Between Empires: Spanish Immigrants in the United States (1868–1945)

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tens of thousands of Spanish peasants, seamen, and workers emigrated to the United States, and settled in an archipelago of tight-knit enclaves that dotted the entire country from Barre, Vermont to Monterey, California, and from Boise, Idaho, to Tampa, Florida. Neither friars nor conquistadors, those tens of thousands of immigrants from Spain who ended up in the United States represent just a tiny percentage of the millions of Spaniards who, in those same years, crossed the Atlantic, most with the goal of settling in various points of the Spanish-speaking Americas. Herein lies one of the best-kept demographic secrets of the American hemisphere: the massive presence of Spaniards in the Americas –South, Central and North– is largely a post-imperial phenomenon. For every Spanish friar or explorer from Spain’s Age of Empire who is commemorated by a statue or a street name in the United States, there would arrive, during the Age of Immigration, thousands of Spanish seamen, nannies, cigar-makers, canners, miners, shopkeepers, sheepherders and steelworkers. But because their stories do not easily fit into any conventional national narrative in either country, these working-class Spaniards are, for the most part, absent from standard historical accounts of both Spanish emigration and US immigration. They are, as it were, invisible immigrants.