Cooking Gumbo—Examining Cultural Dialogue About Family: A Black-White Narrativization of Lived Experience in Southern Louisiana

Only recently have family scholars begun to consider the relationship between ethnicity and family functioning (e.g., see Galvin & Brommel, 1996). As McGoldrick (1993) suggested, ethnic values and identification with a cultural group are transmitted through communication in everyday family life. In this volume, Socha and Diggs (chap. 1) contend that family communication plays a foundational role in the formation and maintenance of societal ethnic culture and the management of ethnic cultural relations. Thus, there exists a symbiosis between family life and membership in a culture.