Because the main Creole and American municipalities were located on either side of Canal Street, people jokingly referred to its extra-wide median as a “neutral ground” between the two factions. To this day, New Orleanians refer to all street medians as neutral grounds.
By the late 1800s, assimilation gradually prevailed, and many folkways of the ancienne population, as the Creoles were often called, would fade away in the 1900s.
The local understanding of the word Creole has varied over the past century. There was a time when white revisionist historians insisted that the Creoles were people of “pure French or Spanish ancestry,” despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Others felt that Creoles were necessarily of mixed heritage, which historically was not true either. Many confuse Creoles with Cajuns (Acadians), who descend from French Canadian refugees exiled by the British from Nova Scotia starting in the 1750s. Cajuns settled in rural south-central Louisiana, west of New Orleans, and have a distinctly more rural culture than that of urban Creoles.
Today, someone who self-identifies as Creole in New Orleans is likely to be a person of mixed racial ancestry, with deep local roots, and with family members who are Catholic and probably have French-sounding surnames—that is, Franco-African Americans. Many Black Creoles live in and near the Seventh Ward, not too far from the historic Creole areas around the French Quarter.
While some Creole cultural traits continue today, in foodways, in words and phrases, and in Mardi Gras festivities, other aspects, such as the French language, have largely disappeared. Yet thousands of older New Orleanians, be they white or Black, can recall elders who spoke some French well into the twentieth century, and most of them would have thought of themselves as Creole.
