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Spanish Town Mardi Gras’ risqué parade, held the Saturday before Mardi Gras day, is usually the raucous high point of the city’s Carnival season. While 18 different krewes still thrive, about half put on parades, although none on Mardi Gras day.

‘We can say nothing of the mask and fancy dress Ball last night at the Harney House, for our reporters have not yet, come in,” reads a yellowed clipping from the Baton Rouge Daily Comet, dated Feb. 9, 1853.

Our city is not known for a raucous honoring of Fat Tuesday the way New Orleans or portions of Francophile Louisiana are thanks to their wild street parties.

But, as that 150-year-old news account indicates, Baton Rouge’s past revels could lay low even a few members of the press, a group historically adept at handling their liquor.

Old newspaper clippings from the 19th century onward mention the rare parade down Lafayette Street, but Mardi Gras in Baton Rouge, for much of our history, was all about private balls and the occasional group of intoxicated young men beating drums and making trouble for the local police.

Demographer Elliot Stonecipher says waves of national and ethnic migration populated the foot of Louisiana’s boot as it developed from a collection of isolated, French-trading settlements to the cultural gumbo it is today. Successive groups of Spanish and French settlers flocked to the area roughly below modern-day Interstate 10.

But how the Protestant thumb that is Baton Rouge came to be stuck in the pie of Catholic South Louisiana has not been widely researched, even though it is a unique area among several already-singular municipalities.

While most of the rest of the region fell under the cultural influence of New Orleans, Baton Rouge was once known by the English name New Richmond and went as far as to express its separateness 100 years ago by establishing itself as an independent country, the West Florida Republic.

As racy as Spanish Town Mardi Gras can be, Mayor Kip Holden and Police Chief Jeff LeDuff aren’t afraid to get into the spirit.

Baton Rouge has always been identified, in varying degrees and if nothing else, as not New Orleans. The Big Easy was a place given over to licentiousness and debauchery, while we liked to see ourselves as a more serious and sober lot. This self-image glossed over many day-to-day facts of life in Baton Rouge—a map of Beauregard Town from the late 1870s, for example, shows the presence of two breweries within the boundaries of that modestly sized neighborhood. But this split between image and action is the way we have handled Mardi Gras over the 200-plus years of our existence.

John Sykes, education manager for the Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge and a general authority on obscure Baton Rouge history, points out that while our city established some of the first Blue Laws (prohibiting businesses from opening on Sundays) on the Mississippi, there were also trains called the Mardi Gras Special leaving three times a day from the Yazoo and Mississippi depot downtown.

We liked to play the part of the stiff-backed teetotaler, but the fun of the carnival season was too irresistible to pass up entirely.

Mardi Gras in Baton Rouge has taken different forms over the years. The Kid Dimes Big Band fired up a New Orleans-style Mardi Gras beginning in 1936 that culminated in the crowning of King Zulu and a dance at what was then the Odd Fellows Theater on North Boulevard (now the Prince Hall Masonic Lodge).

“Peace and serenity, with a bit of extemporary jitterbugging, ruled the floor for the ‘Dark-Town Strutters’ majestical ball for King Zulu and his queen here last night,” The Morning Advocate reported in the parlance of the day on Feb. 7, 1940.

This tradition too seems to have waned during the war years of the 1940s. However, the practice did continue on in various ways; the Krewe of Tucumcari held its 62nd annual ball in 2009 (read more about Tucumcari here).

A dozen-and-a-half Mardi Gras krewes host annual balls in Baton Rouge, with half of those putting on public parades, and plenty of well-to-do Baton Rougeans belong to some of New Orleans’ esteemed krewes.

Baton Rouge has flirted with Mardi Gras over the years, but it was the Spanish Town parade that finally enticed the city to commit. It started inauspiciously enough. “A bunch of gay guys and other bohemians were too broke to go to New Orleans, so they decided to march up and down Spanish Town Road,” Sykes says.

Another quirk of Mardi Gras in Baton Rouge: obvious commercial promotion on the floats themselves, something you’re much less likely to see in New Orleans or Lafayette.

Today, the event draws around a hundred thousand partygoers. It is a strange community that responds to the fallout from a monumental event like the Louisiana Purchase by saying, “No thanks, we’ll start our own country.” So it is no surprise that our biggest and most exuberant parade has little to do with a religious holiday and instead titillates the city with sexual innuendo and biting political commentary. At the Spanish Town Parade, parents are as likely to use their hands to cover their children’s eyes as they are to reach skyward for beads. In this regard, at least, Baton Rouge is a complicated place. It is a diverse community that tends to gravitate around the idea of being apart from its locality, somewhat ashamedly having a good time, football and little else.

We, as a city, may not have a clear picture of who we are or who we want to be. Though we may all temporarily bond over a thing like the Spanish Town Parade or Saint Patrick’s Day.

For Sykes, this is the whole point of the widely seen emblem of Spanish Town, the pink flamingo. Sykes emphasizes that the flamingo is the parade’s symbol not because of the migratory birds that land in our lakes or because of the showy boas it gives people license to wear, but as a nod to film director John Waters’ ode to the White Trash Nation, Pink Flamingos. The moral of which, says Sykes—his eyes twinkling—is that “having bad taste is better than having no taste at all.”