Barceló amassed a small fortune by capitalizing on the flow of American and Mexican traders involved with the nineteenth-century Santa Fe Trail.
She became infamous in the U.S. as the Mexican "Queen of Sin" through a series of American travel writings and newspaper serials before, during, and after the war.
These depictions, often intended to explain or justify the U.S. invasion of Mexico, presented La Tules as a madame and prostitute who symbolized the supposedly immoral nature of the local Mexican population.
Barceló may have been born in the state of Sonora, Mexico around 1800 but one correspondent of the time, Wilkins Kendall of the New Orleans Picayune, argued in his book Narrative of the Texas—Santa Fe Expedition that she was French, referring to her as Madame Toulouse.
The priest who performed the ceremony referred to her as "Doña," a title given to women of quality and high social standing.
"[3][4] Some authors have connected this to the Mexican Spanish word tules, meaning "reeds," with suggestions that it referred to "the curvaceousness of her figure"[5] or possibly to "her thin frame.
She wrote the La Tules "made her living by running a house where open gambling, drinking, and smoking were enjoyed by all...with no thought of being socially degraded.
Typical of many, Josiah Gregg's widely read Commerce of the Prairies described Tules as a woman of "loose habits.".
The only real agreement among them was that Tules excelled at the card game monte, often winning vast piles of gold from the male customers in her saloon.
[8] Despite her negative reputation among Americans and the alleged source of her "ill-gotten" fortune, the U.S. Army borrowed funds from Barceló shortly after the invasion of New Mexico in 1846.