In 1993, the state legislature passed a resolution to rename Interstate 12 the West Florida Republic Parkway.
It seems simple enough, but in reality, the legislature’s act is indicative of a general trend (it should be the Republic of West Florida Parkway) — disregarding that bastard of a region east of the Mississippi River and north of lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain known as the Florida Parishes.
In his first novel “Modern Baptists” LSU faculty member and Hammond native James Wilcox described the region as thus: “…the Florida Parishes, not part of the Louisiana Purchase, rebelled against Spanish rule. The settlers here, many of them Tories from Virginia and the Carolinas, ate corn, which the French, living just a few miles south, considered pig food. For a
short while, in 1810, this strip of land south of Mississippi and north of Lake Ponchartrain pledged allegiance to no one, not to the U.S. or Spain or even England.”
As a lifelong resident of the Florida Parishes, I am sick and tired of tourism promoters lauding only Louisiana’s French heritage.
The Florida Parishes are not French, nor Creole, nor Cajun, or have anything to do with France at all.
Yet it seems the region’s own distinct heritage is not important enough to promote, its accomplishments and personalities not distinctive enough to applaud.
Last year’s Louisiana Purchase celebration was especially excruciating.
The Florida Parishes were not bought. It fought for its own independence.
Yet over and over again I had to contain my jealousy at the hoopla over the anniversary. I’m really glad that Thomas Jefferson pushed the United States to buy PART OF Louisiana and all, but why do I never hear anything of the other part? The part of Hodding Carter, Britney Spears, and Walker Percy?
I once took a LEAP test that had a story about Pierre and his pirogue.
How the hell were the students of the Florida Parishes supposed to know what the hell a pirogue was?
I certainly didn’t see a story about Giovanni and his strawberries. How absolutely preposterous!
In the 1970s white flight from New Orleans suburbanized the Florida Parishes’ southern piney woods and forever changed the cultural dynamic of the region.
The political hegemony of the region, if it ever existed, is gone, and I fear in a few more decades the sterility of subdivisions and the ease of commuting will fade the cultural boundaries of the Florida Parishes into another Kenner or Metairie. Then a type of bland pseudo-Cajun culture, or lack thereof, can reign over the entire state once and for all.
Think of how easy the state Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism can promote the traditional Scotch-Irish, Italian, and German inhabitants of the Florida Parishes when this occurs!
Louisiana is a state of diverse peoples. Isn’t it about time state government realizes this?
We should embrace all cultures of this state, not just the ones that are most economically lucrative.