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СпутникиРНSpaceXРоскосмосNASAWhen we talk about the African diaspora, we mean the voluntary and involuntary movement of Africans and their descendants to various parts of the world during the modern and pre-modern periods. In the 20th century, the Great Migration was the voluntary movement of black Americans over twenty years to escape the racism, persecution and segregation...
When we talk about the African diaspora, we mean the voluntary and involuntary movement of Africans and their descendants to various parts of the world during the modern and pre-modern periods.
In the 20th century, the Great Migration was the voluntary movement of black Americans over twenty years to escape the racism, persecution and segregation of the Jim Crow South. Creole diasporas were something different. While often a flight from American racism, they began years earlier, and were spurred also by generational wealth and a sense of internationalism.
Creole diasporas, though rarely talked about, rival the “Back to Africa Movement” carried out by the American Colonization Society (ACS), which was a proponent of this movement for over a hundred years, but in reality, only repatriated about thirteen thousand people during this time. The first Creole diaspora was during the Haitian Revolution ( 1791 to 1804). More than seven thousand people, mostly white planters and slaveholders, were driven off the island at the beginning of the revolution. White Creoles ( who were born in Haiti) were forced off the island. Creoles of color were driven off, but some left voluntarily, too. Creole slaves like Marie Couvent, who later founded a school for children of color in New Orleans, was forced to leave with her enslaver.
Some white Creoles and Creoles of color congregated in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Among them, former planters and slaveholders hoped that they could convince Napoleon and the French government to reinvade the island of Haiti and reestablish slavery. Later, these same Creoles were driven off Cuba by the Spanish in 1809 in retaliation for Napoleon’s invasion of Spain.
My white Creole ancestor, Antoine Pavageau, after being forced off Cuba, ended up in New Orleans, settling with his free woman of color wife, Rose, and Creole of color children and many other refugees from the Haitian Revolution in Vieux Carré. Many other white Creole families from Sante Domingue who had shared similar experiences, like the Pirons and Pacauds, also congregated in Vieux Carré.
New Orleans and its Creole culture were already well-known to these refugees, and they chose to flee to New Orleans out of prior knowledge gained from friends and families who had visited before. The last French Prefect of Louisiana, Pierre De Laussat, wrote that “Saint Domingue was, of all our colonies in the Antilles, the one whose mentality and customs influenced Louisiana the most….Exiles from the island prefer Louisiana as refuge.”
Some white Creoles stayed during the uprising to assist Toussaint L’Ouverture and his troops’ battle for independence. One was Charles Lamerenx, who would later be involved in a lawsuit in New Orleans for non-payment of a mortgage to a free man of color named Charles Decoudreau. Creole of color Joseph Savary stayed on and fought for the French during the Haitian Revolution. He served later in New Orleans for the Americans during the War of 1812, ascending to the rank of Major of the Battalion of the Free Men of Color.
Fleeing Saint Domingue had a variety of outcomes for Creole families. Antoine Pavageau’s sister, Adele, fled to Charleston, South Carolina, and then spent the rest of her life in Georgia. Antoine’s brother Mathurin returned to France. He served as a bureaucrat in the French Navy Department before becoming the mayor of Romanville, France, from 1824 to 1832.
After being driven off the island, two of Antoine’s sisters, Ursule and Augustine, accompanied their father and mother to St. Andrews, Jamaica. They congregated with other Creole refugees, creating a small community there. Undeterred by barely surviving the Haitian Revolution, Antoine’s father set up another plantation and became a large slaveholder again. After he died in 1817, his daughters settled the estate, which included selling more than 25 slaves. Augustine spent the rest of her life in Kingston, Jamaica, where she died in 1846. Ursule returned to Paris, where she died in 1866.
Antoine’s brother Jean became a surgeon’s assistant in Napoleon’s Army. After returning to Jamaica, he became a prosperous merchant and later the Vice Consul of France to Colombia. Unlike Antoine, he married both a Colombian woman and had children with a free woman of color. His descendants still live in Colombia.
After the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, numerous Creole of color diasporas were arguably caused by the influx of Anglos and their policies and behaviors. For example, after the 1811 New Orleans Slave Uprising, where 3 white planters were killed and several plantations burned, the Anglos held trials and retribution which led to 95 slaves being executed. Their heads were put on pikes leading into the city and hung from the gates of the city to discourage slaves from revolting. Following the uprising, my fourth great-aunt Mercelite Hazeur moved to France. She did not return for 45 years, finally returning to New Orleans in 1866.
Creoles of color moved easily between these two places. My relatives, the Hazeurs and Pavageaus, traveled to France many times between 1809 and 1860. Creoles of color like the Roudanez and Crocker families went to France for university educations, then returned to New Orleans.
The families of many Creoles of color had been free long before the Civil War. Because of this freedom, they had been able to build up wealth that allowed them a certain mobility that enslaved and newly freed people did not have.
Creole diasporas were informed by their sense of being world citizens. Creole diasporas to Mexico were common. Trade routes established before the Spanish control of Louisiana in 1763 were well-traveled by Creoles of color. Many New Orleans Creoles were informed by relatives who traveled there. It is no coincidence that after Mexico outlawed slavery in 1829, visits from free people of color and slaves escaping to Mexico increased.
