A parish is Louisiana’s equivalent to a county elsewhere in the United States. The Cajun homeland, Acadiana, comprises twenty-two south Louisiana parishes. Parishes were first created in Louisiana in the late eighteenth century, when Captain General Alejandro O’Reilly, an Irish-born governor (1769-70) in the service of Spain, divided the colony into twenty-one ecclesiastical parishes under the control of the Bishop of Santiago de Cuba. (A single parish had been founded near New Orleans in 1723, but not until O’Reilly’s administration were they organized on a widespread basis.) After the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, these church parish borders served as the basis for the state’s political subdivisions.