Migration to a Spanish Imperial Frontier in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: St. Augustine

Abstract

ECENT CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE ETHNIC DIVERSITY of American society has renewed interest in the Old World source of colonial American immigrants. It is well known that Florida's colonial capital, St. Augustine, was largely settled by immigrants of origin. It is less recognized that within the term Hispanic there was a variety of groups almost as diverse as the present-day American ethnic mixture. These groups were divided both by racial background and by geographic origin. Not only was there the usual division between the peninsulares, who migrated from the Iberian Peninsula, and the criollos, who had been born in Spanish America, but even among peninsulares, there was separatism and discrimination based on one's native municipality or province. The Spanish-American group was equally diverse. Besides criollos, it included a variety of mixed-bloods, for example, mestizos, mulattoes, and zambos. As in the other parts of Spanish America, mestizos were further differentiated by degrees of Spanish and Indian blood: the term castizo usually referred to those mestizos who had a relatively small amount of Indian blood and were treated as whites, while other mestizos with a small percentage of Spanish blood were regarded as illegitimate and looked down upon. Also present were full-blooded Indians, not only from St. Augustine's hinterland (Apalache and Guale) but from Mexico and the rest of Spanish America. Finally, there were pure blacks (morenos) who came from the Antilles or as escapees from Carolina. Colonial St. Augustine was thus a melting pot of ethnic groups, loosely bound together by a common Catholic faith, Castilian tongue, and the political dominion of the Spanish Crown.' My purpose