Atlantic Creole
Later, when more European populations began to establish themselves in Africa and the trans-atlantic industrial kidnapping complex ramped up, genetic, cultural and political admixing took place.
In the multicultural trading ports of 16th century West Africa, the Atlantic Creoles were frequently outcasts in both African and European cultures, but they were admired for their abilities to navigate between the two worlds, earning them reputations as expert traders and negotiators.
"[6][7] The historian Ira Berlin writes that Atlantic creoles were among what he called the 'Charter Generation' in the Chesapeake Colonies, up until the end of the seventeenth century.
Through the first century of settlement, lines were fluid between black and white workers as the color coded Caste system didn't solidify until later; they often both worked off passage as indentured servants, and any captives were less set apart than they were later.
Many of the new generation of creoles born in the colonies were the children of European indentured servants and bonded or captive workers of primarily West African ancestry.
Paul Heinegg and other twentieth-century researchers have found that 80% of the free people of color in the Upper South in colonial times were born to white mothers (thus gaining freedom) and African or Creole fathers.
[14][15] According to Berlin, most of the original admixed Atlantic Creoles were descended from Portuguese and Spanish fathers, primarily in the trading ports of West Africa; they had Iberian surnames such as Chavez, Rodriguez, and Francisco.
In the Chesapeake Bay Colony, many of the Atlantic Creoles intermarried with their European neighbors, adopted Anglo-Saxon surnames, became property owners and farmers, and captured others in turn.
In 2007, Linda Heywood and John Thornton used "newly available data from the DuBois Institute and Cambridge University Press on the trade and transportation of enslaved people" in their new work on the relation of Central Africans to the Atlantic Creoles.
They found strong support for Berlin's thesis that the Charter Generations of enslaved creoles, before 1660, came primarily from West Central Africa.
[16] They also noted that in the Kingdom of Kongo (northern present-day Angola), the leaders adopted Catholicism in the late 15th century due to Portuguese influence.
They formed a type of African-Catholic spirituality unique to the region, and the people frequently adopted Portuguese names in baptism.
[17] The historians argue that numerous people from Kongo were transported to the North American colonies as captives, especially to South Carolina and Louisiana.
[17] Brunelle says that the enslaved Kongolese, rather than the small admixed communities around European trading posts, were the source of most early Atlantic Creoles with Iberian surnames in North America.
[21] Such workers typically worked under a limited indenture contract for four to seven years to pay off their passage, room, board, lodging, and freedom dues.
French, Acadian, African and Amerindian cultures merged and interviewed to form a distinct Atlantic creole culture while the racialized system operated atypical as compared to the rest of the United States which made social mobility easier for Creoles of Color creating a distinct class system.
The act is also significant because it asserts that part-American [Indians] with or without [emphasis added] African ancestry could be counted as Negroes, thus having an implication for all later slave censuses.
[37] One root of the cuisine also stems from captives transforming less desired food or scraps into a palatable meal in creative or innovate ways.
Since the 1960s, when linguists began describing this language in great detail, it has gone through many name changes based on the social and political times in which it exists.
In an interview on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation, McWhorter characterized AAVE as a "hybrid of regional dialects of Great Britain that captive people in America were exposed to because they often worked alongside the indentured servants who spoke those dialects..." According to McWhorter, virtually all linguists who have carefully studied the origins of AAVE "agree that the West African connection is quite minor.
[44] Creolist John Dillard quotes, for example, slave ship captain William Smith describing the sheer diversity of mutually unintelligible languages just in The Gambia.
In 1721, Cotton Mather conducted the first attempt at recording the speech of enslaved people in his interviews regarding the practice of smallpox inoculation.
[47][48] Encompassing the earliest folk traditions to present day popular music [49] "Africans brought their own cultures and way of life to the Americas.
They told stories, sang, danced, played African and African-derived instruments, and more broadly, celebrated life as they had done in Africa.
It arose through a process of syncretism between the traditional religions of West Africa, the Roman Catholic form of Christianity, and Haitian Vodou.
Hoodoo is a set of spiritual practices, traditions, and beliefs which were created and concealed by Atlantic creoles in North America.
[58] In 1792, about 1200 of the resettled Black Loyalist emigrated to West Africa and founded a new colony where their descendants identified as the Sierra Leone Creoles.
Ingredients that are common in most islands' dishes are rice, plantains, beans, cassava, cilantro, bell peppers, chickpeas, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, coconut, and any of various meats that are locally available like beef, poultry, pork or fish.
A characteristic seasoning for the region is a green herb-and-oil-based marinade called sofrito, which imparts a flavor profile which is quintessentially Caribbean in character.
Some of the styles to gain wide popularity outside the Caribbean include, bachata, merenque, palo, mambo, denbo, baithak gana, bouyon, cadence-lypso, calypso, chutney, chutney-soca, compas, dancehall, jing ping, parang, pichakaree, punta, ragga, reggae, reggaeton, salsa, soca, and zouk.
