Creole peoples
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Creole peoples may refer to different ethnic groups around the world.[1] The term has been used with various meanings, often conflicting or varying from region to region.[2]
Creole peoples vary widely in ethnic background and mixture and many have since developed distinct ethnic identities. The development of creole languages is sometimes mistakenly attributed to the emergence of Creole ethnic identities; however, the two developments occur independently.
In some places, they are
In some cases, often involuntarily uprooted from their original home, the settlers were obliged to develop and creatively merge the desirable elements from their diverse backgrounds, to produce new varieties of social, linguistic and cultural norms that superseded the prior forms.[3][4][5] This process, known as creolization,[6][7] is characterized by rapid social flux regularized into Creole ethnogenesis.
Etymology and overview
The English word creole derives from the French créole, which in turn came from Portuguese crioulo, a diminutive of cria meaning a person raised in one's house. Cria is derived from criar, meaning "to raise or bring up", itself derived from the Latin creare, meaning "to make, bring forth, produce, beget"; which is also the source of the English word "create". It originally referred to the descendants of European colonists who had been born in the colony. Creole is also known by cognates in other languages, such as crioulo, criollo, creolo, créole, kriolu, criol, kreyol, kreol, kriol, krio, and kriyoyo. In
In Spanish-speaking countries, the word Criollo refers to the descendants of Europeans born in the Americas, but also in some countries, to describe something local or very typical of a particular Latin American region.[12]
In the Caribbean, the term broadly refers to all the people, whatever their class or ancestry — African, East Asian, European, Indian — who are part of the culture of the Caribbean.[13] In Trinidad, the term Creole is used to designate all Trinidadians except those of Asian origin. In Suriname, the term refers only to the descendants of enslaved Africans and in neighboring French Guiana the term refers to anyone, regardless of skin colour, who has adopted a European lifestyle.[4][13]
In Africa, the term Creole refers to any ethnic group formed during the
The Crioulos of African or mixed Portuguese and African descent eventually gave rise to several ethnic groups in
Perhaps due to the range of divergent descriptions and lack of a coherent definition, Norwegian anthropologist T. H. Eriksen concludes:
“A Creole society, in my understanding, is based wholly or partly on the mass displacement of people who were, often involuntarily, uprooted from their original home, shedding the main features of their social and political organisations on the way, brought into sustained contact with people from other linguistic and cultural areas and obliged to develop, in creative and improvisational ways, new social and cultural forms in the new land, drawing simultaneously on traditions from their respective places of origin and on impulses resulting from the encounter.”[4]
Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Creolisation as a Recipe for Conviviality (2020)
The following ethnic groups have been historically characterized as "Creole" peoples:
- Afro-Brazilian Crioulos
- Aku Krio people
- Atlantic Creoles
- Belizean Kriol people
- Cape Verdeans (Crioulos)
- Criollo people (European diaspora born in the Spanish colonies in the Americas)
- Fernandino Creole peoples
- Haitian Creole people
- Afro-Honduran Creoles
- Liberian Creole people
- Louisiana Creole people
- Mauritian Creole people
- also Réunion Creole
- Seychellois Creole people
- Sierra Leone Creole people
- Surinamese Creole people
United States
Alaska
Alaskan Creole, sometimes colloquially spelled "Kriol" in English (from Russian креол), are a unique people who first came about through the intermingling of
Chesapeake Colonies
Atlantic Creole is a term coined by historian Ira Berlin to describe a group of people from Angola and Central Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries with cultural or ethnic ties to Africa, Europe, and sometimes the Caribbean. Some of these people arrived in the Chesapeake Colonies as the Charter Generation of slaves during the European colonization of the Americas before 1660. Some had lived and worked in Europe or the Caribbean before coming (or being transported) to North America.[15] Examples of such men included John Punch and Emanuel Driggus (his surname was likely derived from Rodrigues). Also, during the early settlement of the colonies, children born of immigrants in the colonies were often referred to as "Creole". This is found more often in the Chesapeake Colonies.[25]
Louisiana
In the
In Louisiana, the term "Creole" was first used to describe people born in Louisiana, who used the term to distinguish themselves from newly arrived immigrants. It was not a racial or ethnic identifier; it was simply synonymous with "born in the New World," meant to separate native-born people of any ethnic background—white, African, or any mixture thereof—from European immigrants and slaves imported from Africa. Later, the term was racialized after newly arrived Anglo-Americans began to associate créolité, or the quality of being Creole, with racially mixed ancestry. This caused many white Creoles to eventually abandon the label out of fear that the term would lead mainstream Americans to believe them to be of racially mixed descent (and thus endanger their livelihoods or social standing). Later writers occasionally make distinctions among French Creoles (of European ancestry), Creoles of Color (of mixed ethnic ancestry), and occasionally, African Creoles (of primarily African descendant); these categories, however, are later inventions, and most primary documents from the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries make use of the word "Creole" without any additional qualifier. Creoles of Spanish and German descent also exist, and Spanish Creoles survive today as
Contemporary usage has again broadened the meaning of Louisiana Creoles to describe a broad cultural group of people of all races who share a colonial Louisianian background. Louisianians who identify themselves as "Creole" are most commonly from historically Francophone and Hispanic communities. Some of their ancestors came to Louisiana directly from France, Spain, or Germany, while others came via the French and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and Canada. Many Louisiana Creole families arrived in Louisiana from Saint-Domingue as refugees from the Haitian Revolution, along with other immigrants from Caribbean colonial centers like Santo Domingo and Havana. The children of slaves brought primarily from Western Africa were also considered Creoles, as were children born of unions between Native Americans and non-Natives. Creole culture in Louisiana thus consists of a unique blend of European, Native American, and African cultures.
