Creole historically meant someone born in the New World, and in Louisiana it could refer to the offspring of French planters as well as the children of newly arrived slaves. Creole has also come to mean something entirely new, or a surprising mixture of ingredients, and can be applied to a style of cuisine, to music, clothing, architecture, literature, language, to a mode of behavior, or to a person of a certain color or social status. It has been said to be an impure state of being, but also the purest state possible.

As a social process, scholars and politicians have taken to calling creolization a way in which things or people of historically unrelated backgrounds and history come into contact and change over time.

—Roger D. Abrahams, Blues for New Orleans: Mardis Gras and America’s Creole Soul, 2006.