Canarian Americans
Their ancestors arrived in what is now the United States in the 18th century, while the Canarian community in Miami is made up of recent immigrants and their children.
The Canarian scholar Javier González Antón says some Canary Islanders went to Florida with Pedro Menéndez, who founded St. Augustine, the first permanent European settlement in what is now the United States, in 1565.
During the late 17th and much of the 18th century (1684–1764), the so-called Tributo de Sangre (Blood Tribute) was in effect; this was a Spanish law stipulating that for every thousand tons of cargo shipped from Spanish America to Spain, 50 Canarian families would be sent to America to populate regions having low populations of Peninsulares, or Spanish-born Spaniards.
After arriving at Veracruz, they were forced to cross overland on foot to Texas, led by the Canarian Juan Leal Goraz, who eventually would become the first mayor of San Antonio.
[7][8] In 1740, La Real Compañía de Comercio de La Habana (The Royal Society of Commerce of Havana), a monopolistic corporation formed to encourage commercial traffic between Cuba and Florida,[9][10] was required by Spanish statutes to provide two vessels bringing 50 Canarian families annually to Florida.
In 1779, other Canarians were established in Galveston, Texas along with Mexican soldiers in the garrison, but after prolonged droughts interrupted by sudden floods, were resettled near Baton Rouge in 1800, where they founded Galveztown.
[17] Beginning early in the 20th century, a different sort of Canarian immigration to America has taken place, primarily to Florida, of migrants not officially sanctioned or subsidized, but coming by their own means.
Currently, according to data of the Padrón de Españoles Residentes en el Extranjero (PERE; Register of Spaniards Resident Abroad), released on March 20, 2014, by the National Statistics Institute (INE), in 2013, there were 5,127 Canarians living in the United States.
[note 2] Its members are descendants of colonists from the Canary Islands who settled in Spanish Louisiana between 1778 and 1783 and intermarried with other communities such as Frenchman, Acadians, Creoles, Filipinos, and other groups, mainly through the 19th and early 20th centuries.
At eleven o'clock in the morning on March 9, 1731, sixteen Spanish families (56 people), often referred to as the "Canary Islanders" or "Isleños", arrived at the Presidio of San Antonio de Bexar in the Province of Texas.
These settlers formed the nucleus of the village of San Fernando de Béxar, and established the first regularly organized civil government in Texas.
The Canarians competed with them in raising crops and livestock, and their success threatened the order's own production, which had increased dramatically with the labor of Native American converts to Catholicism.
[14] Fourteen years after the founding of San Antonio, the non-Isleño settlers complained that the stranglehold the Canarians had on local politics was tightening to the point of depriving them of water for their homes.
Antonio Rodríguez Medero and Governor Carlos Benites Franquis de Lugo had a part in passing legislation enabling development of an irrigation system for the settlers.
There were a few descendants of Canary Islanders in San Antonio who joined the Mexican army to oppose Texas' independence from Mexico, such as the soldier and landowner Juan Moya.
[23] Currently, there are several Isleño associations in San Antonio, including the Canary Islands Descendants Association and the Fundación Norteamericana Amigos de las Islas Canarias (American Foundation of Friends of the Canary Islands), presided over by the Canarian cardiovascular medical specialist Alfonso Chiscano, whose aim is to strengthen the historical ties between Canarians and San Antonio.
[6] In 1539, Hernando de Soto, funded in part by the Count of La Gomera, recruited sailors in the Canary Islands to man expeditions for the exploration of Spanish Florida.
In 1565, the newly appointed Adelantado of Florida, Pedro Menendez de Aviles, organized two separate armadas, totaling more than twenty ships, which sailed from Asturias and Cádiz to the Canary Islands before continuing on to attack the French at Fort Caroline.
Benavides defended the rights of the indigenous peoples, allowing no distinction between classes or persons, and consequently was respected by Native Americans and Spaniards in the presidio alike.
These were peasant families to which were provided seeds for one or two crops, animals, land and franchises for the export of agricultural products to ports north and south in Spanish America.
[11] In 1763, after its defeat by Great Britain in the Seven Years' War, Spain was forced to cede Florida, causing most of its Spanish inhabitants to immigrate to Cuba, although a small Canarian community would be permanently established in the region, where they were considered innovators in agriculture.
[28] According to the Spanish journalists Fernando Martínez Laínez and Carlos Canales Torres (who examined the Spanish history of the United States in his book Banderas lejanas: La exploración, conquista y defensa por España del territorio de los actuales Estados Unidos), after the cession of Florida to Great Britain, many more Canarian families immigrated to Florida.
He left a huge corpus of work consisting of maps and plans of streets, letters and documents vital to the complicated sale of land in Florida and Louisiana.
The vice president of the council of Tenerife, José Manuel Bermúdez, estimated that more than 200,000 people from the Canary Islands live in Florida.
[14] The Isleño communities in Louisiana have kept alive their Spanish musical folklore and Canarian romance ballads, décima, and lyric songs of their ancestors.
They also preserve in their oral traditions a wide variety of songs, nursery rhymes, riddles, proverbs, and folk tales, and still use common Isleño names for numerous animals, including birds, fish, and reptiles, as well as insects and trees.
The Spanish Tradition in Louisiana, a scholarly book written by Samuel G. Armistead, with musical transcriptions and information gathered from this recorded material, was published to ensure their preservation over time.
