Robert Goodwin - América: The Epic Story of Spanish North America, 1493-1898

For Theodora

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Spain: The Centre of the World, 15191682

Crossing the Continent, 15271540: The Story of the First African-American Explorer of the American South

CONTENTS

The idea for a book about all the parts of the United States that were once claimed by the Spanish Empire originated in the reactions of various readers to a book I wrote about a Spanish expedition to Florida and Texas and the first African American. I was puzzled that a handful of well-educated friends should express such surprise that Spain had laid claim to so much of the South and the Southwest long before Jamestown or the Mayflower . They knew that Spaniards had been there, after all, for names such as Florida, California, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, San Antonio, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, and the Rio Grande clearly betray that foundational Spanish presence. But it was almost as though it had happened in some ethereal, mythical past, as easily ignored as Native American lore rather than embraced as European reality, as though it were not of this world, but another. In fact, the subject has rarely been addressed in its entirety by professional historians anywhere, with only a handful of notable exceptions. Perhaps that is because for Spaniards most of those North American territories were but a handful of the many lands lost in the tidal wave of independence that swept across the Spanish Empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century? Perhaps for Mexicans the abject surrender of half their nascent nation at the end of the Mexican-American War is a deep scar best left unscratched? Perhaps for Americans three centuries of Spanish and Mexican sovereignty over most of the country is too quick a challenge to the tradition of brave pioneers progressing westward to forge their private Edens in an unclaimed and virgin wilderness?

However, while the overarching tale of Spanish North America has largely been ignored, a wealth of scholarly material has been published on specific elements and aspects of the story. In the United States, the plethora of academic journals dedicated to the histories of different cities, states, or regions deserve special mention because they have enabled thousands of researchers to share their discoveries, deductions, and conclusions with a global readership. In Spain and Mexico, too, scholars have published extensively, often working from archival sources to produce exhaustive accounts of different historical periods or geographical regions that help to firmly conceive of North America within the context of the Spanish Empire. Some of these researchers have produced translations and, increasingly, transcriptions of myriad original documents uncovered in the archives of Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and elsewhere. They and others have analyzed that material, interpreting the past, allowing us to better comprehend the people and events of a bygone age. To all these scholars and researchers I owe deep gratitude, for without their work this book would not have been possible. But although this book properly belongs alongside so much scholarly research, it is essentially of a different nature, for I have not tried to make use of or synthesize all their research. Instead, I have attended to the storytelling, to the creation of a collage whose pieces come together as a vast landscape of this history.

For Amrica: The Epic Story of Spanish North America , first among those dons, in both senses of the word, it might be said, is Barry Ife, Cervantes Professor Emeritus at Kings College London, who supervised my PhD thesis many years ago. I first crossed the Ocean Sea with Barry at the helm when he handed me a copy of Bartolom de las Casass transcription of Columbuss famous Diario de Abordo , the log of his first voyage in 1492. Subsequently, Alexander Samson and Stephen Hart have given me great encouragement, and University College London has allowed me the space to research and write. The staff at Senate House and especially don Jess Bermejo Roldn at UCL have been wonderful, while Mike Townsend, Mette Lund Newlyn, Kate Wilcox, and their colleagues at the Institute of Historical Research have made me feel truly at home.

It would be impossible to find a more enthusiastic and generous scholar than Jerry Craddock, who was supportive far beyond any call of duty. He and his group of dons working on the Cibola Project, based at Berkeley, are publishing on their website, at a remarkable rate, painstaking transcriptions of hundreds of original documents relating to the history of Spanish North America. Richard and Shirley Flint, likewise working for the love of the research, have published similarly careful transcriptions of documents relating to Coronados expedition to New Mexico and a number of works of interpretation. These are extraordinarily valuable resources, and in most cases they offer very considered translations into English, opening the field to writers and researchers who may struggle with old Spanish. The PARES website, operated by the Spanish Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte, is a catalog and map of material in archives across Spain that allows online access to thousands of original documents, most helpfully those in the Archivo General de Indias, in Seville, repository for almost all Spanish government papers relating to the Americas dating back to the fifteenth century. David Webers Spanish Frontier in North America is the only modern academic book published by a university press to address the entire subject across time and geography, so it was an invaluable place to begin thinking about this book and a frequent source of inspiration. So, too, was John Kessells Spain in the Southwest and the many pioneering works of Herbert Bolton, now over a century old.