“Cantel-lope-ah! Fresh and Fine!” Immigrant Food Vendors, Street Cries, and Ethnic Identity in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans

The 1884 World’s Fair was held in New Orleans, Louisiana, renewing American interests in a southern city that had long been exoticized in the American imagination. In tandem with the celebration of the World’s Fair, authors such as Lafcadio Hearn and George Washington Cable published ethnographic works detailing the food, folklore, and urban culture of New Orleans for broader American audiences. Their observations about Creole life, which relied heavily on sensory descriptions, labeled New Orleans as inherently different from other American cities.  

In this paper, I argue that sound, more so than sight, touch, taste or smell informed the ways in which ethnic identity was imagined and recast in the ethnographic literature of the late-nineteenth century. The complex soundscape of the French Market, its customers, and its vendors play a crucial role in contextualizing the lived experiences of New Orleanians. Similar to many American port cities, the French Market served as a meeting ground for the city’s diverse urban population—a key space where the daily rituals of consumption bonded community members from Europe, West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America together. Here, African-American calas vendors competed alongside Spanish oystermen and Italian fishermen for customers. Their sonorous efforts to capture the attention of passers-by manifested in a wide variety of witty, salacious, musical, and grating street cries, which writers captured in the pages of their ethnographic literature. Often, these street cries were paired with images and descriptions that perpetuated racist and xenophobic stereotypes of food vendors. My analysis dissects these stereotypes, unearthing the pivotal role of immigrant vendors in shaping the taste preferences and food culture of New Orleans in the late-nineteenth century.