Lea este artículo en español aquí.
Long before the American Revolution, Spanish-speaking women—Indigenous, African and European—helped build settlements, forge alliances and shape the societies that would become the United States.
This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy. Taking the form of essays, audio, poetry and original art, historians and scholars revisit the nation’s origins to center those written out of the founding documents and reimagine what a truly inclusive democracy requires.
During recent immigration crackdowns, more than 20,000 women have been detained by ICE and CBP, the majority of whom are Latinas and many of whom are legally in the U.S.
In response, at anti-ICE and No Kings rallies, Latinos and other marginalized and disaffected people have vigorously asserted their place in American society with signs proclaiming, “This is our country too!” (No Kings, a nationwide day of peaceful demonstrations, returns March 28.)
Indeed, as anti-Latino sentiment coincides with the 250th anniversary of the United States, we must remember that long before the American Revolution, Spanish-speaking women inhabited territory that would become the United States. Unfortunately, with the acquisition of those lands by the newly independent United States, their role in the creation of our nation was forgotten.
Decades before English settlers arrived at the Roanoke colony and Plymouth Rock, Spanish-speaking women explored mainland North America, as Spain expected women of all races to act as agents of European imperialism. In the process, they became central to the establishment of European settlements in what would become the United States. Their independence, determination and resilience would be foundational to America’s feminist legacy.
In 1527, women participated in the Narváez expedition that journeyed across the west coast of Florida.
Later, Ana Méndez, a servant from Spain, and Francisca Hinestrosa, the wife of a soldier, were two of probably 10 women who sailed with Hernando de Soto and his expedition from Cuba to Florida in 1539. Hinestrosa, who accompanied her husband and was about to give birth, was killed during the Battle of Chicaza in present-day northeast Mississippi in 1541.
Méndez survived and returned to Spain, where she testified about her experience.
In the wake of these early expeditions, the Spanish Crown encouraged Spanish women to settle in the region to help consolidate its authority.
… Women of Indigenous and African descent played critical roles in the establishment and perpetuation of the European settlements.
In 1565, Leonor de Morales, from northern Spain, her husband and her two young children crossed the Atlantic with the Menéndez de Aviles expedition that established the Spanish colony of La Florida. When she gave birth the following year, her son, Martinico, became the first Spanish child we know of to be born in Florida (although others, no doubt, went unrecorded).
Luisa de Abrego, a free Black woman from Seville, Spain, and her partner, Miguel Rodríguez, a European blacksmith, crossed the Atlantic with the same colonizing expedition. They witnessed the founding of San Agustín (St. Augustine, Fla.), the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the continental United States. They married soon after, and their interracial marriage is the first documented Christian marriage in what became the U.S.
It is important to acknowledge that European women were complicit in exploiting Indigenous and African labor, destroying families on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and attempting to eradicate non-European cultures. Nevertheless, women of Indigenous and African descent played critical roles in the establishment and perpetuation of the European settlements.
The Spanish conquest of Florida was shaped by strategic alliances with Indigenous women, who often acted as intermediaries between European settlers and Indigenous communities. Recognizing the importance of these relationships, Spanish authorities not only permitted but encouraged marriage between Spanish men and Indigenous women. Such unions strengthened ties with local populations and advanced Spanish interests in the region.
Archaeologist Kathleen Deagan has noted the critical intervention of Doña María Meléndez, the cacica (female chieftain) of the Saltwater and Mocama Timuca peoples, in the late 16th century. After converting to Christianity and marrying a Spanish soldier, Meléndez became a pivotal figure in the survival and stability of St. Augustine. When famine threatened the colony, she imposed a head tax of 25 pounds of corn on all married men under her authority, thereby ensuring the settlement’s survival. Marriages between Indigenous women and Spanish settlers also benefitted local communities, as they established vital diplomatic ties that fostered collaboration and provided protection during Spanish expansion and settlement.
For enslaved women (and men) living in the adjacent British colonies, Spain offered sanctuary and freedom to those who escaped to Spanish territory and converted to Catholicism.
By the 18th century, enough enslaved Africans found freedom in Florida that in 1738, Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, or Fort Mose, was established just north of St. Augustine, the first free Black town in what would become the continental U.S. The small population of 38 households with around 23 women included Ana María de Escovar, who fled enslavement in Carolina for the liberty offered by the Spanish town. When Florida was ceded to England in 1763, Spain evacuated Fort Mose and resettled the inhabitants in Cuba.
After the region was restored to Spanish control in 1784, other free Black towns were established and survived at least until Florida became U.S. territory in 1821. In addition, Spanish law provided enslaved women and men from its own territories with basic legal rights even while enslaved and gave them the ability to purchase their freedom through a process called coartación.
The descendants of these colonists, particularly women of color, lost most of those rights under U.S. rule. Many left for Spanish possessions in the Caribbean rather than submit to U.S. authority. Others stayed and fought to keep what was rightfully theirs, like the formerly enslaved plantation owner Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley (1793-1870), an ally of the Spanish, who burned her estates rather than relinquish them to the new nation.
