Креольские народы: происхождение и формирование этнической идентичности.

Ethnic groups formed from mixed cultural and linguistic ancestry

Creole peoples may refer to different ethnic groups around the world. The term has been used with various meanings, often conflicting or varying from region to region. Creole peoples vary widely in ethnic background and mixture and many have since developed distinct ethnic identities. The development of creole languages is sometimes mistakenly attributed to the emergence of Creole ethnic identities; however, the two developments occur independently. In some places, they are ethnic groups formed during the European colonial era, from the mass displacement of peoples brought into sustained contact with others from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, who converged onto a colonial territory to which they had not previously belonged. This process, known as creolization, is characterized by rapid social flux regularized into Creole ethnogenesis.

Alaskan Creole, sometimes colloquially spelled "Kriol" in English (from Russian креол), are a unique people who first came about through the intermingling of Sibero Russian promyshlenniki men with Aleut and Eskimo women in the late 18th century and assumed a prominent position in the economy of Russian America and the North Pacific Rim.

Atlantic Creole is a term coined by historian Ira Berlin to describe a group of people from Angola and Central Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries with cultural or ethnic ties to Africa, Europe, and sometimes the Caribbean. Some of these people arrived in the Chesapeake Colonies as the Charter Generation of slaves during the European colonization of the Americas before 1660. Some had lived and worked in Europe or the Caribbean before coming (or being transported) to North America. Examples of such men included John Punch and Emanuel Driggus (his surname was likely derived from Rodrigues). Also, during the early settlement of the colonies, children born of immigrants in the colonies were often referred to as "Creole". This is found more often in the Chesapeake Colonies.

In the United States, the words "Louisiana Creole" refers to people of any race or mixture thereof who are descended from colonial French La Louisiane and colonial Spanish Louisiana (New Spain) settlers before the Louisiana region became part of the United States in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase. Both the word and the ethnic group derive from a similar usage, beginning in the Caribbean in the 16th century, which distinguished people born in the French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies from the various new arrivals born in their respective, non Caribbean homelands. Some writers from other parts of the country have mistakenly assumed the term to refer only to people of mixed racial descent, but this is not the traditional Louisiana usage. In Louisiana, the term "Creole" was first used to describe people born in Louisiana, who used the term to distinguish themselves from newly arrived immigrants. It was not a racial or ethnic identifier; it was simply synonymous with "born in the New World," meant to separate native born people of any ethnic background—white, African, or any mixture thereof—from European immigrants and slaves imported from Africa. Later, the term was racialized after newly arrived Anglo Americans began to associate créolité, or the quality of being Creole, with racially mixed ancestry. This caused many white Creoles to eventually abandon the label out of fear that the term would lead mainstream Americans to believe them to be of racially mixed descent (and thus endanger their livelihoods or social standing). Later writers occasionally make distinctions among French Creoles (of European ancestry), Creoles of Color (of mixed ethnic ancestry), and occasionally, African Creoles (of primarily African descendant); these categories, however, are later inventions, and most primary documents from the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries make use of the word "Creole" without any additional qualifier. Creoles of Spanish and German descent also exist, and Spanish Creoles survive today as Isleños and Malagueños, both found in southern Louisiana. However, all racial categories of Creoles from Caucasian, mixed racial, African, to Native American tended to think and refer to themselves solely as Creole, a commonality in many other Francophone and Iberoamerican cultures, who tend to lack strict racial separations common in United States History and other countries with large populations from Northern Europe's various cultures. This racial neutrality persists to the modern day, as many Creoles do not use race as a factor for being a part of the ethno culture. being explicitly described as "Creoles." Today, however, the descendants of the Acadians are more commonly referred to as, and identify as, 'Cajuns'—a derivation of the word Acadian, indicating French Canadian settlers as ancestors. The distinction between "Cajuns" and "Creoles" is stronger today than it was in the past because American racial ideologies have strongly influenced the meaning of the word "Creole" to the extent that there is no longer unanimous agreement among Louisianians on the word's precise definition. Today, many assume that any francophone person of European descent is Cajun and any francophone of African descent is Creole—a false assumption that would not have been recognized in the nineteenth century. Some assert that "Creole" refers to aristocratic urbanites whereas "Cajuns" are agrarian members of the francophone working class, but this is another relatively recent distinction. Creoles may be of any race and live in any area, rural or urban. The Creole culture of Southwest Louisiana is thus more similar to the culture dominant in Acadiana than it is to the Creole culture of New Orleans. Though the land areas overlap around New Orleans and down river, Cajun/Creole culture and language extend westward all along the southern coast of Louisiana, concentrating in areas southwest of New Orleans around Lafayette, and as far as Crowley, Abbeville, and into the rice belt of Louisiana nearer Lake Charles and the Texas border. Louisiana Creoles historically spoke a variety of languages; today, the most prominent include Louisiana French and Louisiana Creole. (There is a distinction between "Creole" people and the "creole" language. Not all Creoles speak creole—many speak French, Spanish, or English as primary languages.) Spoken creole is dying with continued 'Americanization' in the area. Most remaining Creole lexemes have drifted into popular culture. Traditional creole is spoken among those families determined to keep the language alive or in regions below New Orleans around St. James and St. John Parishes where German immigrants originally settled (also known as 'the German Coast', or La Côte des Allemands) and cultivated the land, keeping the ill equipped French Colonists from starvation during the Colonial Period and adopting commonly spoken French and creole (arriving with the exiles) as a language of trade. Creoles are largely Roman Catholic and influenced by traditional French and Spanish culture left from the first Colonial Period, officially beginning in 1722 with the arrival of the Ursuline Nuns, who were preceded by another order, the sisters of the Sacred Heart, with whom they lived until their first convent could be built with monies from the French Crown. (Both orders still educate girls in 2010). The "fiery Latin temperament" described by early scholars on New Orleans culture made sweeping generalizations to accommodate Creoles of Spanish heritage as well as the original French. The mixed race Creoles, descendants of mixing of European colonists, slaves, and Native Americans or sometimes Gens de Couleur (free men and women of colour), first appeared during the colonial periods with the arrival of slave populations. Most Creoles, regardless of race, generally consider themselves to share a collective culture. Non Louisianans often fail to appreciate this and assume that all Creoles are of mixed race, which is historically inaccurate. Louisiane Creoles were also referred to as criollos, a word from the Spanish language meaning "created" and used in the post French governance period to distinguish the two groups of New Orleans area and down river Creoles. Both mixed race and European Creole groups share many traditions and language, but their socio economic roots differed in the original period of Louisiana history. Actually, the French word Créole is derived from the Portuguese word Crioulo, which described people born in the Americas as opposed to Spain. The term is often used to mean simply "pertaining to the New Orleans area," but this, too, is not historically accurate. People all across the Louisiana territory, including the pays des Illinois, identified as Creoles, as evidenced by the continued existence of the term Créole in the critically endangered Missouri French.

