Gumbo, Bayous, Pirates . . . and Mickey Ears? Exploring Disney's Fascination with Louisiana

I am a Disney fan. I am also a Louisianian, and a south Louisianian at that, if I might draw a distinction between the state’s more French-Catholic southern parishes (unlike other American states, we have parishes, not counties) and its more Anglo-Protestant central and northern parishes.

I meet Mickey.
(Photo: Amy Lançon Bernard)

While much of Louisiana is thoroughly entrenched in the “Bible Belt,” south Louisiana is more firmly rooted in the Latinized and Creolized heritage of French, Spanish, and Afro-Caribbean traditions—even if those traditions are less salient each passing year because of that steamrolling behemoth called Americanization (a topic I wrote about in my 2003 book The Cajuns: Americanization of a People).

My book
The Cajuns:
Americanization of a People

So, as a Disney fan and a south Louisianian, and one of Cajun/Creole ancestry, I am frequently struck by how often south Louisiana appears in all-things-Disney.

Excluding California and Florida, the two states in which Disneyland and Disney World are located, is there any state so often evoked in Disney films, parks, and resorts as Louisiana? Hawaii might come to mind, given the setting of Lilo & Stitch and the location of Aulani resort and spa on Oahu—but on closer inspection even Hawaii is eclipsed by Louisiana. (Much of what at first might seem “Hawaiian” at Disney is in fact more broadly Polynesian or Oceanian, and not an explicit allusion to “the Aloha State.”)(1)

Disney’s fascination with south Louisiana, both inside New Orleans and beyond, can be traced back to an animated short released in 1946, the Disney “tone poem” titled “Blue Bayou.”(2) Accompanied at first by Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” this short was ultimately set to original music by The Ken Darby Chorus. Intended for inclusion in Fantasia (1940), it instead appeared six years later in Make Mine Music.(3)

Title screen for Blue Bayou (1946).
(Photo © Disney)

“Blue Bayou” does not overtly reference Louisiana—its swamp scenes could have just as well been based on Florida or the Carolinas or any number of other southern states—though the Disney Wiki refers to the film as set “in the loneliness of the Louisiana bayou.”

Scene from Blue Bayou.
(Photo © Disney)

In 1967, however, Disney retroactively codified a link between the film and Louisiana when it used the film’s name for a new Cajun and Creole restaurant in, appropriately enough, Disneyland’s New Orleans Square. (The Blue Bayou restaurant remains in operation today, and Disney runs another south Louisiana-themed Blue Bayou Restaurant in Tokyo Disneyland.)(4)

The Blue Bayou Restaurant
at Disneyland.
(Photo: Wikimedia by Contributor19)

Also in New Orleans Square that same year, Disneyland unveiled one of its most popular, enduring, and influential rides. I refer to Pirates of the Caribbean—a ride that would spawn a series of blockbuster movies set not in south Louisiana, but (as the name suggests) the Caribbean.

However, as one of my mentors, Professor Barry Jean Ancelet, has often noted, Louisiana, or at least its southern region, might be viewed as “the northern tip of the Caribbean world,” or words to this effect. (Barry attributes this expression to someone else, but I first heard it from him.) And so it is not much of disconnect for the original Pirates dark ride to begin, as it still does, not in the Caribbean proper, but, as the Disney Wiki observes, “amid glimmering fireflies during an evening abuzz with the croaking of a bullfrog in a quaint Louisiana bayou . . . at Lafitte’s Landing. . . .”(5) Lafitte, of course, refers to legendary Louisiana-based pirate and privateer Jean Lafitte.

Pirates of the Caribbean,
original promotional art.
(Image © Disney)

Indeed, the Pirates of the Caribbean ride begins in the same space as the south-Louisiana-themed Blue Bayou Restaurant, where diners watch as riders in little boats start the dark-ride experience.

Interestingly, outside in New Orleans Square, near another restaurant called Café Orleans (originally The Creole Cafe), sits an anchor whose commemorative plaque reads “Said to be from a pirate ship commanded by Jean Lafitte in the battle of New Orleans – January 8, 1815.” The plaque continues “It is also said that Lafitte’s privateering ships left a wake of blood from the mainland to Barataria Bay,” an inlet in extreme southeast Louisiana. (The plaque ends with the tongue-in-cheek caveat, “But don’t believe everything you read.”)(6)

Nearby runs New Orleans Street (which connects New Orleans Square with Frontierland), as well as streets named Front, Orleans, and Royal—just as found in the actual New Orleans.

It was also in New Orleans Square, in 1969, that Disneyland unveiled another of its most popular and enduring rides: the original Haunted Mansion, which has inspired attractions at other Disney parks, including Phantom Manor at Disneyland Paris and Mystic Manor at Hong Kong Disneyland. The one in California, however, is set in New Orleans and features southern-gothic architecture. (Fittingly, in Disney’s 2003 Haunted Mansion movie featuring Eddie Murphy, the mansion is “located on a remote Louisiana bayou.”)(7)

Haunted Mansion poster,
Disneyland.

(Image © Disney)

Moving from the parks to the resorts, consider that Disney World boasts not one but two intertwined Louisiana-themed hotels, Disney’s Port Orleans Resort-Riverside (originally called Disney’s Dixie Landings Resort) and Disney’s Port Orleans Resort-French Quarter. These hotels feature local-color flourishes called, for instance, Alligator Bayou, Magnolia Bend, Acadian House, and Cajun Campfire. Their food venues offer such Louisiana fare as gumbo, shrimp po’ boys, jambalaya, muffulettas, beignets, pralines, and (if not quite traditional) “Cajun Chicken Salad.”

Port Orleans Resort,
Disney World.
(Photo © Disney)

Some might see Disney’s fascination as purely New Orleans-centric—as concerned primarily with that city, its photogenic French Quarter, tantalizing eateries, and scruffy jazz, blues, and R&B venues. Evidence shows, however, that Disney has long had equal interest in the region’s hinterland.

