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I work at a grocery store and go to college, so you'd think the foreign language I would take at my respective school would be Spanish since I lived in Texas. But after a lot of limited courses at my small high school, I decided to take French in high school.
For the first time ever, I was able to speak French to customers at work today. They were from New York but picked up on the language they were speaking in my line and we both were pretty amused over it. I got to count their change out to them in French, too.
It was the most pumped I'd ever been at midnight in my life.
So it made me curious as to how much of a French-speaking population there is in Texas and where am I likely to find a lot of them.
I work at a grocery store and go to college, so you'd think the foreign language I would take at my respective school would be Spanish since I lived in Texas. But after a lot of limited courses at my small high school, I decided to take French in high school.
For the first time ever, I was able to speak French to customers at work today. They were from New York but picked up on the language they were speaking in my line and we both were pretty amused over it. I got to count their change out to them in French, too.
It was the most pumped I'd ever been at midnight in my life.
So it made me curious as to how much of a French-speaking population there is in Texas and where am I likely to find a lot of them.
I reckon you'll find a few French speakers near the Louisiana border.
Also, Castroville bills itself as "The Little Alsace of Texas," but I've never heard any French being spoken around there. Maybe among the old-timers...
There is a French consulate in Houston, so I'd imagine there's a few French people scattered across Houston.
As others said - SE Tx and SW La, especially Lafayette. I grew up in SE Tx a few miles from the La border. Next door neighbors were the Guidry's and the Thibodeaux's. Went to school with the Hebert's (A-bears) and Richard's (Ree-shards) and many more. It's not common, but you will certainly hear French from the older generation. Louisiana is actually trying to preserve the language now. This is another reason the "English only" crowd needs to rethink their stance.
Lol duh, I probably could have thought the most French-speaking Texans lived closer to Louisiana if it wasn't 2 a.m. Thanks everyone for the information though!
The first Cajuns in Texas arrived by mistake in the spring of 1770. The group of 30 refugees, who were trying to get to Louisiana from Maryland, was on the schooner Britain, which was blown off course, missing the Mississippi River and ending up at Matagorda Bay. Imprisoned by the Spanish authorities as suspected smugglers, they had to do hard labor at Goliad but were released in October and made a trek across East Texas to Natchitoches, La., and then down to Opelousas.
Spain, which had been given authority over Louisiana in 1763 in the Treaty of Paris, provided ships in 1785 to carry some 1,600 Acadians who had taken refuge in Europe to Louisiana, partly to be a buffer of Catholic subjects against Anglo-American expansion. In 1800, there were 3,000 to 4,000 Acadians or Cajuns in south Louisiana.
They did not stay long in the port of New Orleans but moved to the remote prairies and bayous west of the city, into what would become the 22 civil parishes that now make up Acadiana, a designation proscribed by the Louisiana legislature in 1971, recognizing the uniqueness of the area as home to Cajun culture.
The first U.S. census in Texas in 1850 found 600 "Franco-Louisianans" between Orange and Houston. Not all these Franco-Louisianans were Cajun, it should be pointed out, and here we encounter the sometimes-confusing term "Creole" in Louisiana history. In fact, probably most of these early Louisianan immigrants were French Creoles.
By the time these immigrations into Texas began, the Cajuns had blended through intermarriage with their German, Spanish, and Anglo neighbors in Louisiana. So, some Cajun families had names such as Martinez, Schexnaider and McGee.
Another impetus for this emigration was the poor economy in Louisiana. As Dr. Brasseaux writes about the Cajun migration in The French in Texas, "Because of the extensive devastation wrought by the Union invasions of south-central Louisiana during the Civil War, the region’s economy virtually collapsed in the early postbellum period, and perhaps half the area’s freeholders were reduced to tenantry."
As more and more Cajuns began living in Jefferson, Orange and neighboring counties of Texas, a Cajun middle class began to emerge. In 1892, Joseph Broussard established the Beaumont Rice Mills, and later, in 1898, he helped to found the Beaumont Irrigation Co.
Twentieth Century
Then there was Spindletop in 1901. The discovery of the massive oilfield in Southeast Texas forever changed the ethnic makeup of the area as Louisiana Cajuns streamed into Texas to work in the burgeoning oil industry. And, this oil industry would be a solid link between Louisiana and Texas: the primary catalyst in bringing the culture of Cajun Louisiana into the homes and offices of Texans, and Texans into Cajun Louisiana as the petroleum industry expanded there.
Into the 1910s, the Cajun presence increased in Southeast Texas, especially in 1915, when a severe hurricane hit the upper Texas coastal area. The destruction in Texas provided immediate work for rebuilding the infrastructure and thus, more Cajuns came to Texas for those jobs. This influx of Cajuns was sustained for another five years as the United States entry into World War I spurred growth in the oil refineries and shipyards in the Golden Triangle.
