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.
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.