Latin Culture

Latin Music Festival - Dancer Group

Persons of Latin American origin or descent are the fastest growing population in Lafayette Parish, accounting for 6.5% of all parish residents, according to the 2020 U.S. Census. A diverse community, Latinos likely come from all thirty-three countries of Latin America and the Caribbean and live and work in all twenty-two parishes of Acadiana, where they make up around 4.5% of the population.

Centuries ago, Louisiana and Latin American resided under the same royal empire. Following the purchase of the French colonial Louisiana territory in 1762, Spain controlled much of the area now known as Acadiana, as part of an American kingdom that stretched from present-day Alaska to Argentina. Just three years later, Spanish authorities began promoting the immigration of Acadians who had been expelled by the British from the Acadia region of the territory then known as New France.  

Beginning in the 1770s, in order to increase the state’s Spanish presence, the government encouraged people from the Canary Islands, a Spanish colony off the coast of West Africa, to immigrate to Louisiana. Around two thousand Isleños, as they were known, arrived between 1778 and 1783, settling in four new communal villages, two of which were located in the future footprint of Acadiana.

The Canary Island community of Valenzuela Dans La Fourche, commonly called Valenzuela, was located along Bayou Lafourche in Assumption Parish, around the present-day town of Belle Rose. The settlement eventually disappeared, plowed under by the fields of Belle Alliance Plantation. Today, some residents of the area still carry Spanish surnames dating back to the Valenzuela era.

Another settlement, Villa de Gálvez, or Galveztown, was established in 1778, around the town of Prairieville in today’s Ascension Parish. Its Isleños residents abandoned the outpost following the Louisiana Purchase for Spanish Town, the oldest neighborhood in Baton Rouge.

In 1779, another significant group of Hispanic settlers arrived in the Spanish colony when the colonial administrator Francisco Bouligny led a group of around 500 colonists, many from the province of Málaga, Spain, to establish the town of Nueva Iberia, or New Iberia, in honor of the Iberian Peninsula.

With the handover of Louisiana to the United States in 1803, the new nation’s ties to Latin America only strengthened the state’s geographic and economic connections to the region, most notably Mexico, Cuba, and Honduras.

Those three nations represent the largest groups of Latinos in Acadiana. For over half a century, the Catholic Diocese of Lafayette, in coordination with the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, has assisted in the immigration of individuals from Latin American countries, including Nicaragua, Venezuela, and El Salvador, seeking refuge from political persecution, natural disasters, economic collapse, and war.

Today, Lafayette and Acadiana are dotted with Latino-owned groceries, restaurants, and other businesses. Many churches hold services in Spanish. And English as a Second Language programs have blossomed in public schools. The local KRVS radio station broadcasts the Sunday hour program Espacio Latino, hosted by Fernando Perez-Viart.

In 2000, Colombian native Luis Mora established the Asociación Cultural Latino Acadiana, a non-profit dedicated to promoting and preserving the cultural heritage of the area’s Latin American residents. Two years later, the ACLA launched the annual Latin Music Festival, a free event held in Downtown Lafayette’s Parc International on the first Saturday of October, the start of Hispanic Heritage Month.

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