Saint-Luc French Immersion and Cultural Center
Mavis Frugé leads the charge for cultural revitalization in Acadiana
Although rarer these days, there still exists a clan of old timers in Acadiana who remember the caramel-tinted cotton of days past. Very unlike the fluffy white balls most of us are familiar with, it was dubbed coton jaune (yellow cotton) in French, but in English it’s known as Acadian brown cotton.
“People made night gowns and underwear with it,” said Arnaudville native Mavis Arnaud Frugé, eighty-two. “It didn’t matter if it was washed in a creek that wasn’t clear, because it wouldn’t stain it. It had a yellow cast to it.”
The plant has its origins in South America, and was likely brought to South Louisiana via trade routes where Creoles, Acadians, and others saw its value. Although brown cotton had smaller yields than white cotton, the plant grew easily and, most importantly, its seeds could be removed by hand instead of necessitating a gin.
“That made it more accessible,” Frugé said. “It was the less-than-wealthy people who were using it to spin and weave.”
People began to rely on coton jaune as women in the region became skilled spinners, thus weaving the plant into the fabric of Acadiana. Although as commercial options became available in the twentieth century, Frugé explained that families simply quit the practice, and the art was on its way to being forgotten.
Recent revitalization efforts have brought the plant and its history back to light, due in large part to the organization Acadian Brown Cotton and the 2015 documentary Coton Jaune: Acadian Brown Cotton, a Cajun Love Story. Today, many farmers around Acadiana are again growing coton jaune to preserve the heritage seeds, and to continue its storied tradition.
[The Hilliard Art Museum at the University of Louisiana Lafayette recently opened the most comprehensive exhibit to date on the subject of coton jaune, Acadian Brown Cotton: The Fabric of Acadiana. It is also the first exhibit that the Hilliard has made available virtually. Read more about the process of presenting the virtual exhibit in James Fox-Smith's interview with Susan Gottardi, here.]
Frugé figured that if she wanted to preserve an important part of her culture, she had better do something about it herself, too. This year she tended to a one-acre patch of coton jaune in her backyard, harvesting by hand from July to December and yielding almost one thousand pounds of fiber.
"When I came back to Arnaudville, and I visited old relatives, and they spoke to me in French, I fell in love with it all over again. I knew that I didn't want that to die." —Mavis Frugé
“Growing coton jaune got me thinking that those talents of growing cotton, spinning and weaving; they are on the decline just like the French language is in Louisiana,” Frugé said.
She has approached growing cotton in the same way that she serves as a steward of her maternal French language, with vigor and unwavering stamina. Known as a frequent host of French tables and of francophone visitors, Frugé is a well-recognized force in Louisiana’s world of language preservation. Currently, she is the president of the non-profit, the Saint-Luc French Immersion and Cultural Campus in Arnaudville, which is a forthcoming organization that will soon offer immersion classes in French and instruction in Louisiana Creole and other local heritage languages; it will be the first program of its kind in the nation. Frugé said organizers are also heavily invested in incorporating Louisiana’s distinct cultural elements into the program—which is where she thinks her coton jaune can shine.
“I have selected a large room in Saint-Luc with five spinning wheels and seven looms,” she said. “In addition to keeping French in Louisiana alive, we’ll be reviving traditions such as weaving with coton jaune through workshops in our programming.”
But before Frugé and other organizers at the Saint-Luc campus can even consider hosting their first program, the old building—which sat vacant for over a decade before the board purchased it in 2019—requires extensive repairs.
While Frugé awaits news of grants, funding, and donations so renovation work can begin on a large scale, and through the uncertainty of the past year as a result of the coronavirus, she has made progress wherever she can. Each week, she and a group of volunteers spend hours scrubbing walls, removing old furniture and mapping out which rooms will house students, cultural items, and a room designated for coton jaune workshops.
“It’s as simple as changing a lightbulb here and there,” she said. “Every little bit gets us one step closer to renovating the building.”
Frugé has served as one of Saint-Luc’s founders, championed its cause, and now hauls buckets of water from her house to the campus to clean one room at a time. More than the face of the organization, she’s the fire beneath it, pushing organizers to overcome numerous hurdles on the path to where they are today.
“Getting Saint-Luc to function as an immersion school will be a lifelong dream,” she said. “It’s been the most important project of my life.”
Frugé came of age during the 1940s and ‘50s, a time when English had just begun to infiltrate most of South Louisiana, and even isolated communities like hers were becoming more Anglophone. Even still, during her early life, her community spoke exclusively French.
“French was the only language I knew,” she said.
