Creole, Criollismo, and Créolité

This is a response to José Antonio Mazzotti’s chapter in this volume titled “Criollismo, Creole, and Créolité.” The chapter takes as its point of departure “the evolution in the definition of the notion criollo from the seventeenth century until the wars of independence in Latin America in the nineteenth century.” The core of Mazzotti’s argument is that the term criollo “evolved from a colonial term to refer to Africans and Europeans born and raised in the Americas, to the quintessential term to refer to the new identities used to justify the state formation and cultural independence in Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean.” However, I would argue that such a perspective tends to omit certain key aspects of the New World experience of the creole, most particularly its linguistic and ethnocultural resonances within an Afro-Caribbean context, and the implications of these resonances for various processes of identity formation. More specifically, the analytical framework for this approach lies in the discursive and ethnocultural experience of the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean, such that the resulting perspective tends to highlight the differences in origin, resonance, and implication between criollo and creole. Indeed, the two terms have developed in different ways in the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanic Americas, such that in the Caribbean the definitions and experiences undergirding these terms literally collide and produce a range of meanings. In a word, then, the Hispanic Caribbean differs from the rest of the Caribbean when creolization is studied. This approach will be the foundational framework of this response.