For example, in Disneyland’s Pirates ride, the old fishing shack seen at the beginning and the animatronic character who inhabits it (known as Beacon Joe or The Old Man in the Bayou) are clearly not in metropolitan New Orleans, but rural south Louisiana.(8) Likewise, Raymond the Cajun firefly, of The Princess and the Frog fame (“Oh I’m a Cajun, brah. Born and bred in the bayou.”),(9) is not an inhabitant of New Orleans proper, but of the peripheral swamplands. (As the Disney Wiki remarks about Ray, “[T]he character was inspired by Cajun culture, an ethnic group in Louisiana. Ray’s character was imbued with Cajun mannerisms and idioms, including the ability to speak French. . . .”)(10)

Ray the Cajun firefly
from The Princess and the Frog.
(Photo © Disney)

And while half the Disney World’s Port Orleans Resort is an architectural paean to the French Quarter in the heart of New Orleans, the other half, Riverside, is (if somewhat uncomfortably in today’s moral climate) a reference to the antebellum plantation homes found not in urban New Orleans, but in south Louisiana’s rural sugar-growing parishes. (As an aside, here in New Iberia, where I live, there is an old door in the Shadows-on-the-Teche historic house signed by Walt Disney—showing he once visited my little corner of south Louisiana.)(11)

And so Disney’s love for south Louisiana extends beyond New Orleans proper to the entire region running from the city south and west through the “Acadiana” parishes—stretching across the Atchafalaya and Teche countries, over the prairies, to the Texas border—a region commonly called “Cajun Country,” but which is also home to a significant Creole population.

Finally, there is the Louisiana theming inherent in Disney’s 2009 animated movie The Princess and the Frog and its associated flume/dark ride called Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, found in both Disneyland and Disney World. Disney’s first African-American princess, Tiana is a young Louisiana woman in the jazz age who aspires to own her own local-fare restaurant—which the filmmakers modeled on Leah Chase’s New Orleans restaurant Dooky Chase.(12) Tiana is thus shown, even as a child, making gumbo—complete with a few shakes of TABASCO® Sauce (the brand whose archives I have managed since 1993).

Early promotional image for
Tiana's Bayou Adventure.
(Photo © Disney)

Nowhere, incidentally, can I find Tiana identified as “Creole”—her last name, Rogers, does not exactly scream “Creole”—nor does the word “Creole” appear in the movie, even as the word “Cajun” appears twice. It is significant, however, that some of the soundtrack music is provided by acclaimed Creole musicians Terrance Simien and the Zydeco Experience, whose version of “Gonna Take You There” greets Tiana’s Bayou Adventure riders both in Disneyland and Disney World.(13)

(Photo © Disney)

Replete with references to jazz, voodoo, swampland “critters,” and various Cajun/Creole themes, the Tiana film and ride celebrate all things Louisiana—or south Louisiana, rather, north Louisiana serving in the film merely as the butt of a joke:

Prince Naveen: Actually, we are from a place far, far away from this world.

Ray: Go to bed. Y’all from Shreveport?(14)

This excellent punchline, delivered by Ray the Cajun firefly, is clearly meant to highlight the perceived “foreignness” or “otherness” of north Louisiana.

When in 2020 Disney resolved to do away with its Splash Mountain ride (and its racially troubling Song of the South theming), it chose to retool the ride as an ode to Princess and the Frog, replete with south Louisiana motifs.(15)

But how to explain away the “mountain” aspect of the original “Splash Mountain,” especially given south Louisiana’s unrelentingly flat terrain?

Disney Imagineers drew inspiration for the revamped attraction’s setting in part from Avery Island, Louisiana, my workplace in coastal Iberia Parish. In fact, those Imagineers visited Avery Island while on a fact-finding tour of Louisiana.(16)

In short, the “mountain” would become a “salt dome,” as Avery Island is. Rising some 165 feet above mean sea level, the real-life salt dome forms an imposing prominence in otherwise completely flat south Louisiana.

Avery Island, a salt dome.
(Photo by the author)

And the tunnels running through the former Splash Mountain? Mining tunnels, left by those digging out the salt.

And Tiana now runs a food company in addition to her restaurant, and what is one of the products that food company makes? Pepper sauce. (It all sounds oddly familiar, doesn't it?)

As Disney itself explains the ride’s backstory, “Tiana purchased the salt mine”—a fictional salt mine, of course, based on, though not meant to be, Avery Island—“and the area surrounding the large salt dome it operated from. . . . [She] revived the old salt mine and the surrounding land, growing a wide array of vegetables, herbs and spices for her recipes. . . . including a line of original hot sauces.” (This is not the first time Avery Island has lent itself to fictional portrayal: it clearly served as the basis for Moonscar Island in the 1998 animated film Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island.)(17)

❧ 

Why, however, this strong, repeated, and sustained Disney connection with Louisiana—a state too often appearing low on good lists and high on bad lists? “Louisiana Is at the Bottom of Another List,” a typical headline reads. “Louisiana Ranked as the Overall Worst State” proclaims another before sardonically adding: “Again.” Yet another declares, “Two New Rankings Place Louisiana among America’s Worst States.”(18) When it comes to health, income, educational attainment—Louisiana repeatedly comes in last, or almost last. (“Thank God for Mississippi!” Louisianians good-naturedly quip about their neighboring state.)

