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Creole Culture
Report
Table of contents

Introduction 2
Family life 3
Historical Creole Gender Role 4
Creole Customs 5
Creole culture 5
People 6
United States 6
Africa 7
Brazil 8
Spanish -speaking countries 9
Caribbean 10
Indian Ocean 10
Languages 11
The Flag 11
Conclusion 12
Used literature 13

Introduction

I chose this theme because I am really into all kinds of different cultures . What most exited me in this theme was that I had absolutely no idea who creoles were. Now I now that there were three general groups that made up Creole society:
1) whites who were Creoles, Americans, and inhabitants of European origin made up the highest class ;
2) free Blacks, emancipated slaves and their descendants made up the middle class; and
3) slaves who were household property, were the lowest class.
The Creoles were the majority of the white population. They had a complex social organization, which included foreign groups such as Germans, Irish, and Spaniards whose names were given a French accent. The people who could trace their noble ancestors called themselves “Creole.” Others were “chacas” or tradesmen, “chacalatas” or country folk (peasants), or “chacumas” for anyone with Black blood . All Creoles, no matter what level of society they were in, including slaves, looked down on the Americans.
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Family life

In the Creole family the father was dominant . His word was law. He was not always a
faithful spouse , but he was an indulgent parent . If he was a planter, he ruled his estate like
a king . He had a large house, large crops, and a large family. He was a dutiful husband
and accompanied his wife to balls, the theatre , and social events . He would go to the
cafes to discuss business, play dominoes, and have a drink.

Historical Creole Gender Role

Young men were given their own quarters for entertainment purposes. They had
mistresses who were Black or mulatto, but they couldn’t marry them . Having a mistress
was an accepted custom because marriages were usually business arrangements , not for
love, and the men expected their wives to be passive and innocent lovers. Men took fencing lessons, went horseback riding, dancing, or played cards. He would fight duels if necessary and preferred to die rather than be dishonored.
Girls needed a dowry and had to marry before they were twenty - five years old. They
usually had a “ coming out” during an evening at the Theatre d’ Orleans , which marked
the beginning of their search for a husband. The whole family attended the performance
and sat in a box. Young men who were interested in the girl stopped by the box to pay
their respects. They had intermediaries talk to the father and ask if they would be
permitted to call on the girl at home. The first formal visit was brief , with the girl’s
mother and perhaps other relatives in attendance who would find out the young man’s
intentions. After four home visits the father asked the young man if he was serious about
his daughter . If the young man wanted to marry the girl the two fathers negotiated the
dowry. A notary came to write a list of the couple’s possessions and drew up the
marriage contract. Once the contract was signed , the families announced the engagement.
The girl’s family gave a big dinner at her house where the young man gave her an
engagement ring. As a fiancée the young man could visit the girl whenever he wanted
and take her out, but they were always chaperoned. A few days before the wedding , the young man gave his fiancée a wedding basket with lacework (handkerchiefs, mantilla, fan), a cashmere shawl, gloves, and jewelry. She could not wear the jewelry before the wedding, nor could she leave the house for three days before the wedding. 4
The Creoles liked to have weddings on Mondays or Tuesdays in Saint Louie Cathedral in New Orleans in the late afternoon.
The bride wore a silk dress with pearls and lace . The veil was held in place with a crown of orange blossoms. The bride carried the same flowers in her bouquet. Later she left the bouquet in the church , put it on a relative’s grave, or sent it to the convent where she studied. After the ceremony the members of the family signed the register . The guests then went to the
bride’s home for the banquet. The bride cut the cake and gave pieces of it to single girls
to put under their pillows. When the guests began to dance , the bride and her mother went
to the bridal chamber where she took off her wedding clothes and changed into her nightgown. The bride and groom spent their honeymoon in her parents ’ house. They were
expected to stay in the bedroom for five days or more.