In the 1920s, a shift by Japanese rice growers in southeast Texas to truck farming provided a need for more Cajun labor, but the next sizeable influx was to come in the 1940s when a larger labor force was required for the industrial expansion during the World War II.
In the postwar period, another industry in which Cajuns had been important – shrimping – brought many to the better fishing grounds off the Texas Gulf Coast.
By the latter part of the 20th century, Cajun professionals and engineers in telecommunications, petroleum and construction began a different kind of migration. For the first time, it was white-collar experts and not laborers who were leaving Louisiana. In fact, during the 1990s, Louisiana had a net loss of population.
Today, there are probably at least 375,000 Cajuns who call Texas home.
Language
Cajun French is a mix of Acadian French, standard 19th-century French, Creole and English. It also borrowed words from Spanish, African languages and American Indian languages ( "bayou" from Choctaw, for example).
It is a dialect that is fading away, even in Louisiana where the state legislature banned all French from schools in the 1920s in an attempt to enforce assimilation and the use of English. That policy was abandoned in the 1970s when there was a reversal in sentiment to retain local cultures.
Probably for Texas Cajuns, the exposure to the world outside their communities — in the oilfield, the shipyards and especially service in World War II — had much more to do with diminishing the use of Cajun French. Even in the Cajun homeland today, few of the recent generations know their ancestral language.
As Shane K. Bernard puts it in The Cajuns: Americanization of a People, "Among Cajuns born between 1966 and 1970, for example, only about 12 percent grew up speaking French as their primary language; for those born between 1971 and 1975, the figure dropped to about 8 percent."
According to recent U.S. census data, only about 0.3 Texans speak French of any dialect at home.
Music
Music has been an important part of the Cajun culture since their time in Acadia, but it developed into a different style in the Gulf Coast as it blended with the music and instruments of their neighbors.
Although the tragic history of the Cajuns might indicate mournful ballads, instead the melodies are festive, cheerful and upbeat, often played and sung loudly to be heard over a crowded dance floor.
The fiddle was important to the music from the beginning, and later the accordion was picked up from their German neighbors in south Louisiana.
In the 1930s, the strings came to the fore again, as Cajun bands were influenced by the Western swing style so popular in Texas at the time, and which relied heavily on strings. The accordion reemerged as an important part of Cajun music in the 1960s as younger people began to return to the roots of the music.
There has always been a rapport between Cajun and Texas music.
In a cemetery in Port Arthur, written on a tombstone in French and English is, "Parrain De La Musique Cajun — The Godfather of Cajun Music." It is the grave of Harry Choates, who in his lifetime was called "the fiddle king of Cajun swing."
Choates died in an Austin jail in 1951, after being arrested for failure to pay child support. Born in Louisiana in 1922, Choates had come to Port Arthur with his mother in the 1930s and began to play in the dancehalls and taverns of southeast Texas as a young man. In 1946, he had a big regional hit with "Jole Blon", a song first recorded by the Breaux family in Louisiana in 1928.
Choates’ rewritten version of the song was an even bigger hit in 1947 for Moon (Aubrey Wilson) Mullican, another Texan from southeast Texas.
Mullican, who was called "the king of hillbilly piano players," was born in Polk County but had performed on both sides of the Sabine, including leading the band that backed up Gov. Jimmie Davis in his successful bid for the Louisiana governorship in 1944.
"Jole Blon" was later a national hit for the Grand Ole Opry’s Roy Acuff, and has become a mainstay in the repertoire of many a Texas singer from Waylon Jennings to Kenny Rogers, and later for Townes Van Zandt and Jimmy Dale Gilmore. It is almost always sung in Cajun French.
The real breakthrough for Cajun music into popular and country music came not from a Cajun but from an Alabama singer: Hank Williams Sr.
When singer Jo Stafford covered "Jambalaya" in 1952, Cajun music was introduced to popular American culture.
As Cajun music evolved throughout the 20th century, drums, electric bass and electric guitars have been included and the triangle, long used to keep tempo, has sometimes been replaced with the frottoir or rub-board.
The frottoir, which is hung around the neck, is more closely identified with Zydeco music, the folk music of the Creoles of south Louisiana that has a fast-tempo with a syncopated back beat.
But, Cajun and Zydeco have influenced each other, so that some bands now blend the styles and instruments.
In fact, the frottoir used today was made by a Cajun welder, based on a design of a Creole musician when they both worked at a Port Arthur oil refinery in 1946.
Refinery worker Clifton Chenier, a legend today in Zydeco music, wanted to replace the washboard in his band with a sheet of ribbed metal that did not have the wooden frame along the outside. From his drawing, fellow worker, Willie Landry, a Cajun and fellow Louisiana native, made the first frottoir used solely as a musical instrument.
