Moving Forward Archive

The coincidence of the 25th anniversary of the Prairie Acadian Cultural Center in Eunice, the Experience Louisiana Festival, and selection of former Eunice mayor Curtis Joubert as king of one south Louisiana’s traditional harvest festivals puts an exclamation point on why St. Landry Parish can claim to be a pioneer in the creation of a vibrant cultural economy.

Joubert has been rightly acclaimed as one of the first to recognize both the historic and economic worth of preserving and building upon the traditions of his community and the surrounding area.

As a legislator in the 1960s, he was a staunch advocate for the preservation of the French language and culture. As mayor in the 1980s, he helped to establish the Eunice Mardi Gras celebration that now draws thousands of people to the community each year, coined the nickname “Prairie Cajun Capital” for Eunice, and led tough fights for the creation of the Prairie Acadian Culture Center and for renovation of the Liberty Theatre next door to it.

The center is one of six in the Jean Lafitte National Park system in Louisiana and one of three designed to interpret life in the south Louisiana Cajun country. The other two are the Acadian Cultural Center in Lafayette and the Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center in Thibodaux.

The Prairie Cajun center’s exhibits, music sessions, demonstrations of local crafts, cooking lessons, and other programs have made it a necessary stop on any tour of the area, and visitors often couple that stop with a visit to the Rendez-vous de Cajuns live radio show offered each Saturday at the old movie house next door.

Data for the full 25 years of operation of the Prairie Acadian Cultural Center are not available, but National Park Service records show that 220,277 people visited it from January 1, 2000, through December 31, 2015, an average of more than 13,700 each year.

At the same time, the Cajun and Creole musicians performing on Rendez-vous de Cajunsat the Liberty Theater have played to a full house practically every week since the show began.

“The center and the theater are perfect examples of what cultural tourism is all about,” according to Celeste Gomez, St. Landry tourism director. “Not only do they work to preserve our unique heritage, they actively showcase it for everyone to see. That generates economic activity throughout the area, and guarantees that it will continue to attract more visitors to St. Landry Parish by making certain that the culture they come to experience is alive, vibrant, and authentic.

That activity also helps to create and keep good jobs. A study done for the Louisiana culture and tourism department points out that jobs created within the cultural economy can be among the most important within a community.

“Authentic local culture … is [the one area] most likely to create jobs that will not eventually be lost to lower cost locations,” that study found. “Furthermore, because its production is localized, it has a ripple effect [on other industries] … of the benefit from people coming to experience … the product firsthand.”

Experiencing the culture firsthand is the driving idea behind the Experience Louisiana Festival, sponsored by the Eunice Rotary Club and held yearly on the LSU-Eunice campus, Gomez noted.

In addition to the traditional festival fare of food and music, it features films, storytelling, a country Mardi Gras ride, demonstrations by Native American groups, discussions of different aspects of the south Louisiana culture, and an eclectic variety of other events.

As with the on-going activities at the cultural center and the theatre, the festival weekend gives a significant boost to the local and area economy, she notes.

A recent study by economists at the University of New Orleans found that the average visitor to a Louisiana festival will spend more than $60 per day and that “for every dollar of direct spending, additional dollars of secondary spending are generated in the economy.”

Additionally, according to Bill Rodier, economic development director for the parish, a growing number of those visitors find themselves so enamored with St. Landry and all of south Louisiana that they return several times, urge friends and neighbors to come visit, and sometimes begin to think of this as a place to retire.

“We’ve got a wonderful story to tell,” he said, “and it’s a story that can be told in no other place.”