America's Forgotten History When Spain Ruled North America

[00:00:00]There is a city that has been named after a Spanish queen for 500 years. It is in the heart of what you call United States today. It is named like that because Castellian soldiers founded it decades before any Englishmen set foot on that continent. And yet when you think about the founders of North America, you think about Plymouth Rock, the Pilgrim Fathers, the Mayflower.

[00:00:27]Spain was erased from that narrative, not gradually, but all at once. And what was lost with that eraser is so big that it completely changes the way you understand the most powerful country in the world. This is the story that they never told you about who dominated North America first and why that story disappeared. On August 28th, 1565, Pedro Menendez de Ailez founded San Augustine on the coast of what is Florida today. It is not a minor piece of data. San Augustine is the oldest city in the United States with continuous European presence. It has been inhabited without interruption since that year, 42 years before Jamestown, 55 years before the Mayflower. While the English still had not decided if America mattered to them, Spain already had a city with a church, a fortress, a market, and streets laid out by line. That is not what they tell you in Hollywood movies. That does not appear in the American foundational narrative. And there is a very concrete reason why it does not appear. A reason that has to do with money, politics, and who writes history when they win the war. But let us go step by step to understand what Spain did in North America.

[00:01:48]You have to understand the scale of what we are talking about first. Because when I say that Spain dominated that territory, I am not talking about a few explorers lost in the jungle. I am talking about an empire that at the moment of its greatest extent controlled what are more than 30 states of the United States today. All of Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Montana. All of that was Spanish territory before being American.

[00:02:26]All of that had missions, precidios, cities, trade routes, treaties with indigenous peoples, and laws written in Castellian.

[00:02:37]And I do not know how to explain to you what that means without something in your head making a click that you can no longer undo. But there is something that almost nobody knows and that completely destroys the myth of the English explorer as the first white man in the interior of the continent. The first Spaniards did not arrive in North America looking for a quiet life. They arrived looking for the legendary seven cities of Sibila, cities of pure gold that supposedly shone on the desert horizon. They did not exist. But the search for something that did not exist led them to explore an entire continent almost without realizing it. And that, although it sounds like a paradox, is exactly what happened. Alver Nunes Cabesa Devaka was the first European to cross North America from east to west. Not in the 19th century with wagons and well-fed horses. In 1528, on foot, half naked, hungry, with fever, living and surviving alongside indigenous peoples for almost 8 years.

[00:03:45]Imagine that for a moment. 8 years walking through an unknown continent without maps, without a reliable compass, without knowing where you were going or if you would arrive. When he reached Mexico, he had traveled more than 10,000 km through virgin land and wrote a chronicle of everything he saw.

[00:04:04]That text exists. It is in the archives.

[00:04:08]Nobody reads it in American schools.

[00:04:10]This stirs something up inside me every time I think about it. Cabesa Devaka reached Texas, New Mexico, possibly Arizona. He described villages. He described geographies. He described customs with a precision that decades later served as a map for everything that came after. And today, if you ask in any city in Texas, who was Caba Devaka?

[00:04:34]Most look at you as if you were asking in another language. While any American child knows who Lewis and Clark were, who did exactly the same thing. But two and a half centuries later and with much more logistical support then came Hernando Dotto. Between 1539 and 1542 he traveled what is Florida? Georgia, the two Carolas, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas's and Oklahoma today. He was the first European to cross the Mississippi. Not Marquette. not those who came long after Dodto. And he crossed that enormous river. That river which in many senses is the backbone of North America with an army of 600 men, horses, pigs, and heavy artillery.

[00:05:26]The expedition was brutal. It was devastating for the indigenous peoples he found, and that is also part of the history that must be told without looking the other way. But what you cannot do is erase it from the narrative and replace it with nothing. Almost at the same time that Dodto marched through the southeast, Francisco Vasquez De Coronado set out from northern Mexico with 300 Spanish soldiers and more than 1,000 indigenous allies in search of those cities of gold that they were not going to find. Between 1540 and 1542, he traveled what are Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas today. His men were the first Europeans to see the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. They stood at the edge of that abyss 1600 m deep and 16 km wide without knowing very well what to do with what they had in front of them. They tried to descend. They could not. They returned to their camps without having found gold. But having seen something that no European had ever seen, and that today is one of the most visited places on the planet. And yet, Coronado's name is not in the American foundational narrative. And what comes now is what almost nobody expects because Spain not only explored, Spain built. And what it built in North America has a presence so profound, so physical, so permanent that it is literally in the ground you walk on if you live in that country. The names. Let us start with the names. Los Angeles is the Spanish name of a city founded by settlers under Spanish sovereignty in 1781. San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, Santa Barbara, San Diego, all Spanish or Franciscan foundations before California was American. Las Vegas in Nevada comes from Spanish which means fertile plains.