Louisiana excels, however, when it comes to food and music and other cultural exports. These are the saving graces that allow an otherwise broken place to attract such an inordinate amount of love and attention, including from Disney. It did not hurt that Walt Disney himself visited Louisiana and found it fascinating. (It was in New Orleans, incidentally, that Walt bought a mechanical bird that inspired the feathered animatronics of the Enchanted Tiki Room.)(19)

In other words, there is something ineffable about Louisiana—specifically south Louisiana, with its Cajuns and Creoles, jazz, spicy food, and other seemingly “exotic” cultural traits—that allows it to transcend its own shortcomings and appeal so alluringly to outsiders and to the imagination. Much of that “magic,” if we might call it such, has to do with storytelling—about its enchanting people and places. And what is Disney about, above all else, but storytelling? Disney clearly understands that its fans—the movie-going, park-going, and resort-going public—will grasp and even share its admiration for this intriguing region, so unlike the other states and indeed so unlike the rest of its own state.

Notes

(1) In response to those who ask “What about Hawaii?” Much of what in the Disney realm might offhand be considered “Hawaiian” is, on closer examination, not expressly so. For example, it would be incorrect to view Disney World’s Polynesian Village Resort or even the various iterations of the Enchanted Tiki Room strictly as odes to the state of Hawaii. They are in fact, as Disney itself points out, tributes to the South Pacific in general.

And so the Polynesian Resort is meant to represent, as Disney puts it, “an imagined South Pacific paradise” and capture “the spirit of the South Pacific.” This goal is apparent in the names of its “longhouses”—among them, yes, Hawai’i and Maui, but also Bora Bora, Fiji, Samoa, Tahiti, Tonga, and even Bali Hai, after the fictional island in the book and musical South Pacific.

Likewise, the Enchanted Tiki Room, though undeniably drawing in part on Hawaiian influences, is described by Disney as capturing “the beauty and magic of the Pacific Islands.” Thus, the attraction is not intended to reference Hawaii to the exclusion of other Polynesian islands.

Similarly, it is worth pointing out that Disney’s Moana stories do not take place in Hawaii, but reflect, to cite Disney itself, “the cultures and histories of Oceania” while centering its main characters on a fictional Polynesian island somewhere in the South Pacific.

Devorah Burgess, Walt Disney Archives, “A Day in the Life of a Walt Disney World Guest in 1971,” D23.com [official Disney website], 30 September 2026, https://d23.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-walt-disney-world-guest-in-1971/?utm_source=chatgpt.com, accessed 16 October 2026; “Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort,” Disney World, n.d., https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/en_CA/resorts/polynesian-resort/?utm_source=chatgpt.com, accessed 16 October 2026; “Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room,” Disneyland Resort, n.d., https://disneyland.disney.go.com/attractions/disneyland/enchanted-tiki-room/?utm_source=chatgpt.com, accessed 16 October 2026; “How the Oceanic Cultural Trust Took ‘Moana 2’ to New Depths,” The Walt Disney Company, 6 December 2024, https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/news/oceanic-cultural-trust-moana-2/, accessed 16 October 2026.

Cajun-themed Disney postcard,
ca. 1995(?).
(Author’s collection)

(2) Robin Allan, “Walt Disney’s Make Mine Music: A Reassessment,” AWN.com [Animation World Network], 1 April 1999, https://www.awn.com/animationworld/walt-disneys-make-mine-music-reassessment, accessed 14 October 2026.

(3) Ibid.

(4) “Blue Bayou Restaurant,” D23.com [official Disney website], n.d., https://d23.com/a-to-z/blue-bayou-restaurant/, accessed 15 October 2026; “Blue Bayou Restaurant,” The Disney Wiki, n.d., https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Blue_Bayou_Restaurant, accessed 14 October 2026.

(5) “Pirates of the Caribbean,” D23.com [official Disney website], n.d., https://d23.com/a-to-z/pirates-of-the-caribbean/, accessed 15 October 2026; “Pirates of the Caribbean (attraction),” The Disney Wiki, n.d., https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Pirates_of_the_Caribbean_(attraction)#Attraction_Plot, accessed 14 October 2026.

(6) Jean Lafitte, The Disney Wiki, n.d., https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Jean_Lafitte, accessed 14 October 2026.

(7) “Haunted Mansion, The (film),” D23.com [official Disney website], n.d., https://d23.com/a-to-z/haunted-mansion-the-film/, accessed 15 October 2026.

(8) “Beacon Joe,” The Disney Wiki, n.d., https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Beacon_Joe, accessed 14 October 2026.

(9) Movie script, The Princess and the Frog, Disney Princess Wiki, n.d., https://disneyprincess.fandom.com/wiki/The_Princess_and_the_Frog/Transcript, accessed 14 October 2026.

(10) “Ray,” The Disney Wiki, n.d., https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Ray, accessed 14 October 2026.

(11) “See a Door Tagged by Walt Disney at Shadows-on-the-Teche Mansion in Louisiana,” Walt Disney World for Grown Ups, 28 November 2013, https://www.wdwforgrownups.com/articles/see-door-tagged-walt-disney-shadows-teche-mansion-louisiana, accessed 17 October 2026; Phillipe Martin Chatelain, “Lost and  Forgotten Historical 'Graffiti' in the US: Revolutionary War Blood Painting, Walt Disney Autographed Door,” untapped cities, 2 December 2013, https://www.untappedcities.com/lost-forgotten-historical-graffiti-united-states-revolutionary-war-blood-painting-walt-disney-autographed-door/, accessed 17 October 2026.

(12) Carlie Kollath Wells, “New Orleans Chef Leah Chase Was Inspiration for Disney’s Princess Tiana,” Axios.com, 1 June 2023, https://www.axios.com/local/new-orleans/2023/06/01/leah-chase-princess-tiana, accessed 15 October 2026; “Tiana Rogers,” The Disney Wiki, n.d., https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Tiana_Rogers, accessed 15 October 2026.

(13) “Disney + Zydeco | Theme Park Ride,” Terrance Simien and the Zydeco Experience, n.d., https://www.terrancesimien.com/disney-park-ride-zydeco/, accessed 14 October 2026; “Terrance Simien,” The Disney Wiki, n.d., https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Terrance_Simien.

(14) Princess and the Frog quotes, IMDb, n.d., https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0780521/quotes/?item=qt1137372, accessed 14 October 2026.

