"What is the true meaning of the word "Creole?" Is there one true meaning, or is the term contextual, geographical, temporal? Is Creole an invention of the colonial world, or an idea that sprung from the national period in Louisiana's history? In "Sunset Limited," Wendy Gaudin addresses the complex and contested history of Louisiana Creole identity and how this multilayered, international, bilingual, transracial history has manifested itself in her own diasporic Creole family. This book is supported by a rich and growing body of literature that delves deeply into the specifics of Creole history. Historians, ethnographers, journalists, memoirists, poets, playwrights, and genealogists, among others, have used "Creole hybridities" as the subjects of their research, their writing, their art and performance. Louisiana Creoles are fascinating to those who see them as racially ambiguous Others; they are useful to those who make arguments for the legitimacy of mixed-race identity; they are challenging to those who propose strict racial binaries. In a story that connects Wendy Gaudin's own family history with the broader stories of race, indigeneity, and prejudice, "Sunset Limited" summarizes a long and complex history-too often elided or simplified to fit within today's classifications of race and nationality-that spans decades and continents. "Sunset Limited" sets the stage for the historical and geographical context within which Creole identity emerged in Louisiana and the broader Atlantic world. Gaudin interweaves her personal experience of Creoleness with the history of the many Louisiana peoples-native, French, Spanish, Black-whose stories made their mark on the state in its earliest days. Racial classifications in Louisiana grew out of its complex colonization and immigration history, but later, Anglo-American hegemony began to shift the meanings of the raced and gendered identities of Creole populations. "Sunset Limited" tells the story of a family, a people, and an identity"--