page_title: Isleños (Louisiana)
section_title: Valenzuela (Bayou Lafourche)
hierarchical_section_title: Isleños (Louisiana) / History / Settlements / Valenzuela (Bayou Lafourche)
caption_attribution_description: Old "Creole Cottage" style house, Donaldsonville, Louisiana.
context_page_description: Isleños are an ethnic group living in the state of Louisiana in the United States, consisting of people primarily from the Canary Islands. Isleños are descendants of colonists who settled in Spanish Louisiana between 1778 and 1783 and intermarried with other communities such as Frenchmen, Acadians, Creoles, Spaniards, Latin Americans, and other groups, mainly through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
  In Louisiana, the Isleños originally settled in four communities which included Galveztown, Valenzuela, Barataria, and San Bernardo. Of those settlements, Valenzuela and San Bernardo were the most successful as the other two were plagued with both disease and flooding. The large migration of Acadian refugees to Bayou Lafourche led to the rapid gallicization of the Valenzuela community while San Bernardo was able to preserve much of its unique culture and language into the twenty-first century. This being said, the transmission of Spanish and other customs has completely halted in St. Bernard Parish with those having competency in Spanish being octogenarians.
  Regardless, these communities have garnered attention from notable academics like Alcée Fortier, Samuel G.
context_section_description: Governor Gálvez had chosen the site for the original settlement, referred to as Valenzuela dans La Fourche, to be along the eastern bank of Bayou Lafourche just south of Donaldsonville extending into what is now the Belle Alliance Plantation. Not long after its establishment in 1779, a large group of Acadian refugees settled in the community. The census of 1784 indicated that Valenzuela had a population of 174 people, of whom 154 were Isleños. By 1785, more than 800 Acadians settled along Bayou Lafourche and by 1788 there were over 1,500 people living in the area. The Isleños of Valenzuela were strongly influenced by the Acadians who surrounded their community. Many families intermarried, adopted French as their everyday language, and their surnames were gallicized.
  After the Louisiana Purchase, many Isleños sold their tracts of land and moved to Baton Rouge or further inland. It was those who moved to the interior swampland that continued to maintain the Spanish language and customs of their ancestors. These Isleños maintained farms growing corn, beans, melons, and squash, as well as various livestock. Many, just as those in San Bernardo, also found work on the sugar plantations that were established along the Mississippi River during the 19th century. It was at this time that their francophone neighbors began referring to the group as the brule/bruli people or brule dwellers due to their practice of clearing land with fire. Some improvements to infrastructure, communication, and infrastructure were made with the turn of the century but many of the Brulis maintained their traditional ways of life.
  Life was difficult for the Brulis and negative perceptions plagued the community. For example, a visitor to the community described them as "half-salvage, ignominiously poor" as well as "a people of inferior calibre...".  It was not long that "Spanish" became synonymous with poverty, a lack of education, and lower class. By 1990s, Samuel G. Armistead found that the use of Spanish and the prevalence of Spanish traditions had nearly vanished with only a handful of octogenarians having any fluency in the language. The influence of the greater French community, along with the negative perceptions of their own group, led to the community forgetting their origins entirely.
caption: Even today, many Isleño descendants can be found in Donaldsonville.
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