Joubert vision helped lead rebirth

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Curtis Joubert couldn’t have been elected mayor of Eunice at a worse time. He took office in 1981, just as a crumbling oil industry began to drag south Louisiana into a financial pit worse even than the Great Depression.
Nine out of 10 jobs in south Louisiana were related in one way or another to oil and gas in those days, and we thought that made us recession-proof. We were a big supplier of something everybody needed, and as long as those petroleum dollars pumped into the economy there was no need for us to even think about any other way to make a living. There was no Plan B when the petrodollars dried up.
Only a handful of people had ever thought about diversifying the economy, and only a few of them had any real idea of how to go about it. Luckily for Eunice and a big piece of south Louisiana Joubert was one of them.
He’d recognized 20 years before, when he was member of the state legislature working to preserve our language and culture, that this was a place unlike any other. At first that movement was simply about holding on to our language and music and food and folkways for our own sake, about rebuilding pride in Louisiana’s multi-faceted French culture.
That had led to some craziness in the 1970s when a Cajun fad struck the nation — “Cajun: recipes that grandma never cooked, stories made up to boost a business, “Cajun” gimmicks of all kinds — but not many people saw the economic value of what we had to offer. If today’s much used terms “cultural tourism” and “cultural economy” had been coined by then, they were not much used.
As he cast about for ways to reinvent a town with a much-diminished oil economy, Joubert realized that Eunice had untapped and, importantly, authentic cultural assets that not only could bring new dollars into the community, but could also rally the pride and morale of its hard-pressed people.
One of his first steps was to proclaim Eunice as Louisiana’s Prairie Cajun Capital, a designation eventually formalized by the legislature in 1988, essentially in recognition of a well-established fact.
By that time the city had purchased and renovated the Liberty Theater, first known as the Liberty Center, and begun the predecessor to the “Rendez-Vous Des Cajuns” music show. He was already hounding Sen. Bennett Johnston and the National Park Service in a dogged and finally successful effort to establish the Prairie Acadian Cultural Center next door to the old theater.
Those two alone were enough to get Eunice named one of the top 10 sites for rural cultural tourism in the nation, but there was more. He helped revitalize the Eunice Mardi Gras courir into a major event that draws thousands of people each (non-Covid) year.
The Liberty’s success helped convince the Cajun French Music Association to establish the Cajun Music Hall of Fame in Eunice. He helped promote the World Championship Crawfish Etouffee Cook-off Contest to showcase one of our iconic foods, and he never missed a chance to bring visitors to Eunice and south Louisiana to tell them our story and show off our charms.
He continued to promote his community and its cultures even after he resigned as mayor in 1995, when he was appointed to serve the 10-month remainder of a term on the Public Service Commission.
During Kathleen Blanco’s administration he headed the statewide Francofete celebration and worked for preservation of the Atchafalaya Basin, projects he continued to support when he was appointed to the state tourism commission Bobby Jindal.
In 1988, UL-Lafayette (then USL) named Joubert, a former coach, teacher, and school administrator, its outstanding graduate from the College of Education and during its centennial in 1999 the school listed him as one of the top 60 graduates in its hundred-year history.
It was a well-deserved honor, testament to what a person can do with a love for the place where they live, a vision of its past and for its future, and the perseverance to bring those together.
He was 89 when he died October 30.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.