After the Purchase: Spanish Diaspora, Nation and Empire in New Orleans (1803–1865)

Abstract

ABSTRACT After half a century of Spanish imperial control over the Mississippi, the territory of Louisiana was purchased and annexed to the United States in 1803. The goal of this article is to examine the continuities of the Spanish imperial dominion over New Orleans since the Louisiana Purchase up until the American Civil War, using the Spanish-speaking community as an observatory to trace them. Decades after the Louisiana Purchase, Spanish-speaking colonists and immigrants continued to inhabit New Orleans’ Vieux Carré, keeping various links to the former territories of the Spanish Monarchy, to the Peninsula and most specially to Cuba. The Spanish community generated new instruments of association as a group, such as bilingual newspapers, associations of mutual assistance, and its own militia. This heterogeneous community experienced in various ways the political upheavals affecting the Gulf of Mexico during the first six decades of the nineteenth century. This included diverse intents on behalf of the former metropole to exert different degrees of control over the community through various means, especially as Cuban separatism became a political force to be reckoned with in the Gulf.