The St. Joseph Altar Traditions of South Louisiana PDF Download

Author: Ethelyn Gay Orso
Publisher: University of Louisiana
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 70

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Author: Sandra Scalise Juneau
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807174769
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Every year on March 19, Roman Catholic churches and households in and around New Orleans celebrate St. Joseph’s Day. As centerpieces of these celebrations, the elaborate tiered displays of foods, prayers, and offerings known as St. Joseph Altars represent a centuries-old tradition established in south Louisiana by immigrants from Sicily. In Celebrating with St. Joseph Altars, Sandra Scalise Juneau expertly documents the stories, recipes, and religious symbolism of this rich tradition passed down through multiple generations. While the altars have adapted over time to local ingredients and tastes, most of the customary dishes still follow cooking and baking methods that remain relatively unchanged from over a century ago. Juneau traces the history and symbols associated with the St. Joseph Altar from its Sicilian origins to its establishment among Louisiana’s celebrations, then its later embrace by multicultural communities across the United States. She also provides a guide for preparing an altar, complete with recommended timelines and suggestions for physical setup. She offers over sixty carefully selected recipes centered on delectable breads, fish, pasta, and spring vegetables. Pastries receive special attention, with detailed instructions for carving the intricate fig cake designs known as cuccidati. Celebrating with St. Joseph Altars chronicles a cultural tradition that continues to draw families and communities together in a generous spirit of hospitality.

Author: Kerri McCaffety
Publisher: Pelican Publishing
ISBN: 9781455612321
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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The acclaimed New Orleans photographer captures the celebration of St. Joseph’s Day through images and traditional Sicilian recipes. According to legend, Saint Joseph sent rain to save the people of Sicily from drought during the Middle Ages. To thank their patron saint, Sicilians made offerings of their finest crops to feed the poor—a display of food and faith that continues today. This beautiful custom, La Tavola di San Giuseppe, came to America as immigrants formed what is still the largest Sicilian population in the United States in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 120 color photographs, Kerri McCaffety shows a sparkling array of Saint Joseph altars where flowers, candles, and photographs of lost loved ones crowd around statues of saints on three-tiered shrines piled with biscotti, pane, cuccidati, frittate, and pignolatti. In addition to describing the spiritual symbolism of these foods, McCafferty includes recipes for the most important dishes, including a cannoli recipe from Emeril Lagasse. Nineteen recipes contributed by local Saint Joseph aficionados—from a Sicilian grandmother to New Orleans’ most famous chef—include traditional Italian cookies and sweets, baked fish, and bread believed to have the power to calm a storm.

Author: Margavio, A. V.
Publisher: Pelican Publishing
ISBN: 9781455601509
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Approximately 70,000 Italian immigrants arrived in the Port of New Orleans between 1898 and 1929. They brought with them a yearning, a hunger for the things they valued: bread, respect, fortune, security, beauty, justice, and drama. Impoverished conditions in Sicily lead its people to respond to Louisiana plantersï¿1/2 pleas for workers, and the transported Sicilians were then able start new lives, rising quickly to become leaders in their communities. This is bread. There were few opportunities for land ownership in Sicily and overcrowding in the urban slums into which immigrants in other parts of the country came. In Louisiana, these immigrants largely settled in rural areas, and before long, Italian Americans became the "food kingpins" of the state. This is respect. Together, they form the basis of this history of interwoven influences, clashes between the old world and the new, and that which makes America the great nation it is: the longing of its citizens to be independent. Using vignettes, family histories, and census as well as other historical records, A. V. Margavio and Jerome J. Salomone examine how Italian culture shaped the lives of the immigrants to Louisiana and, in turn, how experiences in Louisiana modified the Old World values and culture the Italians brought with them. There are hundreds of thousands of Italian Americans living in Louisiana today. A. V. Margavio is a professor of sociology at the University of New Orleans. Jerome J. Salomone is a professor of sociology and scholar in residence at Southeastern Louisiana University.

Author: Kim Marie Vaz
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 080715072X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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One of the first women's organizations to mask and perform during Mardi Gras, the Million Dollar Baby Dolls redefined the New Orleans carnival tradition. Tracing their origins from Storyville-era brothels and dance halls to their re-emergence in post-Katrina New Orleans, author Kim Marie Vaz uncovers the fascinating history of the "raddy-walking, shake-dancing, cigar-smoking, money-flinging" ladies who strutted their way into a predominantly male establishment. The Baby Dolls formed around 1912 as an organization of African American women who used their profits from working in New Orleans's red-light district to compete with other Black prostitutes on Mardi Gras. Part of this event involved the tradition of masking, in which carnival groups create a collective identity through costuming. Their baby doll costumes -- short satin dresses, stockings with garters, and bonnets -- set against a bold and provocative public behavior not only exploited stereotypes but also empowered and made visible an otherwise marginalized female demographic. Over time, different neighborhoods adopted the Baby Doll tradition, stirring the creative imagination of Black women and men across New Orleans, from the downtown Trem area to the uptown community of Mahalia Jackson. Vaz follows the Baby Doll phenomenon through one hundred years with photos, articles, and interviews and concludes with the birth of contemporary groups, emphasizing these organizations' crucial contribution to Louisiana's cultural history.

