From Cuba to Creole: The Lacroix Household at the Convergence of Community and Identity in Creole New Orleans

Born in Santiago de Cuba to interracial refugee parents from Saint-Domingue, François Lacroix made his home in New Orleans along with several thousand other Saint-Dominguans in the first decade of the 19th century. Raised by his “mulâtresse” mother following his white father’s death, Lacroix came of age in an urban space in flux—a city at the heart of a growing nation but culturally on the move. By the time of his death in the 1870s, Lacroix was a known entity in town. He owned dozens of properties, two tailoring businesses, and an estate valued above $600,000. He was a Creole—a self-conscious community of mixed-race, francophone Catholics rooted in place, produced over time by the city of New Orleans and the Atlantic currents that created it. At the heart of both this community and Lacroix’s long, successful life was the household, the space within which familial bonds gave life and legacy to an external Creole culture, the parts of which arrived from without but grew and developed from within. Using the Lacroix household as an emblem of New Orleans’s Creole of color community from the 1810s to the 1850s, this paper places the development of the urban colored Creole culture and identity not in the public space where it was observed and often described by and for outside eyes but rather in the private, local, familial spaces where it was experienced and maintained in its most personal forms.