Besides traditional Cajun folk music, another influence on Texas dance halls and songwriters came from a special fusion called "swamp pop", which reached its peak of popularity in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
This blend of Cajun, Creole, rockabilly, rhythm & blues and rock ’n’ roll resulted in such hits as "Sea of Love", the 1958 hit by Phil Phillips, a Creole artist from Lake Charles (his real name was John Phillip Baptiste). The songs were noted for their highly emotional lyrics.
Another swamp pop song, "I’m Leaving It Up to You," was a hit for Dale and Grace (Grace Broussard of Ascension Parish).
Their record producer was Huey P. Meaux, whose family, like many Cajuns, had moved across the Sabine River. When he was 12, they settled in Winnie, where he later barbered before getting into the music business in the mid-1950s.
As the Beatles craze shook up the American music scene in 1964, Meaux began producing and promoting San Antonio’s Doug Sahm. Meaux told Sahm to grow his hair long, and he renamed Sahm’s band the Sir Douglas Quintet to capitalize on the British invasion.
Meaux, writes Joseph Levy on his Vinyl Tourist website, analyzed the Beatle sound and decided their "beat was on the beat, just like the Cajun two-step." Meaux then told Sahm to write a song with such a beat. In 1965, the Sir Douglas Quintet’s mix of Cajun, rock ’n’ roll and conjunto, "She’s About a Mover," became an international hit.
In 1975, San Benito’s own Tex-Mex rocker Freddy Fender sought out Meaux, who convinced Fender to record "Before the Next Teardrop Falls." They followed that hit with a remake of "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights," which, although first recorded in 1959 in the Rio Grande Valley, is still included in swamp pop collections today.
(The Huey Meaux Papers, 1940-1994, are now housed in The Center for American History at the University of Texas. Huey Meaux was released from a Texas prison in 2002, where he had been serving a sentence as a convicted sex offender.)
Food
Cajuns live to eat, it is said, and it is their cuisine that has had a profound impact on Texas. Long before the Cajun food craze of the 1980s, when chef Paul Prudhomme turned on the whole country to blackened redfish and other delicacies, Cajuns were introducing Texans to their pots of spicy dishes.
Many of those dishes begin with the "trinity" of aromatics for Cajun cooking, onion, celery and bell pepper. And, there is the ubiquitous roux, a blend of oil or fat and flour, darkened in a pot to shades ranging from blonde to very brown.
Although historically based on provincial French cooking, Cajun cooking — often done by the menfolk — adapted to available ingredients and incorporated various styles from their neighbors, the Germans, Spanish, American Indians and Afro-Caribbeans.
And whether incorporated in the dish or as a side, there is almost always rice, which the Cajuns found to grow so easily in the damp climate of the Gulf Coast.
The sausages include andouille, made with pork and garlic and smoked, often over pecan wood and sugar cane, and boudin, pork and rice stuffed into a casing; this is boudin blanc. Boudin rouge is a blood sausage.
There are many other dishes that today are a fusion of the distinctly Cajun with other influences such as Creole cooking and New Orleans specialties.
Bon Ton Roulet, is French for, "Good Times Roll" (as in "Let the good times roll.."), and they do, all over the state of Texas, to Cajun or Cajun-related themes. Some of those include:
Alvin — Crawfest & Shrimp Boil in April.
Austin — Louisiana Swamp Romp and Crawfish Festival in April.
Clear Lake area — Crawfish Festival in April.
Columbus — Rajun Cajun Fest in May.
Comal County, Anhalt Hall — Gumbo Cookoff and Cajun Dance in May (sponsored by San Antonio’s De Fa Tras chapter of the Cajun French Music Association).
Conroe — Cajun Catfish Festival in October.
Fredericksburg — Crawfish Festival in May.
Grand Prairie — Cajun Fest in May.
Houston — Bayou City Cajun Fest in April.
Lakehills — Medina Lake Cajun Festival and Great Gumbo Cookoff in September.
Longview — Harvest Festival Crawfish Boil in April.
Odessa — Mudbug Hurricane Party in June.
Orange — Texas Cajun Heritage Festival in May.
Spring — Texas Crawfish & Music Festival in April.
Wichita Falls — Cajun Fest in May.
Wimberley — Cypress Creek Crawfish Boil in April.
Winnie — Texas Rice Festival in October.
Various Catholic parishes, in East Texas especially, have seasonal Cajun crawfish boils and festivals.
In addition, a French Louisiana tradition that transcends the Cajun culture, the Mardi Gras, has taken root in Texas.
Galveston stages its version on the Strand in the period preceding Lent. The 10-day celebration of dances, parties and parades has grown to draw an estimated 500,000 revelers.
Port Arthur also has the Mardi Gras of Southeast Texas, a four-day event with floats, street entertainment and food.
— written by Robert Plocheck, associate editor, for the Texas Almanac 2008–2009.
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Ici vous avez un petit peu d'histoire