(15) Michael Ramirez, “New Adventures with Princess Tiana Coming to Disneyland Park and Magic Kingdom Park,” DisneyParksBlog.com [official Disney site], 25 June 2020, https://disneyparksblog.com/dlr/new-adventures-with-princess-tiana-coming-to-disneyland-park-and-magic-kingdom-park/, accessed 14 October 2026.

(16) Attractions Magazine states “The Imagineers based it off the Avery Island Salt Mine in Louisiana. . . .” The Hollywood Reporter notes, “The team who worked on the attraction also did a bayou tour, looking at details as specific as the flora and fauna, and went to Avery Island and toured a salt dome to help them design the settings for the ride.”

Matt Roseboom, “Splash Mountain Closing Date, Plus New Scene and Characters for Tiana’s Bayou Adventure Ride,” Attractions Magazine, 2 December 2022, https://attractionsmagazine.com/splash-mountain-closing-date-new-scene-characters-tianas-bayou-adventure-ride/, accessed 14 October 2026; Abbey White, “Disney Reveals First Look at Splash Mountain Replacement Attraction Tiana’s Bayou Adventure,” The Hollywood Reporter, 1 July 2022, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/disney-parks-tianas-bayou-adventure-replaces-splash-mountain-1235174927/, accessed 14 October 2026.

Disney Imagineers shot video on Avery Island that can be viewed at “Tiana’s Bayou Adventure Walt Disney Imagineering Research Trip,” Disney Parks [official Disney vlog], 1 July 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyt6Vv_n2XM, accessed 14 October 2026.

(17) Kevin Rafferty, “New Storyline Details Revealed for Tiana’s Bayou Adventure,” Disney Parks [official Disney site], 3 February 2023, https://disneyparksblog.com/disney-experiences/new-storyline-details-revealed-for-tianas-bayou-adventure/, accessed 15 October 2026.

(18) Rita Lebleu, “Louisiana Is at the Bottom of Another List, but One Area Business Leader Advises Not Taking These Rankings Too Seriously,” (Lake Charles) American Press, 20 May 2023, https://americanpress.com/2023/05/20/louisiana-is-at-the-bottom-of-another-list-but-one-area-business-leader-advises-not-taking-these-rankings-too-seriously/, accessed 12 October 2026; Presley Bo Tyler, “Louisiana Ranked as the Overall Worst State, Again, and Here’s Why,” Shreveport Times, 30 July 2026, https://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/news/local/louisiana/2026/07/30/why-is-louisiana-considered-the-worst-state-us-news-ranking-50th-education-safety-healthcare-money/91095297007/?gnt-cfr=1&gca-cat=p&gca-uir=false&gca-epti=z110101p000150c000150e004910v110101&gca-ft=220&gca-ds=sophi, accessed 12 October 2026; Gray Louisiana [sic], “Two New Rankings Place Louisiana among America’s Worst States,” Fox8Live.com [WVUE-TV, New Orleans], 13 July 2026, https://www.fox8live.com/2026/07/13/two-new-rankings-place-louisiana-among-americas-worst-states/.

(19) The New Orleans/mechanical bird story is attested in Mike Scott, “How Disney Audio Animatronics Got Its Start in New Orleans – With a Toy Bird Walt Bought,” NOLA.com, 25 June 2024, https://www.nola.com/entertainment_life/how-disney-audio-animatronics-got-its-start-in-new-orleans/article_649bd7f0-2f49-11ef-9356-9bc87570d8cf.html, accessed 12 October 2026; Michael Broggie, Walt Disney’s Railroad Story (Virginia Beach, Va.: The Donning Company, 2006), p. 186; The Imagineers [authors], Walt Disney Imagineering: A Behind the Dreams Look at Making the Magic Real (Disney Editions, 2009), 118. See also Becky Cline, “Walt Disney’s Love Letter to New Orleans,” DisneyParksBlog.com [official Disney site], 8 June 2024, https://disneyparksblog.com/disney-experiences/walt-disneys-love-letter-to-new-orleans/, accessed 12 October 2026.

Why Do Cajuns Identify as Cajuns (And Not as Creoles)?

This essay is one of five in which I address current issues in Cajun and Creole studies. The other essays can be found here.

I wrote these works not only as a historian, but as someone who identifies as both a Cajun and a Creole. As I note elsewhere, “[M]any of my ancestors were Creoles of French heritage. My own family tree abounds with tell-tale Creole surnames: de la Morandière, Soileau, de la Pointe, Fuselier de la Claire, Brignac, Bordelon, de Livaudais, and others. . . . As such, I could, if I chose to do so (and sometimes I do), identify as Creole — doubly so because Cajuns themselves are to begin with a kind of Creole.”

I trust those with whom I express disagreement will accept this critique in the collegial spirit it is intended.

I thank Dr. Barry Jean Ancelet, Dr. Marc David, independent researchers Don Arceneaux, Wade Falcon, and Ryan Bernard, and former CODOFIL president Warren A. Perrin for proofing the below essay.

❧

Recently, someone asked me, “Why do Cajuns identify as Cajuns?”

This implied other, related questions, namely “Why don’t Cajuns identify as Creoles? Aren’t they a type of Creole?” — as some, including myself, assert.

The short answer is: Like their Acadian ancestors, Cajuns have always viewed themselves as a distinct people. Even from other south Louisiana Creoles.

Not only culturally distinct, but, as importantly, historically, legally, and genetically distinct.

Poster in downtown Lafayette, La.
(photo by the author, 2024)

Let’s start with a few definitions:

In its broadest sense, the term “Creole” can mean a native-born Louisianian of French-speaking (less commonly Spanish-speaking) Roman-Catholic heritage — a definition without racial connotations. According to this definition, one can be Black, White, or multiracial and be Creole. “Cajun,” on the other hand, refers to descendants of Acadian exiles in south Louisiana and all the other ethnic groups with whom those exiles and their descendants intermarried.(1)

Some understandably ask “Wouldn’t Cajuns therefore qualify as Creoles?” Because what are Cajuns in their broadest sense but native-born Louisianians of French-speaking, Roman-Catholic heritage? 

