Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans by John B. Garvey, Mary Lou Widmer

the holder should profit.”
    All of these harsh words were directed against French colonialism because the French approached Louisiana as a money-maker. It was never that, and so, in one way, it must be admitted that it was a failure. But a city was established, trade had begun, and New Orleans was a living, breathing, seductive lady, to whom much had happened. Now, the lady was to become Spanish, or so the treaty said.

General Alessandro O’Reilly, sent to take over Louisiana for Spain in 1769.
    CHAPTER IV
    The Spanish Period
    Although the city remained tenaciously French throughout the period of Spanish domination, Spain’s influence in New Orleans is still felt today. Spanish colonial Louisiana became part of the existing Spanish colonial administrative structure, in which the governor of New Orleans reported to the governor general in Havana, Cuba, who in turn reported to the viceroy of New Spain in Mexico.
    New Orleans was strategically positioned within the transportation and communications systems of the Gulf of Mexico’s half moon that linked Cuba, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, and Mexico’s Gulf Coast and Yucatan with the rest of Central America. During the antebellum period and after, the port of New Orleans was a nexus of trade in goods and slaves, smuggling and piracy, capital ventures, immigration and emigration, troop movements, filibustering adventurers, and travel between the eastern United States and southern tips of North America.
    The first Spanish-language newspaper in the United States, El Misisipi, was founded in New Orleans in 1808. Prior to the Civil War, at least twenty-three periodicals in Spanish were published in the city. New York, the nearest contender of Spanish-speaking populations, had only thirteen newspapers. The major French language newspapers, L’Abeille and L’Avenir du peuple, both printed Spanish language sections throughout the 1830s.
    Nineteenth century expatriates and émigrés from around the Caribbean and Spanish America would have found New Orleans the least alienating city in the nation—besides the substantial population of Spanish speakers, most of their educated classes knew French and could get by without speaking a word of English. New Orleans’s dominance of the banana industry brought in massive waves of Hondurans in the 1940s, followed later by Cubans in the 1960s and other groups up through the present (Gruesz 2002).
    When the French colonials came to Louisiana, they brought their wives and families, and so their heritage remained intact. When the Spanish settlers came, they came in smaller numbers. Men often came alone and married Creole girls native to Louisiana. The language spoken in most of their homes was, therefore, French, as were the customs and traditions. The Spanish were assimilated into the already-established French way of life and made little change in the people they controlled. They were, perhaps, more sober in their Catholicism than the pleasure-loving French Creoles , but in time, the French even managed to convert the Spanish to a more lethargic religious life.
    The word “Creole ” derives from the Spanish criollo, “a child born in the colonies,” according to John Churchill Chase in Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children . . . (1960) . Therefore, native-born Orleanians of Spanish and French descent were designated Creoles , even if their parents were strictly European.
    Only one group of Spanish settlers arrived en masse to stay. They were the Canary Islanders, who settled in St. Bernard Parish in 1778. Colonists migrated to Louisiana from Spanish Florida and settled in the parish called New Iberia (New Spain).
    The most indelible impression left by the Spanish from their forty-year rule (1762-1800) is the Spanish style of architecture with which the Vieux Carré is stamped. Even this was the outcome of accident, not purposeful design, as we shall see.
    As to the beginning of Spanish rule, it is well to say that at the outset, the change in