Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal

Abstract

In 1720, thirteen deported French Bohemian (Romani) families disembarked in the floundering Louisiana colony. Anti-Bohemian sentiment combined with a growing French Empire in need of able-bodied and reproductive laborers to dislocate these families from their already precarious lives. Over the next century, as Louisiana increasingly developed along new and more intransigent racialized lines, Bohemians navigated and helped construct this emergent racial order in diverse ways. Despite the formation of an initial Bohemian community in eighteenth-century Louisiana, their descendants were eventually distributed into new colonial racial categories. The racial potential of Louisiana Bohemians declined as their actions, especially their sexual choices, determined where they, and their descendants, might racially situate. Both self- and other-ascribed Bohemian identity eventually, if unevenly, lost relevance in French, Spanish and U.S.-controlled Louisiana as other more powerful racialized categories and identities prevailed. This article attends to the history of the colonial Louisiana Bohemian community in order to broaden the historical knowledge of the Romani diaspora, complement the existing scholarship on the Louisiana colony and state, and continue to fine-tune our understandings of racial formation in early America.

Pages

659-698

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2021.0021

Volume

19

Issue

4

Publication Date

Fall 2021

Keywords

Louisiana, New Orleans, French, Bohemians, Gypsies, Romani, race, racialization, racial formation, whiteness, empire, family, intimacy, Atlantic World, deportation

Disciplines

History | United States History

Comments

Copyright © 2021 The McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of scholarly citation, none of this work may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. For information address the University of Pennsylvania Press, 3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112.

ISSN

1543-4273

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