A growing number of Cajuns, Creoles, scholars, and activists accept this notion of Cajun ethnicity. They agree that Cajuns are indeed a kind of Creole. 

A kind of Creole — and yet, most would assert, still Cajun.

This might prompt the further inquiry: “Yes, but why do Cajuns continue to see themselves as distinct from other Creoles?” Creoles who today seem eager to welcome Cajuns into their fellowship, but only if, as some Creoles insist, they jettison the “Cajun” label.

In short, the message is “Stop calling yourselves ‘Cajuns,’ start calling yourselves ‘Creoles.’”

The "Flag of the Louisiana Acadians,"
late 1960s.

Some who support this idea imply if not outright assert, without evidence, that Cajuns are not a real ethnic group. That Cajun identity came into being only in the late 1960s as a racist response to the Civil Rights Movement. That “Cajun” is therefore a made-up or fake ethnic label.(2)

Clearly, however, the word means a great deal to a great many people. According to recent census data, over 107,000 Americans (more than 74,000 of whom reside in Louisiana and, to a lesser extent, Texas) identify their primary ethnicity as “Cajun.” (The same census data shows about 14,000 persons in Louisiana and Texas choosing “Creole” as their primary ethnicity.)(3)

Despite the dubious claim that “Cajun” is “a new identity” dating back only 55 to 60 years, researchers (including me) have shown that the word originated as an ethnic label in English as early as 1862 — and in French as early as 1851.(4) Since then, the label’s use has not only persisted but grown enormously.

Google "Ngram" chart showing use of "Cajun" 
in books. Note the uptick spurred by the Cajun fad of the 1980s.
(Source: Google Books Ngram Viewer)

And these findings are based solely on printed references. Who knows when the word “Cajun” (whatever its spelling) first sprang into existence purely as a spoken word? 

Returning to the core issue “Why do Cajuns identify as Cajuns?”: 

Given the size of their population (again, over 107,000), there could be any number of reasons why individuals identify as Cajuns. A theoretical Cajun might have embraced the term because their parents and other relatives identified as Cajuns; because they inherited a surname commonly regarded as Cajun; because they identified closely with other self-identifying Cajuns; because they discovered their Cajun ancestry through family oral traditions, genealogical research, or state-of-the-art DNA testing, among other reasons.

In other words, Cajuns choose to identify as Cajuns for the same reasons other peoples around the globe embrace their identities — whether we speak of present-day Assyrians in the Middle East, the Tagalog people of the Philippines, the Mestizos of Spanish America, or any other group. Including, for that matter, the Creoles of south Louisiana.

Another factor may be the tendency of some racial and ethnic communities to identify by subgroup rather than using a broader umbrella label. This pattern, for example, appears among Native Americans. As the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian notes, “The consensus . . . is that whenever possible, Native people prefer to be called by their specific tribal name.” Similarly, one Native American philanthropic organization observes, “[M]ost Indigenous individuals prefer to be called by their specific tribal affiliation(s) and many may also prefer to use their tribe’s traditional name. . . .” Although the comparison is not exact, a parallel might be seen in the preference for “Cajun” over the broader, more encompassing “Creole”—that is, assuming many Cajuns even think of themselves as a type of Creole (a concept many Cajuns are simply unfamiliar with).(5)

Consider, however, one particularly powerful driving force of ethnic identification: history or, less formally, storytelling — both of which play a vital role in creating group identity and cohesiveness. For example, the story of the Acadian expulsion fits into a long tradition of exile narratives, such as the Romans claiming descent from defeated sea-wandering Trojans, the Israelites' forty-year exodus from Egypt leading to the Promised Land, or the Pilgrims departing England for religious freedom in the Netherlands before voyaging to America and founding Plymouth Colony.

Called Le Grand Dérangement (The Great Upheaval), the Acadians’ tragic exile experience occurred when British redcoats (often New England colonists in service to the Crown) sought to expel the region's 12,000 to 18,000 Acadians, including women and children. A third to a half of the exiles died from disease, starvation, exposure, and outright violence. As prisoners, they were shipped to inhospitable locales in England, the thirteen British colonies of North America, the French mainland, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. About a decade later, the first of roughly 3,000 Acadian exiles arrived in south Louisiana, a new homeland they tellingly called Nouvelle Acadie. In time, their descendants would come to be known as Cajuns.(6)

Carl Brasseaux's important study
The Founding of New Acadia.

This exile spread the distinct Acadian identity far beyond Nova Scotia and its environs. As noted by Carl A. Brasseaux, author of seminal works about Cajun and Creole history:

[M]ainstream historians of the past 150 years . . . have clearly established that the French colonists of the Bay of Fundy Basin [i.e., Acadia] had forged a new, collective ethnic identity as Acadians long before their expulsion from Canada in 1755. . . . During the ensuing years of exile and wandering, the Acadians were universally regarded by their reluctant hosts [in the places to which they were deported] as a distinct people with a common ethnic identity. That identity clearly remained intact after successive waves of surviving Acadians made their way to Louisiana between 1764 and 1788.(7)

 

The 1755 expulsion of the Acadians.

Cajuns aware of their history regard the expulsion and its aftermath as a painful but defining legacy, one that serves to further distinguish them from other ethnic groups. Even from those who endured their own diasporas, as in the case of Creoles of African heritage.(8)

Brasseaux moreover observes, “At the time of their arrival [in south Louisiana] and for decades afterward, the exiles’ ethnicity was clearly and unequivocally recognized by established Louisianians, including proto-Creoles, who clearly viewed the immigrants as the ‘other.’” 