… Spanish-speaking women not only bore and raised children on the frontier, but they also toiled relentlessly to provide for their families by cultivating crops and tending farm animals.
On the West Coast, Spanish-speaking women played a critical role in establishing the major European population centers in California as part of the Anza Expedition (1775-1776). The women and children who made up the majority of the 240-person expedition journeyed more than 1,200 miles from northern Mexico across the desert Southwest, crossing the Colorado River and the San Jacinto Mountains. Along the California coast, they founded settlements at Mission San Gabriel Archangel (outside what would become Los Angeles), San Luis Obispo, the fort at Monterey, and the missions and forts around San Francisco Bay.
Most of these women were mixed-race—among them María Feliciana Arballo, of mixed African descent, who had signed on to the Anza Expedition along with her soldier husband and two daughters, a 4-year-old and a 1-month-old. Undaunted when her husband died before the group departed, she decided to continue on the expedition with her children. Referred to by authorities as a “very bold widow,” she and her daughters journeyed as far as the Mission San Gabriel, where she remarried. Widowed for a second time, she later resettled and remarried for a third time in newly established San Diego.
Women’s ability to bear children was central to the success of the new outposts. In this regard, the Anza Expedition did not start auspiciously, as Manuela Ygnacia López Peñuelas died giving birth on the first day. However, she was the only woman to die during the expedition, and more commonly, these women bore many children.
María Gertrudis Rivas, who identified as Spanish or white, and was the wife of a soldier of either African or Indigenous descent, began the expedition with three children and was heavily pregnant. She went into labor on Christmas Eve, 1775, and gave birth to a son named Salvador. María Gertrudis subsequently bore four children at Mission San Francisco de Asis (San Francisco) and four more at Mission Santa Clara, before she died in 1813 at the age of 61. Her seven daughters and four surviving sons achieved considerable success, and their descendants, along with those of other mixed-race members of the Anza expedition, became the backbone of early Spanish society on the West Coast.
At the new California settlements, Spanish-speaking women not only bore and raised children on the frontier, but they also toiled relentlessly to provide for their families by cultivating crops and tending farm animals. They did so under difficult conditions, often suffering from a lack of provisions and facing Indigenous attacks. Women and children frequently outnumbered men at the sites, as their soldier husbands left on patrol for extended periods. Nevertheless, they persisted and brought Spanish culture and Catholicism to the outposts.
Across the Southwest, the non-Indigenous population was largely Spanish-speaking well into the 19th century, as Texas remained under first Spanish and then Mexican rule until 1836, as did California, Arizona and New Mexico, until the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.
Today, more than 40 million people in the U.S. speak Spanish at home, of whom more than half were born here.
As Spanish-speaking women came under the jurisdiction of the new United States, they were erased from the narrative of American history. They bravely traveled across oceans and continents to build new lives. They established cities and towns that became centers of American culture and economic growth.
Like their English Protestant counterparts in New England, Spanish-speaking women were founding mothers of our nation. Their legacies live on through their descendants and the many other Latinas who immigrated to the U.S. over the past 250 years. Faced with the widespread detention of Spanish-speaking women, it is crucial to remember that it has long been their country too.
Explore the entire FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists essay collection:
- The main Founding Feminists page contains original art and a historical timeline and invites readers to submit original poetry.
- America’s Founding Feminists: Rewriting America’s Origin Story, by Janell Hobson, professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the University at Albany.
- Haudenosaunee Governance: The Matrilineal Democracy That Shaped America, by Michelle Schenandoah, founder of Rematriation, a Haudenosaunee women-led nonprofit organization.
- ‘This Is Our Country Too!’: The Enduring Legacy of Spanish-Speaking Women in Early America, by Allyson M. Poska, professor of history emerita at the University of Mary Washington, translated by Antonia Delgado-Poust, associate professor of Spanish at the University of Mary Washington. Lea este artículo en español aquí.
- Claiming the Revolution: Gender, Sexuality and the Radical Promise of 1776, by Charles Upchurch, professor of British history at Florida State University.
- Reclaiming Phillis Wheatley (Peters): Imagination as a Feminist Founding Project, by Dana Elle Murphy, assistant professor of Black studies and English at Caltech.
- The Radical Potential of Traditional Femininity, by Jacqueline Beatty, associate professor of history at York College of Pennsylvania.
- Queer Possibilities in Revolutionary America, Jen Manion, Winkley professor of history at Amherst College.
- She Wanted to Be Free: Black Women’s Revolutionary Resistance, Dr. Vanessa M. Holden, associate professor of history, director of African American and Africana studies at the University of Kentucky, and director of the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative.
- Sally Hemings and the Making of Democracy, Jessina Emmert, doctoral candidate in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas.
- The Abolitionist Origins of American Feminism, Manisha Sinha, Draper chair in American history at the University of Connecticut.
- The Curious Case of Afong Moy: Asian Womanhood and National Belonging in the U.S., Anne Anlin Cheng, Louis W. Fairchild class of ’24 professor of English at Princeton University
