How Spanish America Built the United States—and Why We Forgot
By a regulated optimist who grades with a pencil, votes with both hands, and still believes maps should tell the truth.
I. The Map With Missing Labels
Every nation is a story told about land. The United States has preferred the tidy novella: thirteen British colonies, a heroic revolution, then Manifest Destiny pacing west like a schoolmaster with a ruler. The footnotes—Spanish Florida, New Spain, Alta California, Louisiana under two crowns—are treated as local color. We have been a little Borges about it: we abridge the library to make the hallway look longer.
But walk any city with your ears on. Los Angeles, San Antonio, Santa Fe, Las Vegas, Corpus Christi. The place names are a low brass section reminding the melody that the harmony was written in another tongue. The demographic chorus has already joined: roughly a fifth of Americans identify as Hispanic/Latino; Spanish is now the second-most spoken language in the country by an Atlantic or two. The point is not sentimental. It is constitutional: the United States is bilingual in fact and bi-civilizational in origin. The refusal to say so out loud distorts policy at home and posture abroad.
I do not mean we should denounce the Anglo story. I mean we should shelve it beside the Iberian one and admit they share a spine.
II. Before Plymouth, There Was a City
The elevator pitch version of early America begins in 1607 at Jamestown and gets a turkey dinner in 1621. Meanwhile, on a northeastern Florida coast, Spain had already raised a city, staffed it, defended it, argued over parish boundaries, and taught children their catechism. St. Augustine—founded in 1565—is the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in what became the United States. You can still see the coquina walls shrug at hurricanes like old men at a bus stop. The date matters because it resets the mental clock; to acknowledge St. Augustine is to admit that the continent's first durable European grammar was written in Spanish.
On the other side of the map, the mission bells of Alta California began ringing in 1769 at San Diego de Alcalá—seven years before the Declaration of Independence. The mission chain that followed was as much a political architecture as a religious one: farms, workshops, registries, and yes, instruments of coercion and conversion. In other words, a state, even if it wore a habit.
Between those bookends, Spanish Louisiana modeled the messy pluralism that would later define America at its best and worst: French, Spanish, African, and Native laws in layered conversation, sometimes cacophony. The enduring oddity of Louisiana's civil law—more Roman/Iberian than English common law in private matters—is not a folklore quirk; it's proof that the country never was one legal culture. Even the state's official pages remind visitors that the system draws deeply from Spanish sources, not simply Napoleonic romance.
III. The Law Beneath the Law
When my students ask where to find a civilization's conscience, I point them to its water. In New Mexico, the acequia—the community-managed irrigation ditch—operates as both canal and covenant. Its governance blends Pueblo traditions with Iberian-Moorish custom; it is democracy by shovel and turn-taking, an ethics of flow. Read the field notes and you see words like mayordomo, turno, comunidad—a living administrative Spanish. To govern water fairly in a dry place is to write a constitution of humility.
American law schools teach the Federalist Papers as if the Republic's only fountainheads were Anglo and Enlightened. Perhaps that syllabus—through no malice, only habit—misleads. The Spanish legal presence in North America was not a decorative border; it was a working ledger: land grants (mercedes), town charters, mission account books, and mixed tribunals. Our national memory learned to call these "precursors." A better word is foundations.
IV. Household Culture: The Empire in the Kitchen
The border between politics and culture is as thin as a tortilla. (Don't worry, we'll keep the metaphors gluten-free.) The basic American pantry—beans, rice, corn, citrus, chiles—took on its modern grammar in Spanish kitchens across Florida, the Gulf, the Southwest, and California. More to the point, Spanish is the language in which millions of Americans buy groceries, joke with a neighbor, or pray. In popular media, Spanish-language networks routinely rival or beat English-language ratings in key markets, shaping civic conversation long before politicians notice. The numbers change by quarter, but the direction is steady: the hemisphere inside the United States is visible if you look with the right eyes.
This is not lifestyle trivia. As any campaign manager will tell you, a city's political temperature is taken at the dinner table—what news is watched; what words are used to describe work, safety, and care. When the administrative state bargains with its citizens, it should do so in the idioms people actually live in. To pretend otherwise is to miscount your own family.
V. A Shelf of Witnesses (Short Reviews for a Long Memory)
The bookshelf for this rediscovery is surprisingly elegant. Consider these as a starter kit—and forgive the professor for placing index cards in the jackets.
