Professor Yvonne Captain is one of CreoleGen’s avid readers and is anxious to share her scholarship, insights and questions with our readers.
Professor Captain is an Associate Professor of Latin American and International Affairs at George Washington University. In her research she examines Latin America, the African Diaspora, and the relations among economically developing countries. Methodologically, Captain has an abiding interest in closing the perceived gap between scholarship and genealogy. Questions of identity, especially family histories, and their connections to larger societies move her to excitement. Finally, she is finishing a book on the presence of African place names and “African” surnames in the United States. She can be reached at https://yvonnecaptain.com
“Creole by Nature, Part 1—Added Dimensions to What It Means to Be Creole”[1]
It is fascinating to witness how words can change their meaning over time. That change comes with social, political, and often ethnic variations. “Creole” is an excellent example of how words can alter how we understand them—even if only slightly.
This is the first of four articles addressing what it means to be Creole. Like most concepts, the period and the region play a role. For example, growing up, I had no idea that Creole extended beyond people of African descent because, in my environment, the Creoles lived in close-knit, segregated communities of Northern California with other Black people not of Creole descent. Upon becoming an adult, I learned more and felt the need to explore beyond the comfortable beliefs of my childhood.
In the first installment of this investigation, I look at how and when the word Creole came into being. Part two focuses on the evolution of the word and its meaning for the Delta region of the United States. That second installment uses a questionnaire that saw several people respond. Importantly, the idea of Creoles with “African” surnames forms part of my research. In fact, moving forward with the third installment, I hope to learn more from you regarding the Congo (throughout the Delta), the Wolfe (Wolof) (Yazoo, Mississippi), and the Senegal Southwest Louisiana (SWLA) families of today. Finally, section four of this research examines the uniqueness of Southwest Louisiana (SWLA) through the example of one Creole family—the Senegals. CreoleGen readers are excellent responders and contributors to the articles that appear in the posts. I hope that will be the case with the three families in this series, as well as ideas in general about what it means to be Creole, especially in the Delta region.
CREOLE:
- Said of a person who is a child of Europeans, born in the colonies.
- Said of a person of the Black race, born in the colonies in opposition to a person brought directly from Africa as a slave.
- Said of a person born in the Americas. (French Academy, Spanish Royal Academy of Languages and Dictionary of the Portuguese Language. See links below.)
It began with the Portuguese. Portuguese conquerors were the first to use the term crioulo during their early age of exploration and conquest as they occupied coastal regions of Africa and many islands in Asia. Crioulo derives from the Portuguese verb “criar,” which, in this case, means “to raise a child.” It was used in Africa as early as the mid-15th century for the few short-term settlements of Portuguese soldiers and their European wives. Their children were the first crioulos. However, European families comprised of White men and White women were not the norm, and Portuguese White men soon coupled with and sometimes married African women. Often, those marriages were not Catholic but rather according to the local customs of the particular ethnic group with whom they conducted trade. This included commerce in human beings. When the husbands returned to Europe, they did so without their African wives and their mixed-race children. Nevertheless, this established a privileged class that lasted through the twentieth century. (See Johnson below.)
CreoleGen readers might think of today’s Portuguese and Creole-speaking island nation of Cape Verde, how the country came about, and the physical appearance of many Cape Verdeans, 400 miles west of the coast of Senegal.
The examples also extend to the mainland areas of Africa. Later, its development spread to Brazil and the other peoples around the world that Portugal conquered. For this series, the Colonial Spanish territories and, later, the French territories matter. For now, it is enough to point out the origins of the word Creole.
Starting with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492, the Americas—from the islands of North America, down to Argentina—were Spanish territory. From the beginning of Spanish conquest and exploration, North America included Florida, Louisiana, and much of the Southwest of today’s United States. Although not present in most of the Americas, the Portuguese did sell their African captives to the Spanish and other European powers. Perhaps their use of crioulo spilled over to the other European colonizers. The Dutch, Danish, and Swedish had colonizing experiences in the Americas and would employ similar terminology.
