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Lit Louisiana: Xavier professor’s new book looks at her ancestors’ choice to migrate from N.O. [1]
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Date: 2025-03-18
There is hardly a New Orleans family that doesn’t have relatives in California. In the first half of the 20th century, migrants left the state along the railroad lines to Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Xavier University of Louisiana Professor Wendy A. Gaudin is the granddaughter of travelers to the West Coast. She has written a book about the experience of growing up in the shadow of her ancestors’ choice. “Sunset Limited: An Autobiography of Creole” is a “multilayered, transnational, bilingual, and racially expansive history of New Orleans and Louisiana,” according to her publisher LSU Press. The book uses history, geography, ethnography, poetry and more to explore ideas about migration and family and their effects.
The Sunset Limited is the name of the train line that began operating from New Orleans to Los Angeles in 1894. The line still exists and passes through San Antonio, Tucson, and Phoenix. LSU says that Gaudin’s reflections on her family’s early journey reveals that “history is not a cold, linear record of the past. Rather, it is a deeply felt understanding of how we are shaped by the movements of our ancestors, and of our rich and ever-changing relationships with those who came before us.” The book was just released in this month.
EMBERS
About a year ago, I mentioned “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of the Great Migration” (2010) with one quote. “The Warmth” is Isabel Wilkerson’s thoroughly researched non-fiction that takes three families—one of them from Louisiana—and follows them to their new locations. It is probably the most comprehensive text on Black migration as a national movement. Do read this book for context on the experiences described in “Sunset Limited.” And if you’d like to round out your knowledge, take a look at the images in Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series. These beautiful paintings about Black people leaving the South can be viewed a website produced by The Phillips Collection.
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