Background

“Spaniards in the Americas”; for many, this expression will surely evoke images of the conquistadors and missionaries who, on behalf of the Spanish Crown, conquered and colonized vast swaths of the American continents –South, Central and North—in the XVIth, XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries.

Few people realize, however, that the number of Spaniards who emigrated from the Iberian Peninsula to the Americas in the half-century between 1880 and 1930 is far greater than the number of those who made the same journey during the previous four centuries; that is to say, since Columbus’s first voyage in 1492 until the year 1880.  In other words:  the presence of large numbers of Spaniards in the Americas is, in reality, a result not of the establishment and maintenance of the Spanish Empire, but rather, of the dissolution and end of that empire.  These hundreds of thousands of enterprising Spaniards responded to the promise of social mobility generated by the independence of Spain’s former colonies; the “loss” of Cuba an Puerto Rico, in 1898, ended up strengthening the flow of emigrants from Spain to those two islands and to the United States.

Spain contributed significantly to the vast wave of emigration of Europeans to the Americas which, in the late XIXth and early XXth century, radically transformed the three continents.  It is estimated that some 4 million Spaniards decided to “try the Americas” in the fifty-year period between 1880 and 1930.

The vast majority of the Spaniards in this diaspora were workers or peasants; many came from the northern Cantabrian coast of the peninsula:  from Galicia to the Basque Country, including Asturias and Cantabria.  Most of these emigrants had, as their original destination, points in Spanish-speaking America.  A significant number, nonetheless, would wind up in the United States, either directly from Spain, or as “rebound” emigrants, who re-emigrated to the US after stints in Spanish America.

Many of those who arrive directly from Spain to the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century are actively recruited by US companies looking for manpower in very defined industrial sectors.  Such is the case of the asturianos who were brought to work in the zinc foundries and coal mines of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kansas and elsewhere; of the Cantabrians who came to work in the granite quarries of Vermont; or the Andalusians recruited to work on sugarcane plantations in Hawaii, for example.

But the majority of Spanish immigrants in the United States were “rebound” immigrants; that is to say, they re-emigrate to the US after having emigrated from Spain to Spanish-speaking America.  We would do well to remember that in this very same period, the definitive dissolution of the Spanish Empire (the loss of Cuba and Puerto Rico) coincides with –and, is in fact accelerated by—the ascent of the United States as a country determined to become a great power in the hemisphere and in the world.  As Spanish sovereignty over the vestiges of its American empire gets weaker and weaker, the political, economic and cultural links between the US and Spanish-speaking America grow stronger and more diverse.  It is in the context of these geopolitical transformations –in the space opened open “between empires”—that the presence of Spaniards in the United States will increase significantly.

For more information please visit Traces of Spain in the US.