Louisianians descended from the French Acadians of Canada are also Creoles in a strict sense, and there are many historical examples of people of full European ancestry and with Acadian surnames, such as the influential Alexandre and Alfred Mouton,[27] being explicitly described as "Creoles."[28] Today, however, the descendants of the Acadians are more commonly referred to as, and identify as, 'Cajuns'—a derivation of the word Acadian, indicating French Canadian settlers as ancestors. The distinction between "Cajuns" and "Creoles" is stronger today than it was in the past because American racial ideologies have strongly influenced the meaning of the word "Creole" to the extent that there is no longer unanimous agreement among Louisianians on the word's precise definition. Today, many assume that any francophone person of European descent is Cajun and any francophone of African descent is Creole—a false assumption that would not have been recognized in the nineteenth century[citation needed]. Some assert that "Creole" refers to aristocratic urbanites whereas "Cajuns" are agrarian members of the francophone working class, but this is another relatively recent distinction. Creoles may be of any race and live in any area, rural or urban[citation needed]. The Creole culture of Southwest Louisiana is thus more similar to the culture dominant in Acadiana than it is to the Creole culture of New Orleans[citation needed]. Though the land areas overlap around New Orleans and down river, Cajun/Creole culture and language extend westward all along the southern coast of Louisiana, concentrating in areas southwest of New Orleans around Lafayette, and as far as Crowley, Abbeville, and into the rice belt of Louisiana nearer Lake Charles and the Texas border.
Louisiana Creoles historically spoke a variety of languages; today, the most prominent include Louisiana French and
Louisiane Creoles were also referred to as criollos, a word from the Spanish language meaning "created" and used in the post-French governance period to distinguish the two groups of New Orleans area and down river Creoles. Both mixed race and European Creole groups share many traditions and language, but their socio-economic roots differed in the original period of Louisiana history. Actually, the French word Créole is derived from the Portuguese word Crioulo, which described people born in the Americas as opposed to Spain.
The term is often used to mean simply "pertaining to the New Orleans area," but this, too, is not historically accurate. People all across the Louisiana territory, including the pays des Illinois, identified as Creoles, as evidenced by the continued existence of the term Créole in the critically endangered Missouri French.
Mississippi
The Mississippi Gulf Coast region has a significant population of Creoles—especially in Pass Christian, Gulfport, Biloxi, and Pascagoula. A community known as Creoletown is located in Pascagoula, with its history on record.[29] Many in this location are Catholic and have also used the Creole, French. and English languages.
Texas
In colonial Texas, the term "Creole" (criollo) distinguished old-world Africans and Europeans from their descendants born in the new world, Creoles; they composed the citizen class of New Spain's Tejas province.[30][31][32]
Texas Creole culture revolved around "'ranchos" (Creole ranches), attended mostly by vaqueros (cowboys) of African, Spaniard, or Mestizo descent, and Tlaxcalan Nahuatl settlers, who established a number of settlements in southeastern Texas and western Louisiana (e.g. Los Adaes).[30][31][33][34]
Black Texas Creoles have been present in Texas ever since the 1600s; they served as soldiers in Spanish garrisons of eastern Texas. Generations of Black Texas Creoles, also known as "Black Tejanos", played a role in later phases of Texas history: Mexican Texas, Republic of Texas, and American Texas.[32]
Africa
Southern Africa
Unlike the Americas, the term coloured is preferred in Southern Africa to refer to mixed people of African and European descent. The colonisation of the
In addition to Coloured people, the term mestiço is used in Angola and Mozambique to refer to mixed race people, who enjoyed a certain privilege during the Portuguese era.