[00:07:27]Montana comes from Spanish. Mountain Colorado comes from Spanish colored red.

[00:07:33]Nevada comes from Spanish covered in snow. Florida comes from Spanish land of flowers. Before a single city with an English name existed in those territories, there were decades, sometimes centuries of Spanish presence etched into the land. But there is something deeper than the names. There is something that survived treaties, wars, changes of flags, and that is still alive today in architecture, in law, and in the irrigation systems of the American Southwest. The water laws that Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and California use today to manage irrigation rights are at their core Spanish law. Not Anglo-Saxon Spanish.

[00:08:19]They came from the legal traditions of Castile and Aragon, adapted by centuries of experience in water management, and were transplanted intact to North America. When a farmer in Arizona manages his right to the Colorado River, he is using a legal system whose route is 500 years old and is written originally in Castellian. That is what happens when a civilization leaves a mark on a territory. even if it later loses the political war. The mark does not disappear. It infiltrates the foundations and holds on. And there is something in this story that haunts me.

[00:08:55]And I do not know why exactly that all of this was erased so efficiently, so completely that the people who live on top of that legacy do not know it exists. And it was not erased by accident. When the United States was growing westward in the 19th century, it needed a narrative. Every nation that expands needs a story that justifies that expansion. The narrative of manifest destiny.

[00:09:21]The idea that North America was destined to be an Anglo-Saxon country from coast to coast. It needed to start in Plymouth, not in San Augustine.

[00:09:31]It needed the founders to be Protestant pilgrims fleeing religious persecution, not Castellian soldiers at the service of a Catholic crown. And for that narrative to work, Spanish history had to disappear. Not in the archives where it remains intact and accessible to anyone who wants to look for it, but in textbooks, in movies, in the collective narrative that a nation builds about itself to give itself cohesion and purpose. Keep this if you do not keep anything else from this video. The stories that nations tell about themselves are political decisions. They are not the complete truth.

[00:10:10]They are the version of the truth that is useful to power at each specific historical moment. If this is making you see something you had not seen before, subscribe because there is much more buried history that nobody is telling.

[00:10:24]And this channel exists exactly to unearth it. Now then, that Spain dominated that territory does not mean it did it well in every sense. And this is where this story becomes more uncomfortable and more honest at the same time. The Franciscan missions that traveled through California from San Diego to San Francisco are today historical heritage and tourist attractions photographed millions of times. They have an architecture that is almost impossible to ignore. That mixture of white adobe and Baroque style that blends with the semi- desert landscape in a way that seems designed expressly for contemplation. But what happened inside those missions is a story that must also be faced headon.

[00:11:07]The indigenous peoples of California, the Chumash, the Tongva, the Olan were integrated into the missions as a captive labor force. They could not leave them freely. They were forbidden from practicing their language, their religion, their customs. Mortality inside the missions was devastating. A product of diseases for which they had no immunological defenses and living conditions that destroyed entire communities that had been in that territory for thousands of years. There is a brutal paradox in all this. The missions were built with the declared idea of protecting and evangelizing the indigenous people. And at the same time they were the mechanism that most accelerated the disappearance of their cultures. That is not a contradiction that is easily resolved. It is the contradiction that lives in the heart of all colonization. The distance between justification and result between the declared intention and the real effect on the bodies and lives of the people who were already there. Let us return to the map because there is a moment in the 18th century that sums up better than any other the scale of Spanish dominance in North America and how fragile it was to maintain it. In 1763, at the end of the 7 Years War, France seated all of Louisiana to Spain, a territory that today includes parts of 15 American states. All of a sudden, without a single battle, Spain started controlling almost the entire interior of the North American continent. From the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains, from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, it was a territory so immense that Spain did not have the men or the money to administer it seriously. And that is the key that explains why everything was lost. It was not lost because Spain was defeated militarily in the north. It was lost because the empire was overextended, because the colonies in the south demanded more attention and resources, because Napoleon was pressing in Europe, and because maintaining precidios in the desert of Arizona or on the coasts of California cost more than what it produced in immediate economic terms. In 1800, when Napoleon needed liquidity to finance his European wars, he sold Louisiana to the United States. Spain had returned that territory to France three years earlier as part of a diplomatic negotiation. With one stroke, the heart of the continent changed hands without anyone asking anyone who lived there anything. After that came Texas, which declared itself independent of Mexico in 1836 and joined the United States in 1845.

