Los Islenos of St. Bernard Parish

St. Bernard, LA

It was the middle of Fiesta Isleña in St. Bernard, La., (pop. 1,500) so the sudden thunderstorm that drove everyone indoors was anything but welcome.
But as lightning crackled over surrounding swamplands, folk dancers from across the Atlantic who were visiting their ancestors for the festival stayed outside to watch in awe as the storm unfolded. The dancers, from Spain’s Canary Islands off the coast of northwest Africa, were accustomed to the arid climate of their mountainous homeland. The thunderstorm was a spectacle unlike any they had ever seen.
This incident illustrated St. Bernard’s cultural evolution in a nutshell, because the dancers were direct descendants of those who settled the town more than 200 years ago. Today’s St. Bernard residents still call themselves “Isleños,” meaning islander in Spanish, long after Spain dispatched several colonies of Canary Islanders to keep the British Empire from encroaching west of the Mississippi River in 1778. Their descendants have forged a unique hybrid of Spanish and Louisiana cultures.
“The Isleños were, in effect, Creolized because they had to adapt to this highly different, flat, swampy environment which was something completely foreign to them,” says William de Marigny Hyland, president of Los Isleños Heritage and Cultural Society and St. Bernard Parish historian.
The most successful of four original Isleños colonies in the region, San Bernardo (later Anglicized as St. Bernard) once supplied the city of New Orleans with many of its staple foods, when the Isleños were farming on tracts given to them by the Spanish government. Some Isleños soon consolidated those tracts into successful sugar plantations. After the Civil War, however, many Isleños retreated to the easternmost parts of St. Bernard Parish, forming such remote enclaves as Delacroix Island and Shell Beach.
“They were the ones who, because of their isolation, retained their cultural identity,” Hyland says. That meant speaking the same Spanish dialect they had spoken for generations and singing the same traditional decimas (native poetry sung a cappella).
Other Isleños who had stayed close to the original settlement had their Spanish heritage reinforced in another way as a steady stream of Spanish mainlanders moved there, attracted by the area’s language and traditions. But another shift in the economy—this time toward oil and gas—once again decentralized the Spanish-speaking community and threatened to erode the Isleños’ culture and traditions.
To prevent that, the Los Isleños Heritage and Cultural Society was formed in 1980 by St. Bernard Parish’s original historian, Frank Fernandez. Housed in an 1840s Creole cottage home donated by the Moleros, a prominent Isleños family, the society soon began collecting stories and artifacts of the Isleños’ history in St. Bernard Parish, culminating each March with Fiesta Isleña, which celebrates the society’s year-round mission.
“Our primary goals are to preserve the heritage, the culture, and the presence of that culture in the parish of St. Bernard,” Hyland says. “And we want to promote that presence whenever possible.”
So far, the Isleños have met with unqualified success. Los Isleños Museum’s campus has grown to envelop other early Isleños buildings, including a house and kitchen building identical in floor plan to the original 1780s colonists’ homes (complete with original mud and moss insulation) and the Ducros Museum and Library. The public library for eastern St. Bernard Parish and a new multicultural center are recent additions.
Efforts also have been made to preserve the Isleños’ unique (and unwritten) Spanish dialect by recording hundreds of oral histories, and several monographs and a cookbook of Isleños recipes have been published. And a Spanish language curriculum emphasizing the Isleños colonists and their culture soon will be incorporated in local schools, whose students are also the museum’s most frequent visitors.
It’s enough to hearten such people as Emily Nunez Vega, who at 83 is one of St. Bernard’s declining number of bilingual Isleños. Until the Isleños society was formed, she worried that her culture would be lost to the ages. Now she sees its survival in the inquisitive younger faces at the museum and the Fiesta (this year on March 23 and 24).
“There are things people can find out here that they couldn’t learn before,” she says. “Until this, a lot of people didn’t know how they got here.”

Michael Depp is a writer living in New Orleans.

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