🔍Beyond the Mayflower: Spanish America
Chapter 2 of my manuscript, Untold America
"When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered around him; and he was by the sea."- Mark 5:21
Introduction: The Journey to the Other Side
Mark's Gospel repeatedly shows Jesus crossing the Sea of Galilee between Jewish and Gentile territories. These crossings aren't incidental to his ministry but essential, demonstrating his commitment to breaking boundaries that divided his world. Each crossing represents physical movement and theological boundary-crossing that challenged established divisions between "us" and "them."
American history similarly involves boundary-crossings that challenge established narratives. While textbooks traditionally focus on the journey of the Mayflower and English colonies along the Atlantic seaboard, an equally crucial American journey began decades earlier and thousands of miles away—the Spanish exploration and settlement that would shape the American Southwest, Florida, and California long before English influence reached these regions.
This chapter delves into the profound significance of the Spanish colonial experience that predates English settlement. It has shaped distinctive American regions, institutions, and cultural patterns. By exploring this boundary, we gain a more profound historical understanding and a more truthful theological vision of American identity formed through cultural encounters rather than cultural dominance.
This Spanish history directly challenges both theological mutations at the heart of our study. Dominative Christianism's emphasis on an English Protestant founding erases the Spanish Catholic reality that preceded it, constructing a false nativist narrative that defines "true Americans" as Anglo-Protestant. Meanwhile, Providential Identitarianism's progressive exceptionalism constructs a seamless narrative of advancing freedom that ignores how Spanish colonial territories developed different approaches to pluralism, governance, and religious integration than the supposedly more enlightened English colonies. Both mutations require historical amnesia about Spanish America to maintain their theological coherence.
Spanish Beginnings: America's First European Settlements
St. Augustine: America's Oldest Continuous European Settlement
The traditional American origin story typically begins in 1620 with the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock. Yet nearly six decades earlier, in 1565, the Spanish established St. Augustine in Florida—now the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the continental United States.
Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine as a military outpost and a permanent community with religious, educational, and governance structures. The settlement included the first parish church, the first school, and the first hospital in what would become the United States—all established decades before similar institutions appeared in English colonies.
This historical priority challenges the timeline of American development and its geographical orientation. Rather than beginning on the northeastern seaboard and moving westward, this alternative narrative starts in the southeast and southwest, spreading northward and eastward. This reorientation shifts the center of American identity from New England to a more complex, multicultural South and Southwest.
Walking through St. Augustine today is to enter an American landscape strikingly different from New England villages or Virginian plantation country. The narrow streets and compact central plaza, reflecting Mediterranean urban design, stand in stark contrast to the spacious layouts of English towns. The coquina stone buildings, with their distinctive arches and balconies, create a visual rhythm unlike English colonies' wooden structures. Even the quality of light seems different—overhanging balconies and shaded arcades soften the harsh subtropical brightness and acknowledge the southern climate in ways English architecture rarely attempts.
The Northern Frontier: Spanish New Mexico
While Jamestown settlers were still struggling for survival in Virginia, Spanish explorers and settlers were already establishing permanent communities throughout the American Southwest. In 1598, Juan de Oñate established the first Spanish settlement in New Mexico, decades before the Mayflower landing. This early establishment challenges the timeline of American development and its geographical orientation, offering a more comprehensive view of the country's history.
Santa Fe, founded in 1607 (the same year as Jamestown), became a vibrant administrative and cultural center that would shape southwestern development for centuries. Its distinctive architecture, urban design, and governance structures created patterns that remain visible in southwestern cities today—the central plaza, adobe construction, and integration of indigenous building techniques with European design principles.
This northern frontier of New Spain developed unique and fascinating cultural patterns that differed from Spanish centers in Mexico and English colonies along the Atlantic. Spanish settlers, Franciscan missionaries, and indigenous peoples created distinctive cultural exchange, hybridization, and conflict patterns that would shape American development long before English influence reached these regions.
California Missions: Alternative Colonial Pattern
The Spanish settlement of California, beginning with the establishment of Mission San Diego de Alcalá in 1769, created another distinctive pattern of American development that differed significantly from the English colonial model. The mission system—a network of religious communities that combined spiritual, economic, and political functions—established a settlement pattern dissimilar to the town-centered development of New England. This unique system, with its focus on religious, financial, and political functions, starkly contrasts New England's town-centered development, enriching our understanding of the diverse patterns of American growth.