Another book by Brasseaux (et al.).

Indeed, Creoles in the l9th and early 20th centuries — white Creoles, but Creoles nevertheless — worked to distance themselves from, and exclude, Cajuns. As an 1881 federal census study maintained, “The Creoles proper will not share their distinction with the native descendants of those worthy Acadian exiles who . . . found refuge in Louisiana. These remain ‘cadjiens’ or ‘cajuns’. . . .” And as one scholar observed in 1939, “[The Creoles] often had a word for the poorer Cajuns: ‘Canaille!’ — that was their way of saying poor-white trash.”(9)

Brasseaux adds, “This does not mean that, after centuries of evolutionary adaptation to the same physical and cultural landscapes, there were not similarities” between Cajuns and other Creoles.

So, yes, Brasseaux says, the Cajuns are similar to other Creoles. Similar, yet distinct.

UL Lafayette sociologist Jacques Henry concurs, asserting, “[B]y the turn of the [20th] century, Cajuns/cadiens are a group symbolically discrete. . . . [and] a breed apart.”(10)

Furthermore, modern evidence reveals legal and genetic proof of Cajun separateness. In 1980 a U.S. federal court, per the lawsuit Roach v. Dresser, established that Cajuns are a federally recognized ethnic group of “foreign descent” and therefore protected from discrimination by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As the presiding judge stated, “By affording coverage under the ‘national origin’ clause of Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act] he [the Cajun] is afforded no special privilege. He is given only the same protection as those with English, Spanish, French, Iranian, Czechoslovakian, Portuguese, Polish, Mexican, Italian, Irish, et al., ancestors.”(11) 

My 2003 book The Cajuns:
Americanization of a People.

Meanwhile, scientists identified a distinctive “Cajun genotype” traced to the early Acadians’ common origins in southwest France. Acadians and Cajuns compounded this trait through intermarriage, a practice encouraged by generations of remote settlement patterns.(12)

So there you have it: Cajuns identify as Cajuns because they have always viewed themselves as a distinct people. And the reason they have viewed themselves as distinct is not merely cultural, but legal, genetic, and historical — a history in which observers not only categorized them as separate, but, as Brasseaux notes, in which Creoles abetted Cajun separateness by casting them as undesirable “others.”

As I have written before, today’s moral consensus demands we respect others’ professed identities and reject erasure in all its execrable forms. Is it therefore fitting that some would tell Cajuns that their identity — one existing in the historical record for at least 175 years — is incorrect and should be changed? Or should we respect how others choose to identify, put aside past and present enmities, and work together for mutual benefit, as many scholars, activists, and others in Cajun and Creole south Louisiana have already done for decades?

Notes

(1) For more information, see my previous essay: Shane K. Bernard, “Of Cajuns and Creoles: A Brief Historical Analysis,” Bayou Teche Dispatches, 13 February 2022, http://bayoutechedispatches.blogspot.com/2019/06/of-cajuns-and-creoles-brief-historical.html, accessed 22 September 2025.

My definitions of “Cajun” and “Creole” are merely working definitions for my purposes and I would not presume to impose them on anyone. Ultimately, ethnicity resists definition. 

(2) Shane K. Bernard, “Born of ‘Elite’ White Reactionism?: Assessing Claims about the Rise of Cajun Ethnicity,” Bayou Teche Dispatches, 5 May 2022, https://bayoutechedispatches.blogspot.com/2022/05/born-of-elite-white-reactionism.html, accessed 22 September 2025.

(3) Shane K. Bernard, “Disappearing Cajuns and Creoles? Ethnic Identity and the Limits of Census Data,” Bayou Teche Dispatches, 20 June 2024, http://bayoutechedispatches.blogspot.com/2024/06/cajuns-creoles-and-limits-of-census-data.html, accessed 22 September 2025.

Self-identification is by far the most common method of declaring one’s ethnic affiliation. Indeed, short of genetic testing and meticulous genealogical research — which some people consider deeply personal and extremely private — what other method of ethnic identification is there? Reliance on self-identification — practiced routinely, for example, by the U.S. Census Bureau — admittedly carries the possibility of error, even deception. It assumes, however, that most claimants respond in good faith and with some degree of accuracy.

(4) Shane K. Bernard, “Notes on the Birth of Cajun Ethnic Identity,” Bayou Teche Dispatches, 12 February 2022, http://bayoutechedispatches.blogspot.com/2020/09/notes-on-birth-of-cajun-ethnic-identity.html, accessed 22 September 2025. 

Some counter that “Cajun” was used in south Louisiana solely as a negative term prior to the birth of the Cajun pride movement in the 1960s. They also claim “Cajun” was used solely as a catch-all term for any poor White French-speaker, no matter their culture or heritage. Yet analysis of 19th- and 20th-century primary-source evidence reveals a more complex, more nuanced use of “Cajun.” While negative occurrences of the word “Cajun” certainly exist — some of them scathing — so, too, do positive and neutral ones. Likewise, while “Cajun” was sometimes applied to all poor French-speaking Whites, it also commonly denoted those who descended from Acadian exiles. In short, the issue of how “Cajun” was used in the past is by no means monolithic.

Evangeline.

(5) “Excerpts from Do All Indians Live in Tipis?,” Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, n.d.,  https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/faq/did-you-know, , accessed 4 March 2026; “Indigenous Identity: More Than ‘Something Else,’” Native Americans in Philanthropy, 24 November 2020, https://nativephilanthropy.org/blog/2020/11/24/indigenous-identity-more-than-something-else, accessed 4 March 2026.

(6) John Mack Faragher, A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from their American Homeland (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), pp. 469-471. Faragher writes, “The Acadian entry in the book of the dead is staggering: in July 1755 they numbered eighteen thousand persons in the maritime region. Over the next eight years an estimated ten thousand exiles and refugees lost their lives as a direct result of the campaign of expulsion” (pp. 470-71).

