2 Hispanic America
U.S. History with a Spanish Accent
In his wonderfully thought-provoking book, Our America, Felipe Fernández-Armesto upends the standard Anglo-American account of U.S. history, which imagines the country as originating with the founding of the English colonies of Jamestown (1607) and Plymouth (1620), and which treats the subsequent history of the country as if it unfolded from east to west. Fernández-Armesto rotates the picture to tell the story of the country as it unfolded from south to north. In this telling, the United States’ colonial origins are as much Spanish as they are English, and the descendants of the first Hispanic Americans have as much reason to count their ancestors among the nation’s founders as does any Anglo descendant of a Virginia planter or a New England Pilgrim.
Fernández-Armesto’s “Hispanic-accented account,” helps us see “today’s plural America” as the product of “the whole of America’s past, not a threat to traditional U.S. identity.” His alternative narrative intersects with the Anglo narrative while highlighting an argument that there is “no single frontier, no single language, or tradition, or identity, no manifest destiny, no culture that deserves to be hegemonic or that predominates or ought to predominate by virtue of U.S. historic experience.”[1]
Early Spanish Settlements in (Future) U.S. Territory
Founded over a hundred years before Jamestown, Puerto Rico was the first Spanish colony in what today is a U.S. territory. In 1508, Spanish explorer and conquistador, Juan Ponce de León founded a settlement at Caparra in Puerto Rico. Caparra was abandoned in 1521, but the city of San Juan, barely 8 miles away, replaced it as the capital of Puerto Rico, making San Juan the oldest continuously inhabited European city in the United States.[2]
Nobody thinks of Puerto Rico as the place where U.S. history began. That might be, in part, because the island of Puerto Rico became a U.S. possession only after the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898. It then became a U.S. territory after the passage of the Jones-Shafroth Act in 1917, which also granted Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship.[3] Yet today, their fellow citizens in the 50 states too often forget the fact that anyone born in Puerto Rico is a U.S. citizen.
Putting Puerto Rico aside, the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the continental United States is San Agustín (Saint Augustine), Florida. Founded by the Spanish in 1565, it remained a Spanish city until 1819, when Spain ceded Florida to the United States.[4]
Another settlement in the United States with a Spanish heritage almost as old, if not older than Jamestown, is Santa Fe, New Mexico. The area was already under Spanish control in 1598,[5] even if the city of Santa Fe proper was not established until 1610, three years after Jamestown. This makes Santa Fe the oldest continuously inhabited state or territorial capital in the continental United States.[6]
The Term Hispanic
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