Father Junípero Serra's mission system created a chain of 21 communities from San Diego to Sonoma that established a Spanish presence along the California coast. These missions introduced European agriculture, architecture, governance, and religion while creating new cultural forms through interaction with indigenous peoples.
While deeply problematic in their treatment of indigenous peoples, these missions established patterns of development that would shape California's distinctive cultural landscape long before American annexation in 1848. The Spanish legacy remains visible in California's architecture, place names, agricultural practices, and cultural traditions.
Catholic America: Religious Alternatives
Distinctive Religious Patterns
Spanish America established Catholic rather than Protestant religious patterns, creating a distinctive spiritual landscape that differed from the predominantly Protestant development of English colonies. This Catholic foundation introduced different understandings of church-state relationships, religious authority, and spiritual practice than those from English Protestant colonies.
Spanish Catholicism established a religious landscape with distinctive characteristics: visually rich religious art rather than iconoclastic plainness, sacramental emphasis rather than sermon-centered worship, hierarchical authority structures rather than congregational governance, and integration of indigenous elements rather than rigid boundary maintenance.
These distinctive patterns created an alternative American religious tradition that predated the Puritan emphasis typically centered in American religious history. This Catholic foundation established patterns of religious syncretism, feast day celebrations, saint veneration, and communal rituals that remain vibrant in American southwestern culture.
Franciscan Missionaries and Spiritual Encounter
Franciscan missionaries played a crucial role in Spanish colonial expansion, establishing missions that combined religious conversion with cultural, economic, and political development. Unlike the Puritan emphasis on creating separate communities of visible saints, the Franciscan approach sought to convert and incorporate indigenous peoples into Spanish Catholic society.
This missionary approach, while often coercive and destructive to indigenous cultures, nevertheless created patterns of cultural encounter different from the separation and displacement that characterized much of English colonization. Franciscan missions became sites of cultural hybridization where European and indigenous traditions interacted to create distinctive new religious forms.
The resulting religious landscape featured syncretic practices that incorporated indigenous symbols, rituals, and concepts into a Catholic framework, creating distinctive forms of American Catholicism that differed from both European Catholicism and the Protestantism of English colonies. These syncretic traditions remain visible in southwestern religious art, ritual practices, and sacred celebrations.
Religious Pluralism Before Religious Freedom
Spanish America established religious authority patterns that differed from the state-church model of Anglican England and the congregational model of Puritan New England. The Catholic Church maintained significant independence from civil authority while functioning as an established religion within Spanish territories.
This arrangement created different dynamics around religious dissent than those in English colonies. While Spanish territories generally lacked the religious diversity found in some English colonies, they established different patterns of accommodation and tension between religious and civil authority that would influence later American development.
The Spanish colonial approach to indigenous religions also differed from English patterns. While often suppressive, Spanish practice tended toward incorporating indigenous elements rather than a complete replacement, creating syncretic forms that preserved aspects of indigenous spirituality within Catholic frameworks. This approach contrasted with the more complete separation between European and indigenous religious practices typical in English colonies.
Spanish Colonial vs. English Colonial Governance
Two Models of Authority and Community
Spanish and English colonies developed fundamentally different approaches to governance that reflected their distinct cultural, religious, and institutional foundations. Spanish colonial governance centered on the plaza—the central public space where political, spiritual, and social authority converged. English colonial governance, particularly in New England, centered on the meetinghouse—where religious and civic authority intersected but remained theoretically distinct.
These different architectural centers reflected more profound differences in governance philosophy. Spanish colonial authority derived primarily from royal appointment, with governors exercising direct authority from the crown. English colonial rule, particularly in New England, derived more from community consent (though within strict religious boundaries) through town meetings and elected assemblies.
This distinction created different approaches to community formation—Spanish colonies tended toward centralized authority with a clear hierarchy from appointed officials. In contrast, English colonies (with significant regional variation) developed more localized governance structures emphasizing community participation, albeit often limited to property-owning white men.
