the old plantation cemetery where his aunt is buried for his final resting place.
In his books, Gaines describes the Cajuns as oppressors, the ones who drove Black sharecroppers off the land as farming mechanized in the 20th century and more land was needed to accommodate the new technology. In fact, the same forces that drove Blacks off the land also propelled landless White farmers to leave their home state in search of affordable land and new employment opportunities. Out-migration began with farmers and cattlemen moving to East Texas in the early years of the last century, then accelerated with the growth of the petroleum industry and wartime manufacturing in the West and North. In recent years, college graduates have left the state at alarming rates in search of better-paying jobs. This most recent exodus threatens to erode the pillars of Cajun rootedness.
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In the final analysis, no single factor alone can account for Cajun attachment to place; different forces have exerted influence over time. In the 18th century, the hardships of survival in the harsh Louisiana wilderness necessitated cooperation and mutual support. Linguistic and cultural differences fostered continued isolation through the 19th century. Rapid transformation characterized the 20th century, as Shane Bernard documents in The Cajuns: Americanization of a People. Like many other U.S. ethnic groups, Cajuns followed the American dream and embraced consumerism and upward mobility. Yet ethnic pride gained momentum during this period and by the turn of the 21st century it had soared to new heights. Nevertheless, Cajuns stayed put.
The cultural revitalization movement fueled a sense of urgency to preserve all manner of cultural resources, including human resources. Loss of native sons and daughters is lamented because it loosens the weave of social ties needed to sustain group cohesion and a sense of shared identity. Keeping kin close helps to protect cherished values and cultural traditions, especially since it’s too late to save the language. And on a human level, people want to live close to loved ones, to be a part of their lives, to experience the joys of children bonding with grandparents, and to be there to take care of elderly parents.
But will the Cajun esprit de clocher survive the current winds of change?
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Out-migration by Cajuns has been propelled by economic necessity and opportunity, navigated through kin and friendship ties. In the early years of the 20th century, East Texas first attracted poorly educated agriculturalists displaced by mechanization and restrictive land tenure. Later, the burgeoning oil industry offered higher income and upward mobility to large numbers of Cajuns, such that le Grand Texas became a sister state and a second homeland. Leaving to seek one’s fortunes in Texas became commonplace and condoned, scarcely more disloyal than moving to the next town.
During the seven years I lived in Galveston in the early ’80s, where my first teaching position was in the island’s medical school, relatives sometimes vacationed in the popular beach town and came to my home to visit. In the Cajun worldview I hadn’t yet left the fold.
California also attracted large numbers of Cajuns and Creoles, where the growing aviation and maritime war industries offered good jobs in settings with less racial discrimination. Likewise, the Great Migration of Southern Blacks to industrializing Northern and Western cities included Louisiana Creoles and created enclaves of French-speaking ethnics. Around Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, migrant musicians created popular scenes for Cajun and zydeco music and dance that attracted a large, multiethnic following, as documented in ethnomusicologist Mark DeWitt’s Cajun and Zydeco Dance Music in Northern California. Such cultural enclaves enabled Louisiana migrants to put down permanent roots.
During the 1980s an international oil glut dealt a severe blow to Louisiana’s economy, which had become heavily dependent on oil and natural gas industries. A huge wave of workers lost their jobs, and thousands were forced to leave the state, creating Cajun communities across the country.
The latest wave of migrants began with the exodus following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which devastated large swaths of the state, especially the city of New Orleans. Five years before Katrina, the Crescent City had a population of roughly half a million; by 2006 the number had plummeted to 230,000. It rebounded somewhat in the ensuing years, but as of 2017, 100,000 displaced persons still lived in Houston.
In recent years, Louisiana has ranked fifth in the U.S. for number of residents lost. The current brain drain involves mostly college-educated, upwardly mobile white-collar workers in search of higher-paying jobs than those available in Louisiana’s depressed economy. From 2000 to 2017 Louisiana lost about 38,000 college-educated adults between the ages of 25 and 54. Over three-quarters of these moved to Texas.
Over the past fifteen years, three of my nephews have moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area for career advancement. Their parents were saddened to see them go but supportive of the opportunity for upward mobility. They live close enough to drive home for regular visits. Their parents also visit them once or twice a year. Still, it’s not unusual for family members to wistfully speculate about whether the nephews might eventually find a way to move back.
Unless Louisiana succeeds in diversifying its economy, which remains petroleum-dependent, increasing mobility trends are expected to continue for the foreseeable future, undoubtedly leading to greater social acceptance for leaving the fold. As the reins on Acadiana’s natives loosen, ethnic identity will be less tied to living in the place of one’s birth. In time, esprit de clocher may become a distant memory.
Before I moved back, I’d lived in Portland, Oregon for six years. In my memoir Rose City Audition: Stories from My Portland Adventure, I chronicle my search for a sense of belonging in my adopted city. After “exhaustive efforts to build community, I felt like a rootless plant, unable to find the right soil in which to thrive.” Like so many other Cajuns, in the end, I came home. In the book’s epilogue, written a year after my return to Louisiana, I reflect on moving back: "As I’d hoped, I feel a greater sense of belonging in the familiar environment of Cajun culture, the Louisiana landscape, and my family of origin. . . . I’m weathering the growing pains of putting down roots, but at least the soil is familiar. . . ."
My sons live in Maryland and Florida, and we visit one another regularly in our respective states. They have never experienced a sense of guilt or separation from their culture for living apart. They partly identify with Cajun ethnicity but would not call themselves Cajuns. My Texas nephews, on the other hand, can rightly check the Cajun box on the census. Had I raised my children in Louisiana, they could do the same.
Future observers will likely speak more of Cajun “heritage” than ethnicity, in much the same way that “francophone” is used today. Over time, Cajun identity will be less circumscribed by geography. But for now, rootedness to place remains alive and well in South Louisiana.
June 26, 2023