With A Cajun Girl’s Sharecropping Years, Viola Fontenot offers us not a glimpse, but a panoramic view of rural Cajun life on the cusp of a radical transformation, from scratching out a meager living on the fertile fields and bayous of southwest Louisiana to the promise of modern life in mid-twentieth-century America. Many scholarly books and articles have been written about the Americanization of the Cajuns, but never before have we had such a passionate and elegant first-hand account of what those changes felt like to someone who lived through them. Fontenot tells an unromanticized tale of the struggles, heartbreak, and simple joys of growing up the daughter of hard-working, hard-living sharecroppers. It is above all the true story of Cajun culture’s survival in spite of much adversity. (David Cheramie, Ph.D., CEO of the Bayou Vermilion District and former executive director of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana)

As we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, there is no better way to celebrate our Cajun culture than to follow a young girl’s journey to assimilation as she overcomes many challenges such as the language barrier, lack of family education, relative poverty, and insecurity. Tellingly, she developed the drive to obtain a good education which served her well―and got her out of the cotton fields of St. Landry Parish. (Warren A. Perrin, attorney, skills professor at Loyola Law School, former president of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, and founder of the Acadian Museum of Earth)