Creole Customs

Creole customs can be divided into two kinds: religious and non-religious. Religious
customs focus on holidays : All Saints Day, Mardi gras and Easter , for example. On All
Saints Day Creoles bring flowers made of white, black, or purple tissue paper to place on
graves in the cemetery. The week before this holiday shops display crowns and crosses
with black beads. Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday is celebrated on the Tuesday before Ash
Wednesday , which is the beginning of Lent . At Easter, rabbits come out at night . The children try to stay up as late as possible, but they don’t see the rabbits. The rabbit ’s nests are found filled with colored eggs both outside and inside the house. When the children find all the eggs, they have a contest of egg breaking. The child who breaks the egg takes it. The child with the most eggs at the end of the game is the winner .
Non-religious customs of the Creoles can be illustrated by two activities : 1) lagniappe,
which comes from the Spanish word la napa meaning a sweetening. Grocery stores in
Louisiana give a small addition to one’s purchase , such as candy or small cakes as a
token of appreciation to a customer; and 2) chiavari, which is a kind of cerebration of the
remarriage of a widow or widower.
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Creole culture

It has been handed down through the years that Creoles are both BLACK and FRENCH in heritage . Creoles are among a rich cultural heritage of people. For many centuries , the word Creole has had as many as 30 known definitions. It is a fact that the word Creole had its origin in Africa, citing the countries of Senegal and Mali . In these areas , it is believed that in the 11th century is when Creolism began. In search of new lands, ideas , riches, knowledge and to dispute the philosophers and historians, men became brave explorers. It is through their discoveries that these varying cultures co-existed in harmony to form the structure of Creolism.  It is documented in the records of history that Creoles of Senegal, whether as freemen or as slaves, traveled directly from Senegal and Mali to Louisiana.

People

The term Creole and its cognates in other languages — such as crioulo, criollo, créole, kriolu, criol, kreyol, kriulo, kriol, krio, kreol, etc. — have been applied to people in different countries and epochs, with rather different meanings. Those terms are almost always used in the general area of present or former colonies in other continents , and originally referred to locally born people with foreign origin.

United States

Louisiana

In the United States, the word "Creole" refers to people of any race or mixture thereof who are descended from settlers in colonial French Louisiana before it became part of the United States in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase. Some writers from other parts of the country have mistakenly assumed the term to refer only to people of mixed racial descent, but this is not the traditional Louisiana usage . Originally it referred to people of French and then Spanish descent who were born in Louisiana, to distinguish them from immigrants . Later Creole was sometimes used as well to refer to people of African descent born in Louisiana. Later the terms were differentiated, by French Creole (European ancestry) and Louisiana Creole (meaning someone of mixed racial ancestry).
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Current usage has broadened the meaning of Louisiana Creoles to describe a broad cultural group of people of all races who share a French or Spanish background. Louisianans who identify themselves as "Creole" are most commonly from historically Francophone communities, with some ancestors who came to Louisiana either directly from France or via the French colonies in the Caribbean. They generally are Roman Catholic and influenced by the traditional French culture of the early part of the state. The term is also often used to mean simply "pertaining to New Orleans". Louisiana's Creole People (Creoles of Color ) are of mixed (mainly) French, Spanish, African American, and Native American heritage.(Those Louisianans descended from the Acadians

Chesapeake Colonies

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.

Africa

Portuguese Africa and the origins of "Creole"

The English word creole derives from the French créole, which in turn came from Portuguese crioulo. This word, a derivative of the verb criar ("to raise "), was coined in the 15th century, in the trading and military outposts established by Portugal in West Africa and Cape Verde . It originally referred to descendants of the Portuguese settlers who were born and "raised" locally. The word then spread to other languages, probably adopted from Portuguese slave traders who supplied most of the slaves to South America through the 16th century. While the Portuguese may have originally reserved the term crioulo for people of strictly European descent, the crioulo population came to be dominated by numerous people of mixed Portuguese and African ancestry. This mixing happened relatively quickly in most Portuguese colonies of the time. The growth of a mixed population was due to both the lack of Portuguese-born women in the settlements, and to the Portuguese Crown policy of encouraging mixed marriages in the colonies to create more stable populations.
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Ethnic groups in Africa of African-American descent