[00:13:53]After that the war between Mexico and the United States which ended in 1848 with the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

[00:14:02]With that treaty Mexico seated more than 2 million square kilm California, Nevada, Utah, the greatest part of Arizona and New Mexico, parts of Colorado and Wyoming. Almost half of Mexico's territory changing flags in a single document signed after a war that lasted less than 2 years. And with that seated territory were its inhabitants, its laws, its property rights, its communities, its families who had been living on those lands for generations.

[00:14:35]The treaty formally guaranteed that the Mexican citizens who stayed would retain their property rights and their citizenship. That guarantee was systematically breached in the following decades. And what comes now is what nobody tells you when they talk about the California gold rush. When gold was discovered in the American River in 1848, there were families of Spanish and Mexican origin in that territory who had been living there for generations. They had huge ranches. They had lands documented with deeds in Castellian.

[00:15:07]They had irrigation systems built with decades of work. In less than 3 years, the gold rush brought more than 300,000 people from all over the world. The lands of those families were disputed, usurped, bought for nothing, or lost in endless litigation before courts that did not recognize documentation in Spanish and that operated according to a legal system completely different from the one those families had lived all their lives. The result was that the majority of the Californios of Spanish or Mexican origin lost their lands in that period. Not in a battle, in a courthouse, with papers they did not understand in a language that was not their own. Violence does not always need weapons. Sometimes courts and time are enough. And yet, there is a paradox that seems to me the most fascinating of this entire story. The Spanish legacy in North America did not disappear. Not entirely. Not really. It is in the names of the cities that every American pronounces every day without thinking about their origin. It is in the water laws of the Southwest.

[00:16:15]It is in the architecture of the missions that are still standing after 250 years. It is in the civil law systems that Louisiana preserves until today, different from the rest of the American states, precisely because its legal base is French and Spanish, not Anglo-Saxon.

[00:16:34]And it is above all in the more than 60 million people of Hispanic origin who live in the United States today, who are already the largest community in number after non-Hispanic whites, and who in states like California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Florida are transforming again the demographics, the culture, and the politics of territories that were once New Spain.

[00:17:00]History makes circles. Textbooks do not say it. But the numbers say it by themselves.

[00:17:07]What Spain sowed in that continent during three centuries is sprouting again in ways that nobody anticipated when the treaties of the 19th century were signed. Santa Augustine is still standing. It has a Spanish fortress from the 17th century. The castle of San Marcos built in Coina.

[00:17:28]That calccarious stone that absorbed cannonballs instead of fragmenting. that swallowed them as if they were minor insults and remained standing. That fortress was never taken by force, never resisted English attacks in the 17th century. It resisted time. It resisted all the changes of flags that came after. Today, it is a national heritage of the United States. Tourists from all over the world visit it and take photos in front of its walls without knowing entirely that they are standing inside what remains of an empire that governed that continent for almost 300 years before the country they are on vacation in existed. The history of Spain in North America is not the story of a clean conquest nor of heroes without a shadow. It never is.

[00:18:17]It is the history of a contradictory human empire, brutal in many things and extraordinary in others, that left a mark so deep that it survived all attempts to erase it, that survived treaties, wars, changes of name, textbooks that ignored it for generations. In the today, in the 21st century, becomes visible again in every city whose name sounds in Castellian, in every surname, in every legal system that has its roots in Castile and in every political debate about immigration, which is actually also, although nobody says it that way, a debate about who arrived first on that ground and what right that gives them over it. What Spain built in North America during 300 years cannot be understood in one video. But it can be understood that it is missing from the narrative they gave us. And that what is missing from a narrative always says as much about power as what is present.

[00:19:14]Because empires do not only conquer territories. They also conquer the stories that are told about those territories. And sometimes, only sometimes, the real story survives underneath, waiting for someone to unearth it. If this story made you see something you had not seen, share it. Because if we do not tell this, nobody is going to tell it for