Latino Spaniards, or Spanish Latinos

A short story about Teresa Valcarce and Bernardo de Gálvez

I was in Washington D.C. recently and shared a late afternoon meal with Teresa Valcarce, who was born in Spain but is now a dual citizen of Spain and the United States. She is responsible for having a portrait of Bernardo de Gálvez hung in the U.S. Congress. I wrote about Gálvez back in March, but as a quick refresher, he was the Spanish Governor of Louisiana in the late eighteenth century. He’s considered a hero of the American Revolution because he helped finance the battle of Yorktown and led Spanish, Native, and African troops into battle against the British in Pensacola, Florida, where every May they still celebrate Gálvez Days. In 1783, George Washington wrote a letter that said the United States would honor Gálvez by hanging a portrait of him in Congress (it was the Congress of the Confederation at the time, since the U.S. Congress didn’t exist until 1789). But a portrait never was hung … until Valcarce became involved. She came across the letter and made it her mission to have its promise fulfilled.

She told me that she wanted to do it for the 60 million Latinos living in the United States, so they could see themselves included in a pivotal moment of U.S. history. She said she had visited Congress several times, when she witnessed groups of Latino students wandering the halls and looking up at the portraits with a facial expression that, according to Valcarce, asked, “what am I doing here?” Her efforts were successful. In 2014, Senator Bob Menéndez spoke at the unveiling ceremony, and President Barack Obama granted Gálvez honorary citizenship—only the eighth person in history to receive the honor, alongside individuals such as Mother Teresa and Winston Churchill. There are videos on YouTube of the unveiling ceremony. After Valcarce’s speech about the close relationship between Spain and the United States, you can hear people murmuring about how she should consider running for office.

In 1976, the year of the U.S. bicentennial, the Spanish King Juan Carlos I, on behalf of Spain, dedicated a statue of Gálvez in Washington D.C. that was placed right across the street from the Department of State. After Valcarce led the effort to have the Gálvez portrait hung in Congress, the National Park Service asked for her help writing the text for a new plaque to be placed in front of the statue. The inclusion of these lines was really important to her: “For his help, Bernardo de Gálvez was made an honorary citizen of the US. But he was not the only Spaniard to aid the fledgling United States. Hispanics from present day Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic also fought and raised funds to make American independence a reality.” She wanted these lines to be read by Latinos from these countries, and that, when they did, they might feel more connected with Spain, since all of these countries had been part of Spain at the time of the American Revolution. Spanish history was also their history, she believed.

I’m interested in this story for several reasons. First, because Gálvez is well-known, but Valcarce’s efforts to revive our memories of him are not. Debates about whether or not Spaniards are Latinos are old. Some have argued that they can be Hispanics but not Latinos. Personally, I kind of side with the Pew Hispanic Research Center, which says that Latinos are Latinos if they say they’re Latinos, and that they’re not Latinos if they say they’re not Latinos. So, if Valcarce and other Spaniards want to call themselves Latinas and Latinos, who am I to stop them? I’m not interested in policing the boundaries of latinidad. But regardless of how you feel about this debate, Valcarce’s efforts to have Gálvez commemorated are a clear example of how Spanish latinidad gets mobilized today. Second, I’m interested in this story because of the plaque Valcarce helped write. My hunch is that many Latinos from the countries she lists have different views of the Spanish empire, and of Spanish colonialism, that the ones she would like them to have. Yet she is one-hundred percent sincere when she says she sees herself as Latina, and that she fought hard to have the portrait of Gálvez hung in Congress on behalf of all other Latinos.

So, both Gálvez and his commemoration in the twenty-first century seem like good ways of talking about, debating, and teaching the connection between Spain and the United States, the legacies of the Spanish Empire in the Americas, and the relationship between Spain, Spaniards, and latinidad.

Here’s the YouTube video of the unveiling ceremony:

The best scholarly treatment I know is the chapter about Gálvez in Kathleen DuVal’s book, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution.

There’s also a children’s book called Conoce a Bernardo de Gálvez, published in 2017, that’s about Gálvez and the whole episode involving Valcarce: