re: Why are tomatoes absent in Cajun cuisine?

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Historically, there were only a few places Catholics were welcomed in the U.S. NOLA was one of them.

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What’s your source for this assertion? And are you referring to a particular time period? There were many hundreds of thousands of Catholic immigrants to the US who went all over the place...from the Irish in the NE to the Czechs in east TX to the many Catholic Germans all over the upper Midwest.

RE: Italian immigration, at one point NOLA was second only to Brooklyn in terms of Italian immigration, but the #3 port of embarkation for Italian immigrants was Galveston, TX. The difference between NE US and Gulf Coast Italian immigration was the origin point of the immigrants: NE US saw lots of Italians from up and down the boot, whereas those coming to the Gulf Coast were primarily Sicilian and very southern Italians.

Yes to the idea that Italian influences in food/cooking are found all over LA, but primarily clustered in NOLA and in Tangipahoa Parish (home to the largest rural Italian farming community in the US for the first half of the 20th century).