| Cross-Country Ramble 37:
Louisiana & West Texas Culture Date: 4/2/98 10:57:01 AM
Central Standard Time
Louisiana and West Texas. West Texas and Louisiana. Here I am in
Florida, three states past Louisiana and four states and two years
past West Texas, and thoughts of these places are still swirling
around in my mind. I think it's because these places challenge some
of my notions of what America is and who Americans are. I wish I
were a cultural anthropologist, so I'd know what I was talking
about, but in this life, my naive efforts to understand will have to
do.
Louisiana has a culture all its own, a living culture that has
not yet been captured and packaged and made dead. Louisiana is not a
theme park; Louisiana simply is what it is. I see signs of this
culture in the houses people choose to build and live in, in the
food they eat and in their dance and music.
Louisiana houses fascinate me. Most are three feet off the ground
on blocks. Most have tin roofs. Most have columns. Most have porches
that extend at least the whole length of one side of the house, and
sometimes all four. I'd read about Palladian* architecture in books;
here I saw more examples of Palladian architecture in a week than
I'd seen previously in my whole life. The uniqueness of Louisiana
style houses really strikes me when we come across little clots of
American standard porchless built-on-a-slab asphalt-roofed ranch
houses built during the 50's and 60's. They stick out like sore
thumbs. Happily, it looks like the Louisiana cultural immune system
has successfully rejected that attempted foreign implant; I don't
see many recent houses built like that. I did see evidence that the
current American trend toward ostentatious big houses has come to
Louisiana, but with a difference: In other parts of the US, these
big houses are typically crowded together on treeless small lots in
developments and look out of place; the ones I saw in Louisiana are
scattered here and there on big wooded lots and look like they
belong.
I've already talked about the food. Spicy rice, crawfish, catfish
and other sea food dishes appear on almost every non-fast-food menu.
They're not labeled as anything special; they're just there
alongside the more typically American food. A few restaurants do
label themselves as Cajun, but they were the exception.
We might have found that the radio show we saw or the dance hall
we went to would have been culture events packaged up for the
tourists, but they weren't. Most all the folks there were
Louisianans doing what Louisianans do.
In West Texas, too, I saw a living culture that was not standard
American (nor was it standard Mexican for that matter). I saw it in
the food and in the use of language. In other parts of the country,
Mexican restaurants are labeled as such, and unlabelled restaurants
serve American food. Here, none of the restaurants are labeled, but
unlike unlabeled restaurants in the rest of America, these places
serve both Mexican and American dishes to both Anglos & Mexicanos.
This is true whether European-Americans or Mexican-Americans run
them. This food is served by people who, whether Anglo or Mexicano,
switch without hesitation from one language to another like they'd
been speaking both languages all their lives. This isn't Mexico.
This isn't America as I thought I knew it. This is something else.
Encountering these cultures put my mind into pondering mode. The
people in these places don't fit into the categories I'd learned
growing up in Michigan and living in Ohio and California. There, I
learned to think in terms of foreigners and immigrants and
assimilation and melting pot, and I was clear about who the
foreigners and immigrants were, and who was supposed to assimilate
and melt.
Assimilating and melting has occurred in West Texas and
Louisiana, but not in the ways I might have expected. I think that a
lot of the difference arises from the fact that in these places,
Americans were the foreigners and immigrants; this was French or
Mexican territory inhabited by French or Mexican people for hundreds
of years before the Americans showed up.
I still don't know quite what to make of all this, but one thing
that is clear to me is that I'll be more careful in my thinking
about assimilation.
Ken
Itinerary (days from Ventura, CA, in ( )'s)
- Day 26 (85) Crestview, FL
- Day 27 (86) DeFuniac Springs, FL
- Day 28-29 (87-88) Bonifay, FL
Fewer than two weeks to go!
*My recollection is that a Palladian house has a big middle
section with lower wings on each side, and, in its complete form,
outbuildings further out on each side.
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