West Africa
In
The extension of these Sierra Leoneans' business and religious activities to neighbouring Nigeria in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - where many of them had ancestral ties - subsequently caused the creation of an offshoot in that country, the Saros. Now often considered to be part of the wider Yoruba ethnicity, the Saros have been prominent in politics, the law, religion, the arts, and journalism.
Portuguese Africa
Atlantic Creole is a term coined by historian Ira Berlin to describe a group of people from Angola and Central Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries with cultural or ethnic ties to Africa, Europe, and sometimes the Caribbean. They often had Portuguese names and were sometimes mixed race. Their knowledge of different cultures made them skilled traders and negotiators, but some were enslaved and arrived in the Chesapeake Colonies as the Charter Generation of slaves during the Transatlantic Slave Trade before 1660.[15]
The Crioulos of mixed Portuguese and African descent eventually gave rise to several major ethnic groups in Africa, especially in
- the dominant ethnic group, called Kriolus or Kriols in the local language; the language itself is also called "Creole";
- Crioulos
- Crioulos
Indian Ocean
The usage of creole in the islands of the southwest of the Indian Ocean varies according to the island. In
The term also indicates the same to the people of Seychelles. On Réunion the term creole applies to all people born on the island.[16]
In all three societies, creole also refers to the new languages derived from French and incorporating other languages.
Former Spanish colonies
In regions that were formerly colonies of
In the latter period of settlement of Latin America called La Colonia, the Bourbon Spanish Crown preferred Spanish-born Peninsulares (literally "born in the Iberian Peninsula") over Criollos for the top military, administrative, and religious offices due to the former mismanagement of the colonies on a previous Habsburg era.[35]
In Argentina, in an ambiguous ethnoracial way, criollo currently is used for people whose ancestors were already present in the territory in the colonial period, regardless their ethnicity. The exception are dark-skinned African people and current indigenous groups.
The word criollo is the origin and cognate of the French word creole.
Spanish America
The racially-based caste system was in force throughout the
Malesia Ecoregion
Persons of pure Spanish descent born in the islands of the Spanish East Indies were called Insulares ("islanders")[36] or Criollos.
Although many of the Spanish Americans in the islands were also persons of pure Spanish descent, they, along with many Mestizos and Castizos from Spanish America living in the East Indies were also classified as "Americanos".
Caribbean
In many parts of the Southern Caribbean, the term Creole people is used to refer to the mixed-race descendants of Europeans and Africans born in the islands. Over time, there was intermarriage with Amerindians and residents from Asia, the Middle East and Latin America as well. They eventually formed a common culture based on their experience of living together in countries colonized by the French, Spanish, Dutch, and British.
A typical Creole person from the Caribbean has French, Spanish, Portuguese, British, or Dutch ancestry, mixed with sub-Saharan African ethnicities, and sometimes mixed with Native Indigenous peoples of the Americas. As workers from Asia entered the Caribbean, Creole people of colour intermarried with Arabs, Indians, Chinese, Javanese, Filipinos, Koreans, and Hmongs. The latter combinations were especially common in Guadeloupe. The foods and cultures are the result of creolization of these influences.[3]
Caribbean Languages
"Kreyòl" or "Kwéyòl" or "Patois/Patwa" refers to the French-lexicon
People speak French-lexicon Antillean Creole in the following islands:[37][38][39][40]
- St. Lucia
- Martinique
- Dominica
- Guadeloupe
- St. Martin
- Saint-Barthélemy
- Trinidad and Tobago
- Grenada
See also
- Criollo people
- Creole nationalism
- Blanqueamiento
- Creolisation
- Indo people
- Kristang people
- McGill family (Monrovia)
- Mestizo
- Métis
- Mulatto
Notes
References
- ^ "Definition of CREOLE". www.merriam-webster.com.
- ^ "Creole | History, Culture & Language | Britannica". www.britannica.com. 15 December 2023.
- ^ S2CID 54814946.
- ^ a b c d Eriksen, T.H. (2020). Creolisation as a Recipe for Conviviality. In: Hemer, O., Povrzanović Frykman, M., Ristilammi, PM. (eds) Conviviality at the Crossroads. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28979-9_3 Archived 2023-03-20 at the Wayback Machine
- ISBN 9781617031069.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link - ^ "Creolization". www.sciencedirect.com. Archived from the original on 2022-06-20. Retrieved 2022-06-23.
- ISBN 9781598742787.
- ^ a b c Dominguez, Virginia R. White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986.
