06/24/2026
In 1778 and 1779, the Spanish colonial government of Louisiana brought settlers from the Canary Islands to populate the coastal areas south and east of New Orleans. They settled along the bayous and islands of what is now St. Bernard Parish, in communities so remote and so tied to the water that they maintained their Spanish language and their Canarian customs for generations while the rest of Louisiana shifted around them. The descendants of those settlers are called the Islenos. Some of them are still crabbing the same waters their great-great-grandparents learned to fish. 🦀
Delacroix Island, in the lower reaches of St. Bernard Parish, was one of those Isleno communities. It is accessible by a single road that runs through the marsh, and the population has always been small and self-contained. The fishermen there have worked the Louisiana coastal waters under Spanish surnames for two and a half centuries, through every hurricane season and every oil spill and every episode of coastal land loss, with the particular stubbornness of people who have decided that the place they are from is non-negotiable.
Coastal Louisiana is losing land at a rate of approximately a football field every 100 minutes. The marsh that surrounds Delacroix has been shrinking for decades, and the community has faced it the way fishing communities everywhere face existential changes to their environment: by continuing to go out on the water every morning before anyone else is awake, pulling traps and checking lines and doing the work. 🌅