Carl A. Brasseaux, “Scattered to the Wind”: Dispersal and Wanderings of the Acadians, 1755-1809 (Lafayette, La.: The Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana [now University of Louisiana at Lafayette], 1991), pp. 4, 67, Table VI; ____________, The Founding of New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiana, 1765-1803 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), p. 91. In the former source, Brasseaux places the pre-expulsion population of the Acadians at 12,000 to 18,000 and the number of Acadian exiles eventually arriving in colonial Louisiana at about 2,600. In the latter source, he places the number arriving in colonial Louisiana at “2,600 to 3,000.”

Faragher's Great and Noble Scheme.

(7) All Brasseaux quotes in this essay derive from Carl A. Brasseaux, Lafayette, La., to Shane K. Bernard, New Iberia, La., 9 May 2022, email correspondence in Bernard’s possession. 

(8) One might ask “What about persons of African heritage who, because of interracial relations, share the Cajuns’ genetic fingerprint and possibly also their language, music, foodways, and other cultural markers, right down to their Cajun surnames? Should they not be considered ‘Cajun’?” There is no denying a racial element to Cajun identity. As I have shown, despite claims to the contrary, Cajuns and their Acadian ancestors have historically been considered “White.” Regardless, I believe someone of both Acadian and African ancestry should be free to identify as Cajun. Indeed, there is no legitimate reason they should not identify as Cajun, if they so choose. I would, however, never tell someone how to identify: that is a choice they should decide for themselves, and others should respect their decision.

(9) George E. Waring Jr. and George W. Cable, History and Present Condition of New Orleans, Louisiana: Social Statistics of Cities, Tenth Census of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior/U.S. Government Printing Office, 1881), 10; Shields McIlwaine, The Southern Poor-White from Lubberland to Tobacco Road (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939), p. 143.

(10) Jacques Henry, “From Acadien to Cajun to Cadien: Ethnic Labelization and Construction of Identity,” Journal of American Ethnic History 17 (Summer, 1998): 39.

(11) Shane K. Bernard, The Cajuns: Americanization of a People (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), pp. 136-37; ____________, “Calvin J. Roach v. Dresser Industrial Valve and Instrument Division,” 64 Parishes, 19 January 2023, https://64parishes.org/entry/calvin-j-roach-v-dresser-industrial-valve-and-instrument-division, accessed 22 September 2025; James Harvey Domengeaux, “Native-Born Acadians and the Equality Ideal,” Louisiana Law Review 46 (July 1986): 1152, 1158, 1159-60, 1194-95, passim.

(12) Bernard, The Cajuns, p. 147.

Race, Language, and Culture: A Note on Identity in Louisiana

I thank historians Dr. Carl A. Brasseaux (Ret.) and Dr. Michael S. Martin of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette for evaluating this essay:

❧

I have seen it stated in a few journalistic and social media outlets that, to quote my fellow researcher Joseph Dunn (for whom I have great respect), “From the late 19th century through today, the baseline for identity in Louisiana shifted from language and culture to race and skin color.” This change occurred, he states, because “of heritage language loss, forced assimilation into English, and Americanization.”(1)

I think it is important, however, to note that the idea of ascribing identity to race, or racialization, did not appear from nothingness after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.(2) Indeed, there is strong evidence that race — not merely language and culture — served as a vital element in fixing identity decades before Napoleon sold Louisiana to the fledgling United States.

The Code Noir (1724)
Source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

In 1724, for example, French administrators in Louisiana adopted a set of regulations aimed at governing race relations in the colony. The very name of that decree invoked race: the Code Noir — the Black Code. France created the Code Noir, to quote Louisiana’s highly accessible state encyclopedia, “to regulate the interaction of European-descended (blancs) and African-descended people (noirs) in colonial Louisiana.”(3) Though it contained some measures pertaining to Jews in the colony, the Code Noir (again, as its name implies) primarily concerned persons of African heritage: it regulated “nègres,” both “libres” and “esclaves,” as well as their treatment by enslavers and by the colonial apparatus in general.

Furthermore, it identified those it regulated based not on their language or culture, but on their race and, beyond that, their status as free or enslaved. For example, the code outlawed (on paper if not in practice) marriage between Whites and persons of African descent, even if the latter were not enslaved but “gens de couleur libre” (free persons of color). It precluded enslaved Blacks from selling anything without the written permission of their enslavers. It forbade Blacks enslaved by different masters from gathering in large groups, even for weddings, on pain of being flogged or even branded. And so on.(4)

After Louisiana became Spanish territory in 1762 its new rulers adopted (eventually) their own race-based regulations, the Sistema de Castas, or Caste System. Tulane historian Lawrence N. Powell describes this intricate system as “a taxonomic arrangement that often verged on the absurd” because of its tortuous attempt to categorize race. As Powell observes about New Spain in general in The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans:

A mixed-race population was forever spilling into the interstitial spaces, and obliging the Spanish bureaucrats charged with keeping track of it all — the census takers and notaries on the one hand, and thousands of parish priests on the other, all keeping racially distinct baptismal and marriage records — to devise, on the fly, cognitive labels for new people. . . . One Mexican scholar counted forty-six different mixed-blood types in the sources he consulted. Only ten categories were fundamental, however, and these were all spinoffs of three main divisions: Spaniards, Indians, and Negroes. . . . One scholar has dubbed the system a ‘pigmentocracy’ [my italics]. 

Those racial categories and sub-categories used by the Spanish included Mestizos, Castizos, Mulatos, Moriscos, Lobos, and Coyotes, as well as the overtly quantitative Cuarterones and Quinterones, among other gradations based on racial descent and admixture.