Joseph Decoudreau, a Creole of color, served as a mechanic on ocean-going trading vessels between the 1820s and 1840s. It is no coincidence that Decoudreau’s cousins and friends took trips to Mexico, sometimes on the same ship he served on. They were investigating Mexico as a possible place to escape the increasing racism that the new Anglos had brought to Louisiana after 1803. For example, Decoudreau’s cousin, Adele Pavageau, a wealthy businesswoman, and her daughter traveled to Tampico, Mexico, in 1828 on board the Oregon, while Joseph served as the ship’s mechanic. In 1829, Adele traveled to Havana, Cuba. Her brother Nelson visited Spain and France in 1830 via Tampico, Mexico, on the ship the Cometa.
By the 1830s, families like the Donatos from Opelousas and the Pavageaus from New Orleans left for Mexico. The Donatos settled near Alvarado, Mexico; the Pavageaus settled in Tampico, Mexico.
Creoles of color moving to Mexico and slaves escaping to Mexico increased after 1830, as one-third of all Anglo legislation in the U.S. was aimed at curbing the rights and privileges of free people of color and controlling slaves and slave escapes. Famous Creole of color composer Edmund Dede traveled and lived in Mexico in the 1840s, looking for work.
Starting after the Louisiana Purchase, Anglos who came to Louisiana were scared of the unique society that had formed in Louisiana, and began dismantling it. In 1857, Louisiana was transformed from a “state with slaves” to a “slave state” by legislation that outlawed the freeing of slaves. As a result, free Creoles of color began to look to the historic connection between Louisiana and Mexico and consider it in earnest as a place to resettle. In 1857, my cousin Suzette Hazeur and her husband August Reynal traveled to Veracruz, Mexico, aboard the ship the Tennessee with Creoles G. Dupart, M.Girod, V. Babin and G. Babin, who were all farmers. They were investigating agricultural opportunities near Veracruz.
Then, in 1858 and 1859, as political and racial pressure became increasingly unbearable for free Creoles of color in the lead-up to the Civil War, hundreds of families left New Orleans for Tampico, Mexico. There, they started an agricultural cooperative called the Confradia. It would be logical to assume that these families were informed by the Creoles who traveled there before them, or by Benito Juarez himself, who was a refugee among the Creoles of color in New Orleans twice, from 1853 to 1855 and in 1858. The Confradia dispersed in the early 1860s.
Napoleon’s installation of his cousin Maximillan and Carlota as Mexico’s rulers did not make the lives of the French-speaking colonists of the Confradia any easier. A mysterious fire burned down the settlement in 1862. Some Creoles returned to the U.S. after the end of the Civil War. Out of the Confradia came two of jazz’s greatest teachers and clarinet innovators, Luis and Lorenzo Tio. They returned to New Orleans in 1877, just as jazz was beginning to evolve.
After the end of Reconstruction and the establishment of Jim Crow in the South, Creoles of color had another small diaspora to Tampico, Mexico and its state of Tamaulipas. With the defeat of the Plessy v. Ferguson case, which had originated in Louisiana, and led to the (Separate but equal) ruling, many people of color—Creoles and African Americans—felt alienated. With connections already in Mexico, some Creoles of color left in the 1890s to take their chances there. The Pirons were a well-to-do family that left during this period. When their parents died in 1893, Adele, Laure and Louis Piron all moved to Tampico, Mexico and lived out their lives there. Clarinetist Lorenzo Tio, who had been born in Mexico in 1867 and returned to New Orleans in the late 1870s, was planning to return to Mexico when he died in New Orleans in 1908.
Enslaved people, including enslaved Creoles, used Mexico and Spanish-controlled Florida as another route to escape slavery. Spanish-controlled Florida used guarantees of freedom and land to any slave who escaped to Florida as a way to destabilize and disrupt American interests and slavery in the South.
Mexico was a destination for escaped slaves even before Mexico outlawed slavery in 1829. After the Mexican American War, slaves escaping to Mexico from Texas only increased despite American protestations to the Mexican government. These slaves settled in the state of Tamaulipas, where free people of color from Louisiana settled in the 1830s and later.
Important to the diasporas of Creoles of color and other black people of Louisiana were two railroads: The Illinois Central and the Southern Pacific Sunset Route. These were used as conduits for two new Creole diasporas.
In 1851, the Illinois Central Railroad, sometimes called the “Main Line of Mid-America”, was established. It was a direct line from New Orleans to Chicago, Illinois. The line was in service until 1998. The trip took only 15 hours. Following the reestablishment of Jim Crow, numerous black and Creole of color Louisianians took advantage of this railway to leave the South and reestablish their lives in the North. One of the most notable families was the new Pope Leo XIV’s family, who left for Chicago after the turn of the century. Some of my Angeletti relatives left in the 1910s, along with my great-grand aunt Pauline Broyard and her husband Eurie Love, who finally ended up in Dearborn, Michigan.
As early as 1874, the Southern Pacific Sunset Route between New Orleans and Los Angeles was used as a conduit for a diaspora to Southern California. Nelson Fouché, the disgraced financier for the Creole Confradia in Tampico, Mexico, was one of the earliest New Orleans Creoles to settle in Southern California.
As the next century progressed, The Great Migration would gather steam. In the 1940s, numerous Creole families from New Orleans used the Sunset Route as they settled in Los Angeles before, during, and after WWII. But just the small number of examples in this writing demonstrates a mobility and a world-view of Creoles and free people of color that is rarely talked about or acknowledged.
Hopefully, this writing will give the descendants of New Orleans families throughout the U.S. and the world some insight into just how prevalent and extensive Creole and free people of color diasporas and travels, and enslaved people escaping, were during the time Louisiana was under Spanish, French and finally American rule.