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Abstract

In 1884 Alexandre Mouton, the largest slave owner in the region, president of the Louisiana Secession Convention, and former governor of Louisiana during brutal conditions for non-whites, developed FreeTown, a mixed-race, mixed-income development out of the dissipating remains of his sugar plantation. While perhaps counter to his politics, Mouton’s entrepreneurism, combined with his privileged economics, social standing, and political connections, allowed him to turn devasting loss into economic opportunity for a diverse range of peoples. Today, FreeTown is one of Lafayette, Louisiana’s most beloved neighborhoods, but it struggles with the specter of gentrification in the context of contemporary neoliberal economic forces guided by a progressive downtown revival and cultural tourism. The heritage squeezed between politics and economics are the community, places, and people of FreeTown, some of whom, like the Creole Figaro family, remain residents and document their lineage back through being slaves on the Mouton planation to their voyage from Guinea when their ancestors were sold into slavery. Jean Figaro chose not to leave the plantation when the Civil War brought freedom to him and, when FreeTown was formed, he went from being ‘property owned’ to a property owner by buying land from Mouton. While much of the South suffered a kind of gentrification at the hands of the occupying North after the War, Mouton developed but did not gentrify. Contrasting 1884 and 2024 suggests strategies, political and economic, including coteries and tax incentives, to deliver redeemable, sustainable, and productive outcomes for people and places.