The Mississippi Gulf Coast region has a significant population of Creoles—especially in Pass Christian, Gulfport, Biloxi, and Pascagoula. A community known as Creoletown is located in Pascagoula, with its history on record. Many in this location are Catholic and have also used the Creole, French. and English languages.

In colonial Texas, the term "Creole" (criollo) distinguished old world Africans and Europeans from their descendants born in the new world, Creoles; they composed the citizen class of New Spain's Tejas province. Texas Creole culture revolved around "'ranchos" (Creole ranches), attended mostly by vaqueros (cowboys) of African, Spaniard, or Mestizo descent, and Tlaxcalan Nahuatl settlers, who established a number of settlements in southeastern Texas and western Louisiana (e. g. Los Adaes). Black Texas Creoles have been present in Texas ever since the 1600s; they served as soldiers in Spanish garrisons of eastern Texas. Generations of Black Texas Creoles, also known as "Black Tejanos", played a role in later phases of Texas history: Mexican Texas, Republic of Texas, and American Texas. In Argentina, in an ambiguous ethnoracial way, criollo currently is used for people whose ancestors were already present in the territory in the colonial period, regardless their ethnicity. The exception are dark skinned African people and current indigenous groups. The word criollo is the origin and cognate of the French word creole.

The racially based caste system was in force throughout the Spanish viceroyalties in the Americas, since the 16th century. During the early Spanish colonial period the Spaniards had a policy selecting promising assimilationist Indigenous to educate and indoctrinate. They were accepted into the colonial leadership but sometimes remained in Spain. Among the descendants of these assimilated sons of chiefs are the Aztec descended Moctezuma de Tultengo. By the 19th century, this discrimination and the example of the American Revolution and the ideals of the Enlightenment eventually led the Spanish American Criollo elite to rebel against the Spanish rule. With the support of the lower classes, they engaged Spain in the Spanish American wars of independence (1810–1826), which ended with the break up of the former Spanish Empire in the Americas into a number of independent republics.

Persons of pure Spanish descent born in the islands of the Spanish East Indies were called Insulares ("islanders") or Criollos. Although many of the Spanish Americans in the islands were also persons of pure Spanish descent, they, along with many Mestizos and Castizos from Spanish America living in the East Indies were also classified as "Americanos".