California native writes about the Great Migration and her Creole roots

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Californian native turned Xavier professor dives into her Creole roots in new book​

Sunset Limited: An Autobiography of Creole by Wendy A. Gaudin.

Louisiana is a rich state of mixed-race people. Wendy A. Gaudin, a California native and descendant of Louisiana Creoles, approaches the complex tapestry of what it means to be Afro-Creole in Louisiana and California in her creative nonfiction book, "Sunset Limited: An Autobiography of Creole."
Gaudin uses the train route, the Sunset Limited — a train that many Creole families took from New Orleans to Los Angeles — as a vessel for investigating her own family's lineage and experiences while examining the cultural and social elements of being Creole inside and outside of Louisiana.

Gaudin forms a personal, nuanced history that includes elements of poetry and imagery.

Gaudin is a historian, essayist, poet and history professor at Xavier University in New Orleans, where she teaches courses in the disciplines of history and African American and diaspora studies. Her research interests are primarily in Creole history and the histories of racially mixed people in different French colonial contexts, namely south Louisiana and south Vietnam.

Wendy A. Gaudin, Xavier University history professor and author of "Sunset Limited: An Autobiography of Creole."


How did you approach your unique style of including poetry and imagery among the history?

My Ph.D., master's and bachelor's degrees are all in history, and I did learn how to write the standard, traditional, third-person singular style that is supposed to be from an objective point of view. But I also studied oral history, and one of the elements is the relationship of the recorder of the story to the person telling their story. You cannot act as if you are two machines telling stories.

We look at each other. We hear each other's accents. We share some of our history with each other. When you're an oral historian, you give some of yourself to the subject that you're interviewing, and it's not flat. It's multi-dimensional. It's very rich.

I was speaking to these Creoles who are my grandparents' generation, and I am a younger generation. They may be judging me based on how I look, how I speak as a Californian, and that perception of me may shape what they tell me and how they tell me. I would also say that I've always been a creative writer.

My strength is interdisciplinary. I write creative nonfiction. I write autoethnography. I write poetry. I weave them all together. I wrote from my strength, rather than the dictates of my discipline.
"Sunset Limited" is accessible in a way that people can connect to it and not feel like they're reading above their understanding. Though, at the same time, it's educational. How did you accomplish that?

I really wanted it to speak to multiple audiences — to people who are interested in life, life stories, life writing. I did not want it to only speak to academics.
I also want to say Creoles are more than one thing, and so I wanted the book to reflect the multidimensionality of Creoles.

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What similarities do you see in the Creole diaspora to Los Angeles and the Louisiana Creole migration to other cities?

There were different migrations. One migration was New Orleans to Chicago, primarily around World War I, and another was southwest Louisiana to Houston.

Other ethnic groups live in Chicago, so it's a different kind of landscape than Houston and a different landscape from Los Angeles. All of that is going to shape how Creoles integrate into a landscape that has different ethnicities, and perhaps even how they're perceived.

They may have been perceived as Greeks in one place, and then as Italians in another place, as Latin Americans in another place, and I don't think that there's anything strange about that. I think that's what happens when people are of mixed ethnicity.
So, they find their place, and they fit into whatever that place is.

What would your grandparents have thought about the new pope being descended from a 7th Ward family?

I think that my grandmother, Rita Roux, probably would have been especially proud that he was a 7th Warder like herself. She probably would have said, "Oh, yeah. I know all of them."
So many of us know people within Creole families that sort of cross the color line back and forth, like a swinging door. Members of my own family have done that.

I think my grandparents would not be surprised. They would probably look at him and say, "Yes, he looks like members of our family."

What do you think people don't understand about leaving a specific culture within a country?
That identity is not simple. Self-definition is not simple. The idea that we are one thing is absurd.

Race is such an overwhelming dominant narrative and a dominant category that it fools us into thinking that we are just this one thing, even if we have to tear ourselves apart or squeeze ourselves until we can't breathe to fit into that category.
Migration is a beautiful way of understanding that we are more than one thing, and our identity is made up of multiple elements of our lives. People of mixed race are a people, not just part this or part that. We share things across language, across time. I feel that Creoles are a part of the African diaspora, and we're also part of the multiracial, post-colonial world.

Although "Sunset Limited" tells a fairly comprehensive history of Louisiana Creoles, is there anything that you would add?
Perhaps I would write a little bit about Acadiana, because Acadiana has a whole Creole history and a culture that's quite different from New Orleans