The Making and Unmaking of San Luis, an Apalachee-Spanish Town in Florida

Abstract

The Spanish archival record is, perhaps unsurprisingly, relatively silent about the lives, experiences, and interactions of women in colonial San Luis and Apalachee. The gendered silence in the colonial archive is in part due to the lack of baptismal, marriage, and death records from Apalachee—in other words, the documents in which women are most likely to appear in Spanish colonial archives are missing for Apalachee. The archaeological and material records tell a different story. The ongoing archaeological excavations in Mission San Luis have uncovered a wealth of artifacts to help us reconstruct everyday life in the southern town. Although the European sites have been far more explored than the Apalachee ones, the archaeological findings help fill out, as well as complicate, a historical narrative focused on Spanish men. Correcting a male-centered focus requires not only writing stories of and about women, but also questioning the narratives and limitations produced by androcentric and un-gendered constructions of the past. This essay combines both historical documents and archaeological findings to offer a gendered reading of San Luis, its structures, and its everyday operations. It centers the life and experiences of women to explore the everyday contours of power in this early southern town.