The anecdotes of teachers punishing Louisiana students for speaking French in the classroom—told to us younger generations by so many of our grandparents and great grandparents—have long stood as a testament to the resulting generational shame associated with Creole people’s ancestral language, hastening its decline in Louisiana. Unlike many of her generation, though, Frugé wasn’t punished in school for speaking her native tongue, and though she began to use it less in the years she spent away from Arnaudville, the French language remained a part of her identity that she was proud of.
“When I came back to Arnaudville, and I visited old relatives, and they spoke to me in French, I fell in love with it all over again,” she said. “I knew that I didn’t want that to die.”
By the time Frugé and her family moved back to Arnaudville, the language had already begun its decline. In the 1960s when Frugé was living outside of Louisiana, there were around one million francophones in South Louisiana. Fast forward to the 2000s, and that figure had been slashed to fewer than 200,000. Today, census estimates show fewer than 100,000 French speakers remain in the state.
In the 1990s, Frugé began hosting French tourists visiting Louisiana in her home. She started Arnaudville’s only French table, an event where people gather to speak French together, at the NUNU Arts and Culture Collective. But Frugé saw her chance to really continue the dissemination of her native language when Amanda LaFleur, a Cajun French professor at Louisiana State University, approached her in 2005 to help coordinate an immersion workshop for LSU students. The idea was for Frugé and other native speakers in Arnaudville to help lead workshops in a five-day immersion school, which morphed into the Sur Les Deux Bayous program.
“Amanda would teach them how to crawfish,” Frugé said. “We took the students to the Evangeline Oak to learn about our culture. They went kayaking. A gentleman would teach them about fishing and he’d fry fish on the bayou bank. And it was all in Louisiana French.”
Classrooms were inside NUNU, or Frugé would host students in her home. Although there was no infrastructure, simply the bare bones of an immersion program, Sur Les Deux Bayous was a great success, and LaFleur continued it each year.
Word spread about the program, and eventually, other universities took part in the five-day immersion program, including New York University, Bucknell in Pennsylvania, and Tulane University.
“Other universities were calling us and saying, ‘Let us know when you’re up and running, we want to come spend a week with you,’” Frugé said. “But we couldn’t advertise anything because we didn’t have anything but a program. We couldn’t host two groups at a time because we didn’t have facilities, no classrooms or lodging.”
This was the spark for Frugé to consider a more robust immersion program in her small town. To meet the demand, she and George Marks, founder of NUNU, hatched a plan in 2008 to attempt to purchase the recently-closed Saint Luke’s hospital in Arnaudville, to create a state-of-the-art facility that would teach French immersion year-round, and also offer a boost to the local economy. The old hospital seemed like the perfect fit, Frugé said, as it had several wings with rooms that could serve as dorms, with a large kitchen to cater to groups.
St. Luke was opened in 1968 and owned by two parishes—Saint Martin and Saint Landry—which complicated Frugé and Marks’s endeavor. Local politicians didn’t want to sell it, despite the fact that they had no plans to use it, Frugé said. So for years, it sat unused.
Frugé and others spent more than a decade negotiating with the parishes before they finally were able to purchase the building in November 2019. During that time, however, the harsh South Louisiana climate had been less than friendly to the structure. It had developed leaks in the roof and mold inside—creating yet more work for Saint-Luc organizers.
Throughout the negotiations, though, Frugé and Marks made headway by organizing a board and founding a non-profit, and a business plan was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. As the sale went through, Frugé said that board members jumped into action—identifying grants, locating funding, and were in the process of getting a new roof. Then, in March, COVID-19 shut everything down, stalling grant applications and renovation plans.
"Museums are where relics are preserved, and Saint-Luc will be a place where French can breathe new life into the state and its people."
“That has impacted everything,” she said. “We had NYU coming in March, but they canceled. Other universities were coming and canceled, as well.”
Instead of giving up, Frugé has spent the months since going from room to room, cleaning as best as she can. She and a small group of local volunteers are tossing old furniture and other debris. Plans for a new roof are again in the works, and progress has been made to get plumbing and water flowing back in the building. Once that’s done, board members will be able to hire a firm to remediate the mold. Frugé is optimistic, too, because the building’s structural integrity has remained sound. “The paint on the walls, that looks brand new,” she said.
Frugé insisted that despite the holdups of the past year, the project’s momentum remains strong. “I think we can start early [in 2021] with coton jaune textile classes, spinning and weaving,” she said. “As far as having students in the building, my hope is fall 2021 or spring 2022.”
Frugé said she sees her work as preservation of the culture she grew up in. But that, at the very same time, her work is rooted in continuity and advancement. After all, she said, museums are where relics are preserved, and Saint-Luc will be a place where French can breathe new life into the state and its people.
“I think there are good valid reasons to increase the use of French,” she said. “It’s a gift to be able to speak more than one language. It opens up many doors. You can travel, you can have interesting conversations with visitors. And it’s a part of our culture that we want to survive to pass that on to other generations.”