Mardi Gras

Mardi Gras. New Orleans's annual pre‐Lenten celebration of Mardi Gras (“Fat Tuesday”), or Carnival, long a ritual of both civic self‐definition and cultural conflict, owes its origins to the region's French, Spanish, and Afro‐Caribbean population. The celebration begins on January 6 and culminates on Mardi Gras day, Shrove Tuesday. Although informal parades and festive masquerades date to the early nineteenth century, the modern Mardi Gras—with its themed parades, costumed maskers, and elaborate balls—began in 1857 with the establishment of the city's first exclusive Carnival organization, the “Mystick Krewe of Comus.” Other all‐white “krewes” like Rex, Momus, and Proteus soon arose and quickly became social networks for the city's Anglo and Creole (French or Spanish) elites.

In 1909 members of New Orleans's black middle class created the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club as a sly critique of white stereotypes of African Americans as “savages,” and as a protest against the city's harsh Jim Crow culture. The “Zulu” parade mocked the ruling white social order as paraders donned blackface and grass skirts and threw rubber spears and highly prized decorated coconuts; eventually this parade became one of the city's most important. Black working‐class people also asserted group pride by subverting white hegemony: Beginning in the 1880s, away from the center city, the black “Mardi Gras Indians” masqueraded in highly stylized Plains Indians costumes that played upon white stereotypes of both Indians and African Americans.

By the late 1990s more than seventy krewes paraded in the two weeks leading up to and including Mardi Gras day. Some used central city routes while many more preferred suburban neighborhoods. In the wake of a proposed 1991 ordinance to desegregate the exclusive Carnival organizations, several of the elite old‐line krewes chose to stop parading. Their disappearance, combined with New Orleans's growing tourism‐based economy focused more attention on newer, nonexclusive superkrewes, like Bacchus and Orpheus, whose parades featured flamboyant floats and abundant Carnival beads.
See also Segregation, Racial.

Bibliography

Samuel Kinser , Carnival, American Style: Mardi Gras at New Orleans and Mobile, 1990.
Reid Mitchell , All on a Mardi Gras Day: Episodes in the History of New Orleans Carnival, 1995.

Steven Hoelscher