- ^ a b c Dormon, James H. Louisiana's 'Creoles of Color': Ethnicity, Marginality, and Identity, Social Science Quarterly 73, No. 3, 1992: 615-623.
- ^ a b c Eaton, Clement. A History of the Old South: The Emergence of a Reluctant Nation, third edition. New York: Macmillan, 1975.
- ^ "creole | Origin and meaning of creole by Online Etymology Dictionary". www.etymonline.com. Archived from the original on 2019-05-01. Retrieved 2019-04-29.
- ^ "Criollo, criolla | Diccionario de la lengua española". Archived from the original on 2021-02-26. Retrieved 2022-06-14.
- ^ a b "Creole". www.britannica.com. Archived from the original on 2022-06-27. Retrieved 2022-06-14.
- ^ a b "Creoles of Africa". www.geography.name. Archived from the original on 2022-08-17. Retrieved 2022-06-14.
- ^ from the original on March 31, 2022. Retrieved June 6, 2022.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-203-44029-2.
- ^ from the original on 2021-08-02. Retrieved 2021-08-02.
- ^ Glimpses of Africa, West and Southwest coast. By Charles Spencer Smith; A.M.E. Sunday School Union, 1895; p. 164
- ^ Murray, Robert P., Whiteness in Africa: Americo-Liberians and the Transformative Geographies of Race (2013). Theses and Dissertations--History. 23. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/history_etds/23 Archived 2022-06-14 at the Wayback Machine
- ISBN 978-0-8020-7402-7., originally published by Longman & Dalhousie University Press (1976).
- ^ "Creoles in Alaska". Archived from the original on 2011-07-24. Retrieved 2010-07-30.
- ^ "Creoles of Alaska – Kreol explores their fascinating history | International Magazine Kreol". 17 February 2016. Archived from the original on 2022-10-22. Retrieved 2022-04-12.
- ^ "Alutiiq Word of the Week Archive - People - Creole".[permanent dead link]
- ^ "Featured Article: Creole Policy and Practice in Russian America – Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest". Archived from the original on 2022-04-12. Retrieved 2022-04-12.
- ISBN 9780809016068. Archivedfrom the original on 2023-03-20. Retrieved 2016-10-03.
- ^ Fowler, H.W. (1926) A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Oxford University Press
- ^ Buman, Nathan. "Two histories, one future: Louisiana sugar planters, their slaves, and the Anglo-Creole schism, 1815-1865". Archived from the original on 2021-08-04. Retrieved 2019-07-23.
- ^ Landry, Christophe. "Attakapas Post Spanish Militia Rolls, 1792" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2022-10-09.
- ^ "Creoletown: Name, racial identity of community lost in Pascagoula's past". 9 April 2012. Archived from the original on 22 November 2018. Retrieved 22 November 2018.
- ^ a b Andrew Delbanco (2019). The War Before the War Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War. Penguin Publishing Group. p. 190.
- ^ a b William C. Davis (2017). Lone Star Rising. Free Press. pp. 63, 64.
- ^ a b Phillip Thomas Tucker (2014). Emily D. West and the "Yellow Rose of Texas" Myth. McFarland, Incorporated, Publishers. p. 100.
- ^ Francis X. Galan (2020). Los Adaes, the First Capital of Spanish Texas. Texas A&M University Press. p. 416.
- ^ Lawrence Clayton; Jim Hoy; Jerald Underwood (2010). Vaqueros, Cowboys, and Buckaroos. University of Texas Press. p. 2.
- ^ Sudo, Takako (April 1979). "Vista de Sobre Mark A. Burkholder y D. S. Chandler, from impotence to authority. The Spanish crown and the American audiencias, 1687-1808". Historia Mexicana: 618–620. Archived from the original on 2019-09-06. Retrieved 2019-09-06.
- ^ "insular | Definición | Diccionario de la lengua española | RAE - ASALE".
- ^ Ethnologue codes Guadeloupean French Creole (spoken in Guadeloupe and Martinique) and Saint Lucian Creole French (spoken in Dominica and Saint Lucia) distinctly, with the respective ISO 639-3 codes: gcf and acf. However, it notes that their rate of comprehension is 90%, which would qualify them as dialects of a single language.
- ^ "The Creole Language of Dominica". Archived from the original on 2 April 2014. Retrieved 31 March 2014.
- ISBN 978-1-4438-2147-6. Archivedfrom the original on 2017-06-11. Retrieved 2022-12-17.
- ^ "Ethnologue report for language code:acf". Archived from the original on 2005-04-28. Retrieved 2022-12-17.
External links
- Media related to Creole peoples at Wikimedia Commons
- International Organization of Creole Peoples