Legal Traditions and Institutional Development
The Spanish civil law tradition and English common law tradition established fundamentally different legal frameworks that would shape American development in distinctive ways. Spanish civil law, derived from Roman legal tradition, emphasized codified legal principles applied by trained legal officials. English common law emphasized precedent, jury trials, and judicial interpretation.
These legal differences created ongoing tensions in American development, notably as Anglo-American legal forms expanded into previously Spanish territories. Areas previously under Spanish control maintained distinctive legal concepts around water rights, land grants, and property arrangements that often conflicted with English common law approaches.
Perhaps most significantly, these different legal traditions created different relationships between law and theology—English common law, particularly in Puritan New England, more closely aligned legal codes with Biblical precepts. Spanish civil law maintained a more significant distinction between civil and canonical law while operating within the Catholic framework. These different approaches to the relationship between civil law and religious authority would influence regional approaches to church-state relationships well into American development.
Distinctive Legal and Social Structures
Different Legal Frameworks
Spanish colonization introduced distinctive legal frameworks that differed significantly from English common law. Spanish civil law, derived from Roman legal traditions, established different approaches to property rights, governance structures, and legal procedures than those found in English colonies.
These legal differences impacted American development, particularly in territories that maintained Spanish legal elements after American annexation. Property rights in Spanish territories often derived from community grants rather than individual titles, creating distinctive patterns of land ownership and use that differed from English patterns of personal property.
Water rights provide an obvious example of these differences. Spanish law treated water as a community resource rather than private property, establishing different patterns of water management than those found in English common law. These distinctive legal approaches continue to shape water governance in southwestern states today.
Multiracial Governance Structures
Spanish colonial governance established multiracial structures that, while hierarchical and often oppressive, differed from the starker racial boundaries typical in English colonies. The Spanish colonial concept of caste created a complex racial hierarchy that acknowledged and incorporated mixed ancestry rather than maintaining a rigid black-white binary.
This approach, while still fundamentally racist, created more fluid racial categories and greater legal recognition of mixed ancestry than typically found in English colonies. Individuals of mixed European-indigenous ancestry (mestizos) held recognized legal status. They could achieve positions in colonial governance and society generally unavailable to mixed-race individuals in English colonies.
These governance patterns established different trajectories of race relations that would influence southwestern development even after American annexation. Territories previously under Spanish control maintained distinctive approaches to racial categorization and governance that would create ongoing tensions with Anglo-American approaches after integration into the United States.
Gender Patterns and Women's Legal Status
Spanish colonial law established different legal status patterns for women than English common law. Under Spanish legal tradition, married women maintained greater property rights, including owning property separately from their husbands, engaging in business transactions, and maintaining a legal identity distinct from their husbands.
These differences created distinctive patterns of women's economic and social participation in Spanish territories. Spanish colonial records show women engaging in business ownership, property transactions, and legal proceedings to degrees generally unavailable to women in English colonies operating under common law coverture principles.
These distinctive gender patterns would influence social development in territories previously under Spanish control, creating regional differences in women's status and economic participation that would persist after American annexation. These different legal traditions remain visible in family property patterns in southwestern states today.
Theological Analysis: Spanish Catholicism's Alternatives and Limitations
The Spanish Catholic presence in North America offers a complex theological counterpoint to our identified significant mutations. On the one hand, Spanish Catholicism resisted certain theological distortions that would later characterize Dominative Christianism. Its emphasis on integration rather than separation countered the binary apocalypticism that divides the world into good and evil. Its incorporating indigenous elements resisted the primitive biblicism that claims unmediated access to divine truth without cultural context.
However, Spanish Catholicism also embodied its theological limitations. Its hierarchical authority structures reflected forms of authoritarian spirituality, albeit different from those found in Dominative Christianism. Its missionary approach, while more integrative than English Protestant efforts, still often embodied practical atheism by privileging institutional expansion over Christ-like relationships with indigenous peoples.
What emerges is not a simple contrast between "bad" English Protestantism and "good" Spanish Catholicism but somewhat different theological strengths and weaknesses that shaped distinct regional development. Spanish Catholicism offered alternative approaches to religious pluralism, cultural integration, and social organization that challenged the exclusive focus on the supposedly exceptional English Protestant foundations of American identity.