David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America
The ur-map: a comprehensive, humane history of Spain's northern provinces that refuses melodrama. Weber's achievement is to treat frontiers as negotiated zones rather than lines, recovering the agency of Native polities without flattening the archive. If you teach one spine, teach this one.Carrie Gibson, El Norte
A narrative in which Whitman's prophecy—Spanish "supplying some of the most needed parts" of American identity—lands with contemporary force. Gibson writes with the journalist's eye for scene and the historian's appetite for sources. It is both correction and invitation: an education in what the map hides.Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Our America
A book that flips the compass: reading U.S. history from the South and West rather than from the North Atlantic. He collects myths not to debunk them but to show how they arranged the furniture of power. An essential counter-narrative—also a lively one.Ned Sublette, The World That Made New Orleans
Polyphony on the page. Sublette's New Orleans is a hinge city where Africa, Spain, and France wrote American music together. Read it and the city stops being "quirky" and becomes a serious philosophy of mixture.Richard Rodriguez, Brown
A lyric essay more than a history, but indispensable. Rodriguez makes "Hispanic" into a verb—to brown—the act of blending, absorbing, forgiving, and dazzling. He writes as if light itself had an accent.
These are not the whole canon; they are the keyholes through which the forgotten house becomes a home.
VI. Florida, Louisiana, California: Three Mirrors
Florida is America's baroque self-portrait: excess, improvisation, and endurance. Spanish governors ruled it as borderland and buffer; today it remains a stage for reinvention and argument. To recognize St. Augustine's antiquity is to see the peninsula not as annex but as origin. That reassigns dignity, which is not a small thing in a democracy where dignity drives turnout.
Louisiana refuses to be monochrome. Its civil law—rooted in Iberian and French codes—signals a legal pluralism that Anglo myth tries to wish away. When you read property or succession cases from the state, the vocabulary itself tests you: usufruct, légitime, forced heirship. America is many constitutions wearing one hat.
California is Spain's paradox in new clothes: utopian engineering haunted by guilt. The mission system prefigured Silicon Valley in one uncomfortable sense—it believed institutions could manufacture virtue at scale. The valley believes code can do the same. Both fantasies produce wonders and harms. The moral is not to scold; it is to remember that optimism needs restraints made of law.
VII. Why the Forgetting Mattered
You can be forgiven for finding all this beautifully academic. The stakes, alas, are practical:
Civic Education. If public schools teach the Revolution without New Spain, students conclude—quietly—that Spanish is decorative and Anglo is essential. That untruth multiplies in college, media, and policy circles until, years later, someone calls Puerto Ricans "immigrants" and is surprised by the laughter.
Administrative Policy. Agencies that underinvest in bilingual capacity misdiagnose needs and misfire on delivery. The result is predictably cruel: rules that look equal on paper but exclude in practice.
Foreign Policy. A people who haven't learned their own hemisphere are unlikely to demand reciprocal respect for neighbors. We perform civility for Europe and practice paternalism for Latin America, then declare it "realism." That double standard is not inevitable; it is taught.
VIII. Domestic Politics: The Decibel and the Database
Let's not be coy: parties weaponize ignorance. Campaigns micro-target Spanish-language voters when it suits them and ignore Spanish-language media when it doesn't. Meanwhile, demographic reality keeps quietly humming in the background. Roughly 62–63 million Latinos live in the U.S., about 19% of the population; in many metropolitan areas they are the plurality. If the United States sometimes feels like two countries talking past each other, that's because one of them forgot it owned the dictionary.
But here is the regulated optimism: bilingual civic life makes institutions smarter. School districts that meet families where they are get better attendance; cities that publish building-permit workflows in Spanish get safer buildings; election offices that respect Spanish-language media get truer turnouts. This is less romance than industrial policy for democracy.
IX. The Moral of Water (Again)
Return to the acequia—because that trench is a thesis. Its rules say: you take your turn, you clear your section, and you show up at the spring cleanup. No farmer is so noble he can skip the shovel. The system's resilience comes from intimacy: neighbors who must see each other weekly develop a politics that is both transactional and tender. The U.S. could do worse than learn from a ditch.
In environmental planning, we dismiss small, local infrastructures as quaint. Yet the 21st century will reward places that combine macro-engineering (levees, renewable grids) with micro-covenants (shared water, shared shade, shared heat plans). The Spanish-Pueblo irrigation commons is not a museum; it is a manual.
X. A Note on Words
Language is a form of zoning. Change the labels and you change what can be built. When courts tell us to measure rights by "history and tradition," whose history counts? If your archive omits the Spanish half of the continent, your jurisprudence will quietly inherit that deficit. You will call some liberties "ancient" and others "novel," when both are equally old, only catalogued in different languages.
The fix is not to romanticize empire. It is to complete the record.
