Are Isleño décimas really décimas?: Tracking Media and Memory in Spanish-Speaking Louisiana

According to Patricia Manning Lestrade:

The décima, popular since its origin in sixteenth-century Spain, entered Louisiana with late eighteenth century settlers from the Canary Islands. These settlers, known as the Isleños, formed a closely-bound enclave that resisted all outsiders. Slowly, however, natural and economic factors forced them to leave behind their lifestyle of fishing and trapping and to join the adjacent English-speaking communities. Social change notwithstanding, they have worked as a community to preserve their heritage into the new millennium. One valued memento of their language and culture is the décima. Mixing tradition with community experiences, the Isleños maintained traditional décimas, adopted others, and created their own.

(Hispania 447)

From the early fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, the Spanish colonial process involved the settling of vast tracks of land. From their first colonial experiment in the Canary Islands in 1402, the Spanish administration learned that it was sometimes more effective to import assimilated settlers from already established colonial possessions than to attempt massive conversion and cultural assimilation. In the Canary Islands, the indigenous Guanche population was colonized and assimilated fairly rapidly and the colonial success due to the bountiful sugar production there attracted settlers and merchants from Europe and North Africa. As the population grew and exploration pushed further east, the Spanish colonial enterprise employed similar techniques in enticing or conscripting settlers to relocate to areas like the mining centers of Saltillo and San Luis Potosi in northern Mexico as well as into New Mexico and Texas. The Spanish colonial governors in this region called up Canary Islanders to relocate to their communities and to help populate areas with sympathetic colonists, but settlers were also recruited from various parts of Spain and from Tlaxcala, the seat of Cortes’s allies in the conquest of Mexico. Gilbert Din details Canary Islander colonists brought to Louisiana and other areas in The Canary Islanders in Louisiana (8-16), while Jesús de la Teja examines Canarian presence in San Antonio, Texas, in San Antonio de Bexar (1995). Charles Gibson discusses the Tlaxcalan immigration into northern Mexico and New Mexico in Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century (185).

To shore up the vast spaces of the northern Gulf Coast, particularly eastern Texas, the newly appointed governor of Coahuila and Texas, the Marqués de San Miguel de Aguayo, requested colonists from the Spanish administration in 1721. His request specifically mentioned sending groups of Gallegos, Nahuatl-speaking Tlaxcalans, and Canary Islanders. Tlaxcalans and Canary Islanders settled outposts along the Red River, as well as in San Antonio, Texas and several areas in Louisiana. These colonists helped establish the presidio de Los Adaes, the first capital of Texas, in what is today western Louisiana.

At the Los Adaes presidio, the soldiers and colonists settled and intermarried with the local Amerindian communities. Even today, vestiges of Spanish can be found in the lexicon of the multi-ethnic descendants of these colonists, known as the Adaeseños (“Glimpses”). John Lipski noted the presence of Nahuatl words in Adaeseño Spanish (118), and H. J. Gregory compiled a list of Nahuatl words still used by the Adaeseños that he collected between 1962 and 1991 from the western Louisiana communities of Ebarb, Grady Hill, Spanish Lake, Zwolle, and Sulphur Springs. This list included plants, animals, and food-related terms, along with items of daily use (89).

While Aguayo and the Spanish government originally established Los Adaes to retake Louisiana from the French, reports from Los Adaes indicate that the residents of the presidio and the missions established in the area survived the harsh winters of because the French settlement in Natchitoches provided provisions for them (“Glimpses”). The very settlement the garrison was established to keep at bay sent support for the starving inhabitants. If we approach these colonial settlements as enclaves to be studied in isolation, whether it is academic isolation because the neighbors are not in our disciplinary milieu or as anomalies dotted across a colonial geography, we may miss that...