These theological differences remain visible in the distinctive religious landscapes of regions shaped by Spanish Catholic influence—landscapes characterized by greater integration of sacred imagery into public space, different relationships between religious and civil authority, and more syncretic incorporation of diverse cultural elements into spiritual practice.
Personal Reflection: Crossing Boundaries to San Antonio
Growing up in Louisiana, I inhabited a cultural boundary zone where French, Spanish, and Anglo-American influences created a distinctive regional culture. My first journey to San Antonio, Texas, as a teenager exposed me to an even more dramatic example of this cultural hybridity—a city where Spanish colonial foundations remained visibly present centuries after American annexation. Later trips as an adult deepened that impression.
The Alamo, typically presented in Texas history as a symbol of Anglo-American resistance to Mexican authority, revealed itself as a repurposed Spanish mission—a building constructed by Spanish missionaries and indigenous laborers long before it became a battlefield in the Texas Revolution. This physical structure embodied the historical palimpsest of American development, with each cultural layer built upon rather than erasing what came before.
San Antonio's central plaza, surrounded by Spanish colonial architecture and anchored by San Fernando Cathedral (founded in 1731), presented an urban design fundamentally different from the New England town model featured in my textbooks. This distinctive urban pattern—the plaza rather than the town common—reflected Spanish colonial priorities and cultural assumptions about public space and community organization.
Standing in the cool darkness of San Fernando Cathedral, with its gold leaf retablos and flickering votive candles, I experienced an American sacred space radically distinct from the austere white Protestant churches of my textbooks. The rich sensory experience—the smell of incense, the visual splendor of religious art, the tactile invitation of holy water fonts—presented a form of American religious expression that predated the Puritan meetinghouse by more than a century yet remained marginalized in standard narratives of American religious development.
This journey across cultural boundaries challenged my textbook understanding of American development. It revealed how different European colonial traditions established distinctive patterns that would shape regional cultures long after political control shifted. Despite political changes, the persistence of these cultural patterns demonstrated how American identity formed through cultural encounters and hybridization rather than a simple extension of English colonial patterns.
Implications for Contemporary Debates
Immigration and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Beyond Binary Apocalypticism
Contemporary debates about immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border often proceed from historical amnesia about the Spanish origins of American southwestern territories. The narrative that presents Spanish-speaking immigrants as "foreign" to these regions ignores the historical priority of Spanish settlement and the continuing presence of Hispanic communities with centuries-long history in these territories.
This historical perspective directly challenges the binary apocalypticism that characterizes much of the contemporary immigration debate—the rigid division between "American" and "foreign," "us" and "them," "legal" and "illegal." The Spanish colonial roots of the American Southwest reveal how artificial these divisions often are, imposed on regions where cultural continuity across the border preceded the border itself.
Understanding the Spanish colonial foundations of the American Southwest challenges simplistic narratives about immigration and national identity. Rather than representing foreign intrusion, Spanish-speaking immigration often represents a continued cultural connection in regions shaped by Spanish influence long before Anglo-American presence—a connection disrupted by relatively recent political boundaries rather than fundamental cultural differences.
This historical perspective doesn't resolve contemporary policy debates but provides essential context for understanding them. The boundary between the United States and Mexico represents a relatively recent political division of regions previously united by shared Spanish colonial heritage, language, and culture—a complexity often lost in contemporary immigration debates shaped by binary apocalypticism.
Cultural Heritage and American Identity
The Spanish colonial legacy challenges narrow definitions of American cultural heritage based exclusively on English roots. Architectural styles, urban design patterns, agricultural practices, linguistic elements, legal concepts, and religious traditions derived from Spanish colonial heritage represent equally authentic American cultural forms with centuries-long presence in what became the United States.
This broader understanding of American cultural heritage acknowledges multiple European colonial traditions rather than privileging English heritage as exclusively authentic. Spanish architectural elements, agrarian practices, water management approaches, and culinary traditions represent not foreign imports but indigenous American developments with centuries-long history.
This perspective supports neither uncritical celebration of colonial heritage nor wholesale rejection of European influences but rather a more complex understanding of how diverse colonial traditions interacted with indigenous cultures and each other to create distinctive American regional patterns. This complexity challenges both the conservative romanticization of Anglo-American heritage and the progressive dismissal of all colonial influences as equally oppressive.
