Spanish Settlements in North America

Spanish Settlements in North America. Spain initially sought to populate its far‐flung northern frontier in America less by settling Spanish or mestizo people than by transforming the indigenous population into Hispanicized and loyal subjects of the Spanish Crown. Unlike New England, where Indians were killed or displaced in order to open lands for European settlement, New Spain (Mexico) sought to use the Catholic church to evangelize the Indians and make them into gente de razón (“people of reason”): Spanish‐speaking, Catholic, peasant farmers who followed Euro‐Christian practices of work and sexual discipline.

To this end, the Spanish settlements in what is now the United States were of three mutually reinforcing types: the mission, the presidio (fort), and the pueblo (town). The importance of each varied from place to place depending on the terrain; the receptiveness of the Indians; the behavior of the priests and soldiers; and the aggressiveness of the Crown's enemies, whether Indian or European. Ideally, the mission would instruct the Indians in European ways and religious beliefs; the presidio would protect priests and the neophyte Christians from adversaries and rebellions; and the Hispanicized Indians would join settlers in the pueblos. Although rarely functioning in this ideal fashion, such institutions embodied Spain's strategy for peopling Florida, Texas, New Mexico, southern Arizona, and the California coast.

Two factors catalyzed missionization: the incursion of rival powers and the zeal of the mission friars. Soon after Spain explored and claimed lands north of Mexico, the Crown experienced threats from other European powers. The first settlements in Florida at Cape Canaveral and San Augustín (St. Augustine) began in 1565 under Don Pedro Menédez de Avilés, who with daring and much bloodshed expelled French claimants. Beginning in 1573, soldiers and Franciscan priests superseded Menédez's warriors and sought to counter England by missionizing and forging alliances with the Indians along the Atlantic coast and, later, in the Florida panhandle.

Meanwhile, further west, Juan de Oñate in 1598 headed north from New Spain to New Mexico with 20 missionaries, 129 soldiers (some with families), and 7,000 head of cattle. With limited success, Franciscans sought to impose Christian beliefs and lifeways upon the corn‐farming Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande valley. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 ended both the encomienda and repartimiento systems of taxation and forced labor, while also dashing Franciscan hopes for establishing a community of believers. But at about the same time, the remarkable Padre Eusebio Kino (ca. 1644–1711) began the missionization of Pimería Alta—present‐day southern Arizona and northern Sonora. Here, Jesuits sought to settle, or “reduce,” the seminomadic Pima and Papago people to an agropastoralist mode. Tucson's Mission San Javier del Bac (1700) stands as a monument to this effort.

The mixed outcomes of these missionization efforts compelled Spanish authorities to sponsor several forms of secular settlements. After Governor Diego de Vargas led the reconquest of the Rio Grande valley (1693–1696), détente prevailed between the Spaniards and Pueblos, in part because of the Pueblos' fighting ability, but also because of the necessity for a military alliance in the face of constant Apache and Navajo raids and warfare. In the eighteenth century, and especially after 1750, New Spain fostered settlement of New Mexico by a system of mercedes, or land grants, given to prestigious individuals and to groups of more humble status. This approach fostered respect for Puebloan lands and also increased tensions with Navajos and Apaches. In these villages, bonds of godparentage, work on the acéquías (irrigation ditches), and the Penitentes (a lay Catholic brotherhood) provided social cohesion within a pattern of dispersed settlement.

In the Texas region at the close of the seventeenth century, Spain responded to expanding French settlements in the Mississippi River valley, and even incursions along the Red River, by establishing two small missions in 1690 and five more in 1716, and then by situating a presidio (1718) at the Río San Antonio. From this emerging center several more missions were founded, and for over a century priests laboriously evangelized the Indians of Texas. In the Texas War for Independence (1836), a Mexican siege of Mission San Antonio de Valero gained enduring fame as Alamo.

Concerned about Russian fur‐trapping and raiding settlements along the coast of Alta California in the 1760s, Spanish authorities initiated another program of temporal and spiritual conquest. Under the leadership of José de Gálvez, appointed visitador general by King Carlos III, and Father Junípero Serra, Catalonian soldiers and Franciscan priests founded several presidios and twenty‐one missions along the Pacific coast, from San Diego (1769) to Solano (1823). Although some rebellions erupted—at San Diego in 1775, at San Gabriel in 1785, and at Santa Barbara, Santa Inez, and La Purísima in 1824—apathy and disease (especially syphilis, introduced by the soldiers) mostly reigned at the missions. Argument continues about the priests' treatment of the Indians, responsibility for the precipitous decline in the Indian populations, and the legitimacy of the whole effort to so radically change, often by force, Indian culture and beliefs.

Generally speaking, the mission effort overwhelmingly failed. Disease, indifference, rebellion, and the resilience of Native beliefs meant that most Indian peoples never genuinely converted to Spanish ways. In Texas in 1823–1824 and in California in 1833, Mexico “secularized” the missions, converting them into simple parish churches. The Indians were to have regained lands preempted by the missions, but most settled in towns or returned to their original habitats, and former army personnel occupied the mission lands.

Several settlements in the Spanish borderlands grew into metropolises—especially Los Angeles (1781) and San Jose (1777)—but Spain founded only pueblos (small towns) and several lasting villas (large towns), most notably Santa Fe (1610), Albuquerque (1716), and San Antonio. Each city remains a magnet for contemporary Mexican immigrants who move al norte (to the north), to places their predecessors founded and named. Although Spain ceded Florida to England in 1763, St. Augustine remains the oldest European‐founded city in the United States.

On the California coast only a few Native peoples remained by the close of the twentieth century, and their ceremonies and languages had all but disappeared. In New Mexico and Arizona the ability of the still‐vibrant Puebloan peoples to compartmentalize Catholicism and their Native beliefs, to deflect further intrusions into their lifeways, and to adapt to modern politics and work has produced remarkable cultural survival. The California missions, restored with varying regard for historical accuracy, still remain—beautiful and complex emblems of a once‐dominant Spanish presence.
See also Alamo, Battle of the; Colonial Era; Exploration, Conquest, and Settlement, Era of European; French Settlements in North America; Hispanic Americans; Indian History and Culture: From 1500 to 1800; Roman Catholicism; Southwest, The; Texas Republic and Annexation.

Bibliography

John Francis Bannon, ed., Bolton and the Spanish Borderlands, 1964.
Douglas Monroy , Thrown among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California, 1990.
Ramón A. Gutiérrez , When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846, 1991.
David J. Weber , The Spanish Frontier in North America, 1992.

Douglas Monroy