Las castas (The Castes).
Anonymous, 18th century,
Museo Nacional del Virreinato,
Tepotzotlán, Mexico.
Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Although the Spanish did not import the full Sistema in all its complexity to Louisiana, Powell nonetheless remarks “the essence of the classificatory regime did get transferred to Louisiana, implanted by the priests and notaries tasked with verifying individual genealogies and entering their verdicts in registry books segregated by race” [my italics]. Racial gradations in Louisiana during the Spanish colonial period included Negro, Mulato, Cuarterón (Quadroon), Grifo (or Grifa), Pardo (“Colored”), and Moreno (“Black”).(5)

What evolved over time from this byzantine race-based system of identity was a simpler, more fundamental three-tiered racial order placing enslaved Blacks on the bottom; free, often multiracial (part-White) persons in the middle; and free Whites on top. This framework would in time be replaced by an even more fundamental binary system that viewed persons as either “Black” or “White,” with no “in-between” multiracial gradations. The binary system arose, strangely enough, even as some continued to refer to a trichotomy made up of “Blancs,” “Noirs” and “Mulâtres.” (Indeed, as late as 1920 the U.S. Census Bureau classified respondents as Black, White, or Mulatto, among other racial/ethnic classes.)(6)

As illustrated by the Code Noir under French rule and the Sistema de Castas under the Spanish, racialization existed in Louisiana long before the coming of American rule. This is important because, as noted, it has been argued that “heritage language loss, forced assimilation into English, and Americanization” shifted “the baseline for identity in Louisiana . . . from language and culture to race and skin color. . . .” Clearly, the issue is not so clear-cut. If a shift occurred, it may have been one of degree, with Americans continuing to use race as the major criterion for identity, albeit perhaps on a larger or more stringent scale than the colonial French and Spanish (though the Spanish, as shown, were fairly stringent when it came to racial identity).(7)

Powell's The Accidental City (2012)

Still, something must account for the presence of race-based identity in early colonial Louisiana. That something, I suggest, was an influence that existed on a vastly larger scale than Louisiana (even as colonial Louisiana covered about a third of the North American continent). I refer to novel if benighted theories of race — part quasi-religious, part pseudo-scientific — that permeated western thought at the time. These theories stemmed from interactions between Europeans and persons of African descent, both in the New World and on the African continent. In short, by the 18th century race as identity was a notion known across the western world, and not at all unique to Louisiana. This explains how Paris and Madrid were able to impose ideas about racial identity not merely on Louisiana, but on colonies throughout their far-flung empires.

This, however, does not mean language and culture exerted no impact on identity. As they do today, language and culture, like race, ethnicity, religion, and other attributes, served as boundaries, markers, or shibboleths used to inform inclusion as well as exclusion (which, for good or bad, is how group identity works). Yet the rise to dominance of racial identity in colonial Louisiana occurred well before the coming of the American period and its pervasive Americanizing agent, the English language.

NOTES

(1) Joseph Dunn, “A Primer on the Evolution of Creole Identity in Louisiana,” Louisiana Perspectives [blog], 13 February 2018, https://louisianaperspectives.wordpress.com/2018/02/13/a-primer-on-the-evolution-of-creole-identity-in-louisiana/, accessed 1 May 2024. See also Howard Blount (with Joseph Dunn), “The Acadian Exile, Louisiana Creoles, and the Rise of Cajun Branding,” Backroad Planet, 6 December 2018, https://backroadplanet.com/acadian-exile-louisiana-creoles-cajun-branding/, accessed 4 May 2024; Jules Bentley, “Blanc like Me: Cajuns vs. Whiteness,” Antigravity, July 2019, https://antigravitymagazine.com/feature/blanc-like-me-cajuns-vs-whiteness/, accessed 4 May 2024.

(2) Merriam-Webster defines racialization as "the act of giving a racial character to someone or something: the process of categorizing, marginalizing, or regarding according to race. . . . : an act or instance of racializing." "Racialization," Merriam-Webster.com, n.d., https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racialization, accessed 8 May 2024.

(3) Michael T. Pasquier, “Code Noir of Louisiana,” 64 Parishes [Louisiana state encyclopedia], 6 January 2011, https://64parishes.org/entry/code-noir-of-louisiana, accessed 2 May 2024.

(4) “Louisiana’s Code Noir (1724),” English translation, 64 Parishes, n.d. [October 2013], https://64parishes.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/LouisianaCodeNoirTranslation.pdf, accessed 2 May 2024, see Secs. I, VI, XIII, XV. For the Code in the original French see: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b86086055/f1.item

(5) Lawrence N. Powell, The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 293, 294, 295; Benjamin Groth, “‘Sacred Legalities’: The Indelible and Interconnected Relationship between Baptism and Race in Spanish New Orleans,” Louisiana History 64 (Winter 2023): 48, 56.

(6) Powell, Accidental City, 293; Paul Schor, “The Disappearance of the ‘Mulatto’ as the End of Inquiry into the Composition of the Black Population of the United States,” Counting Americans: How the US Census Classified the Nation (Oxford University Press, 2017), abstract, July 2017, https://academic.oup.com/book/25441/chapter-abstract/192603358?redirectedFrom=fulltext, accessed 2 May 2024.

(7) For more on Americanization, see my book The Cajuns: Americanization of a People (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003).

FURTHER READING

Recent works touching on racialization in colonial Louisiana, as recommended by historian Michael S. Martin:

Dewulf, Jeroen. From the Kingdom of Kongo to Congo Square: Kongo Dances and the Origins of the Mardi Gras Indians (Lafayette: UL Press, 2017).

Groth, Benjamin. “‘Sacred Legalities’: The Indelible and Interconnected Relationship between Baptism and Race in Spanish New Orleans,” Louisiana History 64 (Winter 2023): 45–82.

Johnson, Jessica Marie. Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).

Johnson, Rashauna. Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Milne, George. Natchez Country: Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015).

Wegmann, Andrew N. An American Color: Race and Identity in New Orleans and the Atlantic World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022).

White, Sophie. Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).