Religious Pluralism and Public Life
The Spanish colonial legacy provides historical context for understanding America's complex religious landscape beyond the Protestant narrative that often dominates discussions of American religious history. Catholic presence in what became the United States predated Plymouth and Jamestown, establishing alternative patterns of spiritual practice, authority, and church-state relationship.
This historical perspective challenges narratives that present American religious history primarily through a Protestant lens, recognizing Catholic traditions as equally indigenous to American development rather than later immigrant additions. The Spanish missionaries' presence in Florida, the Southwest, and California established Catholic institutions—churches, schools, and hospitals—representing some of the oldest continuous religious institutions in what became the United States.
This broader understanding of American religious heritage supports neither Catholic triumphalism nor Protestant exceptionalism but rather a more complex recognition of religious pluralism embedded in American development from its earliest European settlement. This complexity challenges both conservative narratives of essentially Protestant American identity and progressive secularism that minimizes religion's formative role in American development.
Conclusion: America's Multiple European Roots
Moving beyond the Mayflower requires recognizing America's multiple European roots—not just English but Spanish, French, Dutch, German, and others—that established distinctive colonial patterns leading to regional American cultures rather than unified Anglo-American tradition. This multiplicity challenges the single-origin myth that places English settlement at the center of American identity.
Spanish America is not a peripheral addition to the essentially Anglo-American story but a parallel tradition with equal claim to shaping American development. From St. Augustine to Santa Fe to San Diego, Spanish colonial settlements established urban development patterns, legal frameworks, religious traditions, and cultural practices that would influence American regional cultures regardless of subsequent political control.
Jesus's repeated crossings in Mark's Gospel remind us that boundary-crossing is not peripheral but essential to faithful witness. Similarly, crossing the boundaries established by traditional American narratives is not peripheral but essential to truthful historical understanding. By recognizing the Spanish foundation of significant American regions, we move toward a more truthful remembering that acknowledges the multicultural roots of American identity.
This truthful remembering challenges both major theological mutations we've identified. It undermines Dominative Christianism's nativist narrative by revealing the priority of Spanish Catholic presence in significant American regions. It equally challenges Providential Identitarianism's progressive exceptionalism by revealing how regions shaped by Spanish influence developed different approaches to pluralism, religious integration, and governance than the supposedly more enlightened English colonies.
The theological insight from Jesus's boundary-crossing in Mark's Gospel remains our guiding principle: genuine understanding requires a willingness to cross conceptual boundaries that divide "us" from "them." Only by crossing these boundaries in our historical knowledge can we develop a more truthful vision of American identity formed through cultural encounters and exchange rather than the imposition of a single cultural tradition.
Reflection Questions
How has the marginalization of Spanish colonial history in traditional American narratives shaped your understanding of American identity and development?
Where do you see evidence of Spanish colonial influence in American architecture, urban design, legal frameworks, or cultural practices today?
How might recognizing America's multiple European roots change our approach to contemporary debates about immigration and cultural identity?
What cultural boundaries might Jesus compel you to cross in understanding American history and identity?
How does the complex religious legacy of Spanish colonization challenge both conservative and progressive narratives about religion's role in American development?
What elements of Spanish colonial heritage might contribute to a more inclusive understanding of American identity and development?
How might educational institutions better incorporate Spanish colonial history into American historical narratives?
Key Lexicon Terms
Binary Apocalypticism: A theological mutation that divides the world into rigid categories of good and evil, friends and enemies, saved and damned, leaving no room for nuance, reconciliation, or the messy complexity of human experience.
Dominative Christianism: A distortion of Christian faith that privileges cultural power, nationalist identity, and political control over Jesus's example of self-giving love and boundary-crossing ministry. This mutation emphasizes dominance rather than service.
Providential Identitarianism: A theological mutation that constructs a seamless narrative of progressive advancement, claiming divine purpose for specific cultural or political developments while ignoring inconsistencies and injustices that challenge this narrative.
Syncretism: The blending of different religious, cultural, and philosophical traditions into new forms. In Spanish colonial America, this process created distinctive religious expressions that incorporated both European Catholic and indigenous spiritual elements.