Sierra Leone , founded by the British to serve as a colony for freed slaves, has a Creole ethnic group whose ancestors migrated from Canada, where many were Americans who had fought with the British and settled there after the American Revolutionary War; the British West Indies, and various parts of West Africa. Their offspring (born in the Freetown colony) came to be known as Creoles or its similar Krio. Some of these Creoles or Krios were of mixed ancestry.Similarly, the United States established a colony for freed slaves in what became Liberia . Descendants of African-American immigrants were often called Creoles. Many of the African-American immigrants and their descendants were of mixed ancestry.Creoles from these two nations emigrated to other African countries, such as Equatorial Guinea , where they were known as Krios; or Nigeria, where they were known as Saros. Some scholars report that a new wave of Krio immigrant descendants of freed slaves of Sierra Leone and Liberia are known as Fernandinos (see Fernando Po).An additional sub-group of African descent from the Americans in Equatorial Guinea were descendants of native Bubi and freed Cuban slaves brought to the islands during the 1800s. People of this specific ancestry were part of the emancipado population which included other distinct groups assimilated into the local colonial society.

Brazil

In Brazil, the word crioulo came to mean " dark skinned person ", that is, a person of mostly African ancestry. In the Colony it was common to refer to a slave born in Brazil as a crioulo and to a slave from Africa as an "African". Thus crioulo came to refer to slaves born and raised in Brazil. Later, crioulos was used to refer to all people of African ancestry.African slaves were imported into the country from the 17th century until the first half of the 19th century. Due to their multiple ethnic roots and to the wide geographic expanse of the country, the slaves and their descendants did not constitute a organized ethnic group. On the other hand , as in the Portuguese colonies in Africa, people of mixed Portuguese and African ancestry soon came to constitute a large segment of the population. There were no sharp class divisions based on degrees of African heritage. As a consequence, the term crioulo never became the name of an ethnic group. Instead it is simply a racial label, and is now considered highly offensive.
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Spanish-speaking countries

In regions that were formerly colonies of Spain , the Spanish word criollo historically referred to class of the colonial caste system, comprising people born in the colonies with unmixed Spanish descent. People with at most 1/8th of Amerindian ancestry, were also considered criollos; but this rule did not apply to black African ancestry. The criollos ranked strictly lower than Spanish-born peninsulares ( literally "born in the Iberian Peninsula"), who occupied the top military, administrative, and religious offices in the colonies. The word criollo is a similar of English Creole, and often translated by it; even though many other Creole peoples never were historically connected to Spain or to the colonial system, and were never defined in terms of racial purity.

Spanish America

The racially-based caste system was in force throughout the Spanish colonies in the Americas , since the 16th century. By the 19th century, this discrimination and the example of the American Revolution and the ideals of the Enlightenment eventually led the Spanish American criollo elite to rise up against the Spanish rule. With the support of the lower classes , they engaged Spain in the Mexican War of Independence (1810– 1821 ) and the South American Wars of Independence (1810–1826), which ended with the break-up of former Spanish Empire in America into a number of independent republics.

Philippines

The Spanish caste system based on racial ancestry was enforced in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period , with minor differences. The terms criollo was used with the same sense as in Spanish America, namely for a person born in the Philippines with entirely Spanish ancestry, or in many cases in Latin America, mostly Spanish and some Amerindian. However , those with Asian blood were not regarded as Criollo in the Philippines. Criollos were more commonly called filipinos ("from the Philippines") or insulares ("from the islands") according to the original meaning of the word. The criollo class was below that of the peninsulares born in spain, but out-ranked the people of mixed Austronesian-Spanish descent, and the Christianized native Austronesian peoples. 9 The meaning of filipino changed drastically during the Philippine Revolution for Independence against Spain in 1896. It was adopted by nationalist movements and transformed into a national designation that encompassed the entire population of the Philippines, especially the descendants of the native Austronesian peoples. In fact, the meaning of Filipino today is the opposite of its colonial meaning, since it tends to refer only to the predominantly native Austronesian population and excludes the mestizos of mixed Spanish descent, as well as the non-mixed criollos, who are seen as foreigners despite the fact that they are Filipino like everybody else.
This has to do with the American colonization of the Philippines after the Spanish-American war, as racial labels were applied to non-white peoples, and the term "Filipino" was mistakenly used by Americans in U.S. newspapers and magazines as a racial label (instead of as a nationality ) to refer to those in the islands of pre-dominantly Austronesian descent — a sense that is the complete opposite of its original definition, and persists to this day.