The first definition of a word tends to be the original usage of that term. All three language academies of the French, Spanish, and Portuguese give the first definition of a criollo as “a person or descendant of Europeans, born in the former Spanish or other European colonies.” The arrival of Africans directly from the continent began in 1501, and their children born in the Americas were quickly categorized as negros criollos (Black Creoles). Negro criollo was a specific, legal term to distinguish the African enslaved population born in the Americas from “bozales” (born in Africa). They are described in the second definition. Definition three acknowledges the word’s current usage to mean anyone born in the Americas of Latin heritage. Although there would be some variation in the definition among the Portuguese, French, Spanish, and other European colonizers, there were enough similarities to provide a synthesis. The abundance of materials available on the first generations of European-descended Spanish criollos provides a basis for my research—including for French-speaking Louisiana.
Generally speaking, there was a dizzying array of social stratification in the Americas—even more so than in Europe or Africa at the time. The color of one’s skin mattered depending on the historical period. Even within each of the following categories, there were social and often legal advantages for some and disadvantages for others. The European colonizer held the top rung of the social ladder, and their children born in the Americas—criollos—occupied the second rung. Some advantages existed for criollos libres de color and gens de couleur libres (free people of color in Spanish and French, respectively). “Black Creole,” “negros criollos, un noir créole, negro crioulo (Spanish, French, and Portuguese, respectively) were also the primary terms for the enslaved of African descent who were born in the Americas and not in Africa. Bozales, nègres brutes were the descriptions of those born in Africa. The book by Seck, below, provides ample illustrations of the term negro criollo as it was applied to the enslaved on the Whitney Plantation. For convenience’s sake, see his “Appendix,” p. 168, although most pages of the book will do. Typically, Indigenous populations occupied the bottom rung of social acceptance and were referred to as salvajes in Spanish and sauvage in French (savages) because, unlike the Black enslaved, they were not baptized in the Catholic faith. Later generations would use the term criollo to describe anyone from the Americas, including Indigenous people who, after generations, had some admixture with non-Indigenous populations.
Ironically, the first and second generations of children of the conquistadors used the term as a cultural weapon to separate them from everyone who was not a legitimate (legally through marriage) child of the conquistadors and their European wives. There were so many privileged criollos that the Spanish crown sought to do away with the automatic entitlements their conquistador parents and grandparents received. However, the offspring of these elite colonist children fought to protect the inheritance of their more famous fathers and mothers by complaining to the Spanish authorities. It is a complex reality for many to accept, but, for the most part, the first generations of White Creoles wanted nothing to do with people of African descent. None of this divisive, discriminatory history was a part of my growing up in Northern California. Black people from Louisiana and Texas were Creoles. Period! It gets more interesting in Part II as respondents answer the questionnaire that piqued my interest to conduct the research for the study of Creoles.
References:
Acadèmie française: https://www.academie-francaise.fr/
Dictionary of the Portuguese Language (Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa): Pesquisa – Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa (acad-ciencias.pt)
Etymology on Line: https://www.etymonline.com/word/Creole
Johnson, Jessica Marie. Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World. University of Pennsylvania Press, Kindle eBook, August 2020
“Portugal’s African Colonies.” Encyclopedia of Western Colonialism since 1450. Encyclopedia.com. (February 21, 2024).https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/portugals-african-colonies
Real Academia de la Lengua Española (Spanish Royal Academy of Languages) https://dle.rae.es/criollo
Seck, Ibrahima. Bouki Fait Gombo: A History of the Slave Community of Habitation Haydel (Whitney Plantation) Louisiana, 1750-1860. University of New Orleans Press. 2015. Kindle Edition
[1] This series of articles is dedicated to my late son, Dr. Benjamin Elías Hidalgo, who guided me through the questionnaire and who was Creole by nature.