On this episode of The Parlay in All Blue Power history and culture collide. And yes, we're gonna talk about voting because voting is the first step. It is an essential tool for building wealth and obtaining and retaining power in the United States. The voting power of black people now is under attack. It is being attacked by Republican legislatures in the states of Louisiana and Alabama.

Mark is talking with Dr. Wendy Gaudin about Louisiana's Creole people, the history, the culture, and about how assertive use of political power can inform black people of today on how to build coalitions across racial and ethnic lines to ensure that we are not erased historically or politically.

Dr. Wendy A. Gaudin is an essayist, a beadwork, a poet, an American historian, and the proud descendant of Louisiana Creoles who migrated to California.  Her training as a historian took place at California State University, Louisiana State University, and New York University.  

Her nonfiction writing delves into the themes of race and belonging, skin color and ancestry, colonialism and family narratives, migration, oral history, hybridity, and Louisiana.  Her publications appear in North American Review, Indiana Review, Puerto Del Sol, the Rappahannock Review, the New Orleans Review, New South Journal, and the About Place Journal. 

She is currently writing an autoethnography of her family, her life, and her fieldwork in Creole Louisiana. A history professor at the Xavier University of Louisiana, Gaudin divides her time between New Orleans and the Acadiana prairie. 

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