WI no Cajuns?

Let's say that, for whatever reason, the Cajuns never come to exist. Maybe there is never an Expulsion of the Acadians and the Francophones of Acadie stay in their homeland. Perhaps the Acadians are resettled en masse elsewhere, in Canada or France or the Falklands. (True story.) Whatever the reason, the nearly two thousand people who, in OTL, migrated to southern Louisiana never do so.

What happens next? What are the consequences for Louisiana? I do not see an absence of Cajuns playing a notable role in the history of Spanish Louisiana, or as being likely to interfere with the eventual transfer of Louisiana to the United States. Wealth and power in colonial Louisiana seem to have been concentrated among the Creoles living near the mouth of the Mississippi, not among the proto-Cajuns further west.

The consequences of a no-Cajuns timeline seem likely to significant later in the 19th century. With fewer Francophone settlers, particularly with the Cajuns' homeland not being settled under Spanish rule, Louisiana might become Americanized that much more quickly. This could have significant consequences.

Thoughts?
 
Cajun is a very new identity, it actually was a derogatory exonym that only gained currency with one particular man trying to make tourist dollar.

Acadian people always were a minority where they settled, never making up more than a third of the population and surrounded by a multitude of francophone and creolophone people of every color.

There would still be pockets in the bayous with probably the same proportion of French speakers like OTL.
 
Cajun is a very new identity, it actually was a derogatory exonym that only gained currency with one particular man trying to make tourist dollar.

Acadian people always were a minority where they settled, never making up more than a third of the population and surrounded by a multitude of francophone and creolophone people of every color who they mixed with (Beyonce a creole descends from an Acadian leader). There are many self identified Cajuns with few or no Acadian roots.

There would still be pockets in the bayous with probably the same proportion of French speakers like OTL.
 
Cajun is a very new identity, it actually was a derogatory exonym that only gained currency with one particular man trying to make tourist dollar. .

Have you met any Cajuns? Most Cajuns I know (and I grew up in East Texas so we had a lot of them about) are very proud of their Cajun identity and roots. As to identity, they have been an identifiable group for longer than the US has been a country, which would seem to make them about as new (or old) as most other North American groups.
 
Top