XI. The Soft Power We Keep Leaving on the Table
The U.S. spends diplomatic calories teaching Europe that we are stable and dependable, and spends far too few showing Latin America that we are curious and reciprocal. We demand conditionality for neighbors and grant indulgences for allies across oceans. Some of that is strategic architecture; much is public salience. Americans know Paris and Prague from movies and study-abroads; fewer could place Oaxaca without Google. What the electorate does not demand, the bureaucracy does not prioritize. It is that simple—and that fixable.
A republic that remembered its Spanish self would send more students south, learn energy policy from Chile, disaster governance from the Caribbean, urban design from Medellín and Bogotá, and policing reform from Mexico City's camera-aided hot-spot trials. We would stop importing only coffee and start importing methods.
XII. Program Notes: What to Build, Who to Read, How to Teach
Build
- A federal "Meridian" grant line supporting bilingual civic infrastructure: permitting portals, election communications, hazard warnings, health systems—delivered in Spanish and English by default, not exception.
- A national "Acequia" demonstration network of urban water commons in the Southwest, blending neighborhood-run shade, flood, and cooling projects with municipal engineering.
- A digital archive—call it El Archivo—that indexes Spanish-language legal and municipal records alongside English ones, searchable by the same APIs used by journalists and planners.
Read
- Start with Weber, Gibson, Fernández-Armesto, Sublette, Rodriguez. Add Andrés Reséndez's The Other Slavery for an honest reckoning with Indigenous coerced labor in Spanish and Mexican North America; then bring in Juliana Barr's Peace Came in the Form of a Woman to understand diplomacy on the borderlands. (For space we won't footnote them all here; the point is the syllabus exists.)
Teach
- Move U.S. history's first exam up a century and south by a thousand miles. Put 1565 (St. Augustine) on the same flashcards as 1607 and 1620. Make acequia and merced vocabulary words. Test on Louisiana's civil law not as novelty but as federated fact.
XIII. A Small Gallery of Scenes
Let me cheat and tell three little Irving-ish vignettes.
A grandmother in San Antonio explains the ballot to her grandson in Spanish while a poll worker—cheerful, monolingual—nods helplessly. The boy translates both ways, and the line moves. The bureaucracy is polite; the democracy is bilingual by volunteerism.
A water meeting north of Taos: farmers argue about silt and saints with the same voices. An engineer from Santa Fe presents a LiDAR model that looks like a video game; the mayordomo smiles and says, "We'll clean the bend on Saturday." Progress wears two faces, both honest.
A high-school civics class in Miami: the teacher writes "Plymouth" and "San Agustín" on the board and asks which came first. No one answers. Then a girl from Hialeah says, very softly, "My great-grandmother thought St. Augustine was a saint before it was a city." The class laughs, kindly. Then they Google. Then they look surprised. Then they look proud.
XIV. The Politics of Courtesy
Vonnegut would say: "God bless you, good luck." Borges would hand you a notecard and a mirror. I will offer a mundane virtue: courtesy—the disciplined habit of seeing your neighbor as a citizen whose memory counts. Courtesy is not niceness; it is recognition. When we vote budgets for bilingual infrastructure, when we cite St. Augustine without asterisks, when we teach civil-law Louisiana in the same breath as common-law Delaware, we are practicing a politics of courtesy that looks suspiciously like justice.
XV. Epilogue: Sol Meridian
At solar noon the shadow disappears for a moment and things stand as themselves. That is what it would mean to place the Spanish and the English Americas on the same map—no shadows big enough to hide in, no shortcuts that skip centuries.
The nation is not one story but a duet, and it always has been. If we choose to hear both melodies, the rhythm of our institutions—the schools, the courts, the agencies, the cities—will steady. The hemisphere will feel less like a foreign policy problem and more like a home economics class for a very large family. We might even treat our neighbors the way we treat our allies, which is to say: as mirrors we polish, not windows we tap on.
At noon the line of light crosses every city—San and Saint alike—and nobody owns it. That seems like the right hour to start telling our history in full.
Selected Sources
- Pew Research Center, demographic portraits of U.S. Hispanics (19% of the population; 62–63 million)
- City of St. Augustine history page (founded 1565; oldest continuously occupied settlement)
- California Missions Foundation (San Diego de Alcalá founded 1769; mission chronology)
- State of Louisiana, "About Louisiana" (civil law rooted substantially in Spanish sources)
- University of New Mexico & Utton Center materials on acequia origins and governance
- Book references: Weber's The Spanish Frontier in North America; Gibson's El Norte; Fernández-Armesto's Our America; Sublette's The World That Made New Orleans
This is the third in a quartet of long-form essays exploring the hidden continuities that shape American public life. Next: infrastructure after the Bipartisan Law, and why U.S. policy treats Latin America differently from Europe.