Caribbean

In the Caribbean region , the term Creole is sometimes used to describe anyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, who was born and raised in the region. It is sometimes used to refer to persons of European, African, or mixed Afro-European descent such as mixed race people of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Dominica, Haiti , Jamaica, Barbados and Suriname, or in contradistinction to other ethnicities such as East Indians in Trinidad and Guyana , or Mestizos & Creoles (African & European Decent) in Belize . It also refers to the syncretism of the various cultures which influenced the area. This is also referred to as the creolization of society "due to its ability to suggest some of the complex sociocultural issues also involved in the process ". Creole, 'Kreyol' or 'Kweyol' also refers to languages in the Caribbean that are derived from a mixture of African and European languages, dialects and grammar . In parts of the Southern Caribbean the term "Creolean" is used to refer to a French-speaking person of Caucasian ethnicity. Especially if they are from the smaller islands belonging to Saint Vincent.

Indian Ocean

In Mauritius, in the Indian ocean, the term denotes anyone with African/Malagasy and French origin, but is also a language derived from French. In the Seychelles, the term includes all ethnic groups, regardless of background. In Réunion, creole is a more inclusive term that denotes all those born on the island . However, those of African/Malagasy and French origin are the ones usually classified as being ethnically Creole. 10

Languages

A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable language that originated from a mixture of various languages. The lexicon of a creole language consists of cognates from the parent languages, though there are often clear phonetic and semantic shifts. On the other hand, the grammar often has original features and may differ substantially from those of the parent languages. Some examples : Arabic-based creole languages, Dutch -based creole languages, English-based creole languages, French-based creole languages, Singdarin, Chinese -based creole languages, German -based creole languages, Malay-based creole languages, Ngbandi-based creole languages, Portuguese-based creole languages, Spanish-based creole languages and some specific creole languages.

The Flag

The flag of Louisiana Creoles was designed by Pete Bergeron in 1987 and adopted by C.R.E.O.L.E., Inc. a Lafayette based African-American heritage preservation group.  The Flag of Louisiana Creoles represents the cultural melting pot that is the Louisiana Creoles.  The first flag was hand stitched by Bergeron's sister , Delores Kay Conque of Carencro, La. By adopting the Creole flag, C.R.E.O. L.E., Inc. upholds its mission statement, "to identify, preserve and promote the numerous aspects of the Creole culture in southwest Louisiana. Today there are Creole populations in New Orleans, St. James Parish, Isle Brevelle, Cane River , Opelousas, Lafayette and other Louisiana towns.  The Creole flag celebrates the mixed lineage, culture and religion of these Louisiana Creoles. The upper left section , a white fleur de lis on a blue field , represents Louisiana's French heritage.  On the lower left and upper right sections, West African heritage is represented by the Mali Republic National tricolor flag ( green , yellow and red) and the Senegal Republic National flag (green, yellow and red).  Spanish Colonial heritage is depicted by the Tower of Castile ( gold tower on a red field) on the lower left section.  A white cross dividing the four symbols represents the Christian faith accepted by the Muslim and Islamic from Senegal and Mali in Louisiana.
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Conclusion

I have learned that creoles are just not a little culture with a few thousand people in a community but there are many branches coming out of this fascinating culture. And even though most of us have never heard of a culture name creole there are so many famous people who are creoles like Johnny Depp , Angelina Jolie, Steve Martin, Beyonce and many more.
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Used literature

http://centralacadianatourism.com/CreoleCulture.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole
The man-of- words in the West Indies: performance and the emergence of Creole Culture By Roger D. Abrahams
http://creoleneworleans.typepad.co m
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