“When buses began in schools in the 1970s, teachers were tasked with classifying students in classrooms,” said Wendy Godin, 54. Her Creole grandparents left New Orleans for California. As an adult, Gaudin is back and teaches at Xavier University's New Orleans. “I was categorized as Native American, my sister Rothlyn was categorized as white, and my sister Leslie was categorized as Pacific Islander.”
Professor Gaudin, who wrote a book on identity at Creole Diaspora, explained how this racial ambiguity can help Creoles when they face obstacles in places that were not the promised land they wanted. When her grandparents found property to build a home in Los Angeles, they discovered that there was a racial contract in their neighborhood, excluding black people. Her grandmother “skinned very, very fair,” she said. Then her grandfather had light skin, built a house and they moved.
“And I couldn't say anything because the land was already theirs,” she said.
Some chose to live in their new homeland as white people. This did not always involve explicitly creating a new identity. Often it had to do with keeping away and quiet.
One of those whose roots of Louisiana Creole were unknown, at least for most of them, was George Herriman, who created the famous comic strip “Krazy Kat”, and was assumed to be Greek by some of his companions. The legacy of the Louisiana Creole of New York's influential writer and literary critic Anatole Breuard wrote a review of books from the era, but was not publicly known until a few years after his death.
In 1946, Roudané's grandmother applied to change the family's surname to officially change – perhaps dropping “Z.” A few years after graduating, he moved to the Midwest and lived for the rest of his life as a white man.
