Becoming American in Creole New Orleans, 1896–1949

In Becoming American in Creole New Orleans, 1896–1949, Darryl Barthé, Jr., has written a probing local history that is instructive for understanding the complexities of racial, ethnic, and cultural identities in both the modern past and present. Focused as it is on the process of “Americanization” engaged by New Orleans Creole communities (or descendants of gens de couleurs) through the late nineteenth and early-mid twentieth century, the book treats a vital era of urban development and transformation in the Big Easy. Much of this history is fragmentary, in terms of cross-cultural and caste relations in the context of the nadir of Jim Crow race and class relations as well as white supremacist racial violence and hegemony in US history.The book sets out to recount some of the methodological challenges of telling histories of Creole communities in polyglot states like Louisiana, bordered as they are on the Caribbean world but within the hegemony of American nation-making. Indeed, as Barthé, Jr., indicates, the “story of Louisiana Creoles in New Orleans is a convoluted one, because it is the story of an in-between people who do not fit neatly into the black and white American racial narrative” (2). Moreover, the “paucity of records” available for chronicling Louisiana's Creole community, “demanded that” the author “consult a variety of sources” (3), notably oral histories of his own family members—which he puts in “dialogue with archival sources to reconstruct historical contexts that have been heretofore inaccessible” (4).In many ways, this book seems like a work that would have been impossible without the insider status enabled by an author with family connections to the subject matter discussed. From the opening words, which recount a descendant's connections to New Orleans’ Plasterers Union (Local 93) profiled in Chapter 4, it becomes clear that the author seeks to interrogate the problematic biracial notions of race that often dominate American discourse in the modern era—obscuring the nuances and complexities of regional and community formations that vary over time and place. As such, the book works as an important corrective to other regional Louisiana (and perhaps US Southern) histories of civil rights and labor that have sometimes overstated the degree to which the state's diverse Creole communities, descended as they are from French and Spanish settlers as well as enslaved Africans in the Americas, fit into histories of resistance to American racism and White supremacy.A clear contribution of the work is to recall the clannish “sodalities” of Creole community formations (notably through ethnically organized benevolent societies and fraternal orders like the Jeunes Amis and the Francs Amis) in a city like New Orleans. These histories also featured the more prolific exploits and life journeys of early American jazz icons and pioneers like Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet, who were Creole in background. While New Orleans and Louisiana Creole artists were certainly at the center of America's history of jazz culture, Barthé, Jr., is sure to indicate how many “musical idioms,” while “adopted, refined, and expounded” by such Creole icons, were “in origin . . . African American, not creole” (69). Indeed, a major theme of the book is to point out the ways in which, ultimately, much of the history of Americanizing Creole New Orleans was set, sometimes violently through colorism, against potential solidarities with Black New Orleans through the era of civil rights in the mid-twentieth century. This was the case even though Black and Creole communities both grappled with the vagaries of Jim Crow (though in different ways, given the phenomenon of racial passing and related class privileges).The book proceeds chronologically and thematically from the French and Spanish colonial era through the nineteenth century epoch of American expansionism and colonization—largely charted in Chapter 1. It follows with two chapters on the ways Creole communities engaged with the decidedly American systems of “white supremacy” that were imposed by the late nineteenth century—an engagement that both divided and united the Creole community along lines of race, class, and ethnicity. As Barthé, Jr., indicates throughout the study, “Creole New Orleans was not a monolithic community” (80). The book also engages important histories of labor, education, and religion, to indicate the important ways Creole culture, French language, and Catholic religion have shaped the history of modern New Orleans, just as Creole communities came over time to be more “American” and Anglo in orientation.The book would certainly interest students of modern race, caste, class, and culture, just as it helps correct and sharpen important local histories of modern New Orleans when it comes to understanding the city's labor and civil rights solidarities across lines of class and caste.

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