Author: Lindahl, Carl
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781604736755
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Here are more than two hundred oral tales from some of Louisiana's finest storytellers. In this comprehensive volume of great range are transcriptions of narratives in many genres, from diverse voices, and from all regions of the state. Told in settings ranging from the front porch to the festival stage, these tales proclaim the great vitality and variety of Louisiana's oral narrative traditions. Given special focus are Harold Talbert, Lonnie Gray, Bel Abbey, Ben Guiné, and Enola Matthews--whose wealth of imagination, memory, and artistry demonstrates the depth as well as the breadth of the storyteller's craft. For tales told in Cajun and Creole French, Koasati, and Spanish, the editors have supplied both the original language and English translation. To the volume Maida Owens has contributed an overview of Louisiana's folk culture and a survey of folklife studies of various regions of the state. Car Lindahl's introduction and notes discuss the various genres and styles of storytelling common in Louisiana and link them with the worldwide are of the folktale.

Author: Reid MITCHELL
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674041178
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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In this study, Reid Mitchell takes the reader to Mardi Gras - a yearly ritual that sweeps the multicultural city of New Orleans into a frenzy of parades, pageantry, dance, drunkenness, music, sexual display, and social and political bombast.

Author: Richard Brent Turner
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253025125
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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This scholarly study demonstrates “that while post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans is changing, the vibrant traditions of jazz . . . must continue” (Journal of African American History). An examination of the musical, religious, and political landscape of black New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina, this revised edition looks at how these factors play out in a new millennium of global apartheid. Richard Brent Turner explores the history and contemporary significance of second lines—the group of dancers who follow the first procession of church and club members, brass bands, and grand marshals in black New Orleans’s jazz street parades. Here music and religion interplay, and Turner’s study reveals how these identities and traditions from Haiti and West and Central Africa are reinterpreted. He also describes how second line participants create their own social space and become proficient in the arts of political disguise, resistance, and performance.

Author: Carolyn Morrow Long
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572331105
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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They can be found along the side streets of many American cities: herb or candle shops catering to practitioners of Voodoo, hoodoo, Santería, and similar beliefs. Here one can purchase ritual items and raw materials for the fabrication of traditional charms, plus a variety of soaps, powders, and aromatic goods known in the trade as "spiritual products." For those seeking health or success, love or protection, these potions offer the power of the saints and the authority of the African gods. In Spiritual Merchants, Carolyn Morrow Long provides an inside look at the followers of African-based belief systems and the retailers and manufacturers who supply them. Traveling from New Orleans to New York, from Charleston to Los Angeles, she takes readers on a tour of these shops, examines the origins of the products, and profiles the merchants who sell them. Long describes the principles by which charms are thought to operate, how ingredients are chosen, and the uses to which they are put. She then explores the commodification of traditional charms and the evolution of the spiritual products industry--from small-scale mail order "doctors" and hoodoo drugstores to major manufacturers who market their products worldwide. She also offers an eye-opening look at how merchants who are not members of the culture entered the business through the manufacture of other goods such as toiletries, incense, and pharmaceuticals. Her narrative includes previously unpublished information on legendary Voodoo queens and hoodoo workers, as well as a case study of John the Conqueror root and its metamorphosis from spirit-embodying charm to commercial spiritual product. No other book deals in such detail with both the history and current practices of African-based belief systems in the United States and the evolution of the spiritual products industry. For students of folklore or anyone intrigued by the world of charms and candle shops, Spiritual Merchants examines the confluence of African and European religion in the Americas and provides a colorful introduction to a vibrant aspect of contemporary culture. The Author: Carolyn Morrow Long is a preservation specialist and conservator at the the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.

Author: Rebecca Sharpless
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469668378
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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While a luscious layer cake may exemplify the towering glory of southern baking, like everything about the American South, baking is far more complicated than it seems. Rebecca Sharpless here weaves a brilliant chronicle, vast in perspective and entertaining in detail, revealing how three global food traditions—Indigenous American, European, and African—collided with and merged in the economies, cultures, and foodways of the South to create what we know as the southern baking tradition. Recognizing that sentiments around southern baking run deep, Sharpless takes delight in deflating stereotypes as she delves into the surprising realities underlying the creation and consumption of baked goods. People who controlled the food supply in the South used baking to reinforce their power and make social distinctions. Who used white cornmeal and who used yellow, who put sugar in their cornbread and who did not had traditional meanings for southerners, as did the proportions of flour, fat, and liquid in biscuits. By the twentieth century, however, the popularity of convenience foods and mixes exploded in the region, as it did nationwide. Still, while some regional distinctions have waned, baking in the South continues to be a remarkable, and remarkably tasty, source of identity and entrepreneurship.