One of the biggest Independence Day celebrations outside of North America takes place in Macharaviaya, Spain, a mountain town, population 500, in the southern province of Málaga. Thousands of people attend the festivities, during which villagers wearing 18th-century period costumes reenact the 1781 Siege of Pensacola, a turning point in the American Revolution. The flag of the United States features prominently. To the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” an actor delivers a dramatic reading, in Spanish, of Francis Scott Key’s poem “Defence of Fort M’Henry,” on which the song was based. The evening ends with fireworks.
Macharaviaya observes the independence of the United States because a hero of the American Revolution, Bernardo de Gálvez, was born there. Gálvez was the Spanish governor of Louisiana whose troops, including Spaniards, Spanish Americans, American Indians, and Black people, both enslaved and free, defeated the British in Florida. He had a hand in securing Spanish silver from Havana that George Washington used to pay and provision the troops fighting for him in the Battle of Yorktown. He also helped draft the Treaty of Paris that ended the war. Washington later recognized that Gálvez had been crucial to the revolution’s success. After the war, Spain claimed Florida and held on to it until the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty, which made it a territory of the United States.
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Macharaviaya’s Independence Day celebrations may sound like nothing more than a funny bit of trivia—quirky festivities in honor of a mostly forgotten historical figure. But they also serve as a rejoinder to the arguments now common on the right that America’s Anglo-Saxon heritage is what ties its people together. When President Trump welcomed King Charles III and Queen Camilla to the White House in April, he lauded the “Anglo-Saxon courage” of the revolting British colonists and said that the culture, character, and creed of a “small but mighty kingdom from across the sea” had laid the foundation of our national identity. But if a Spaniard played such an important role in the founding, and if Pensacola—which sits in a deep-red county of a deep-red state—was liberated from Great Britain due to the bravery in battle of Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic people, then their descendants today are “heritage Americans” as much as anyone else the nativist right might bless with that moniker.
Any history book will tell you that Spaniards arrived in North America more than 100 years before British colonists landed at Jamestown. Spanish was the first European language spoken in the Americas. And many place names in the United States—San Antonio, Los Angeles, Santa Fe—remind us of the nation’s Spanish roots. Yet despite such deep ties, many Americans regard Hispanic culture as perpetually foreign. Perhaps celebrating Gálvez and his role in the American founding can change this dynamic.
Gálvez isn’t exactly unknown, even if he’s less familiar to American schoolchildren than the Marquis de Lafayette. Galveston, Texas, was named after him. In 1980, for the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Mobile, where troops led by Gálvez defeated the British, the U.S. Postal Service issued a Bernardo de Gálvez commemorative stamp. The city of Pensacola celebrates Gálvez Day in May, to commemorate the Siege of Pensacola. In 1783, to commemorate that battle’s second anniversary, the Continental Congress resolved to have a portrait of Gálvez hung in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. That portrait was finally unveiled in 2014, after a Spanish immigrant made it her mission to have the 200-year-old resolution fulfilled in the U.S. Capitol. The same year, a joint resolution from Congress made Gálvez an honorary American citizen because he had “played an integral role in the Revolutionary War and helped secure the independence of the United States.” Gálvez is one of eight people to receive the honor, alongside Winston Churchill and Mother Teresa. Carlos del Toro, the secretary of the Navy under President Biden, announced in 2024 that the Navy would name a new warship the USS Galvez.
Guillermo Fesser, a Spanish journalist who wrote a children’s book called Conoce a Bernardo de Gálvez (“Get to Know Bernardo de Gálvez”), told the audience at the July 4, 2024, celebration in Macharaviaya that many in the United States see Hispanics as “bad hombres,” or as dangerous figures who “arrived last night to abuse your daughter or steal your jobs.” He said that he has talked with “dozens and dozens” of students at schools across the United States, where he tells them that Gálvez’s army “saved George Washington’s ass.” In Gálvez’s army, Fesser said, “there were people from Africa, there were people from Europe, there were people from America, and there were mixed people from the three continents.” When he looks out at students not only in Hispanic strongholds such as Florida and the Southwest, but also across New England and the Midwest, he said, he sees “the army of Gálvez, each one different from the other, from all the colors, families, and faiths, and that’s what makes the United States such a great country.”
Yet if Gálvez can connect Hispanics in the United States both to Spain and to the founding of the U.S., his legacy also reopens an old debate about Hispanic American group identity. Are Hispanic and Latino synonymous? Are Spaniards part of the group, or not? Is Enrique Iglesias Hispanic? Rosalía?
In recent years, some Hispanics have sought greater connection with Spain. A good number of them, especially the descendants of conversos—whose families continued to practice Judaism despite their formal conversion to Christianity, fled or were expelled from Spain during the Inquisition, and eventually landed in places such as New Mexico and Florida—sought Spanish citizenship under the Spanish Law of Return, in effect from 2015 to 2019. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have emigrated to Spain in recent years, as the United States has become less welcoming. “They are not strangers,” Fesser said in Macharaviaya of these new arrivals. “They are the heirs of those who left with Gálvez and then returned, and I hope we will say to them, ‘Welcome home.’”
Yet other Hispanics are inclined to see Spaniards as very different from them. People who came, or whose families came, directly from Spain to the United States represent 1 percent of all Hispanics. Members of that tiny minority have higher levels of education, rates of homeownership, and median incomes than other Hispanics. Some who don’t embrace their Spanish ancestry view those who do as part of the colonizing minority, not the colonized majority. If you watch Hispanics reveal the results of their DNA tests on YouTube—it’s a thing—you’ll see people who are visibly amused, maybe even delighted, to learn that a significant percentage of their ancestry comes from Africa, Asia, or Indigenous America, and some who are visibly bummed when a significant percentage of their DNA is from Spain.
Shaking their reputation as bloodthirsty conquerors has been a challenge that Spaniards have tried to overcome at least since Bartolomé de las Casas wrote his 1542 treatise, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, about Spanish cruelty toward indigenous people of the Americas. Genocide, the spread of disease, and, as Protestants saw things, the popish Catholicism of Spaniards contributed to the rise of a Black Legend about Spain—la leyenda negra—that remained alive in the United States for hundreds of years after the 16th century. Honoring Gálvez as a hero of independence and the leader of a multiracial army has become a way for Spaniards to attempt to redefine how they are seen in the U.S. One main goal of the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute, a New York nonprofit founded in 1954 and funded in part by the Spanish royal family, is to make Gálvez, and Spain’s contributions to the independence of the United States in general, a more central part of the public story of the independence of the United States. The institute’s America&Spain250 initiative promotes, as its annual report from last year put it, “awareness amongst Hispanic and Latino communities, descendants of Spanish Americans, of their foundational role in the history of the United States.”
Earlier this year, the institute sponsored a contest for American high-school students to produce an original podcast “exploring key figures and events connected to the shared history of Spain and the United States.” The winners were two students at Benjamin Franklin High School in New Orleans, who focused on Gálvez’s legacy in the city. One of the students, Elodie Colón, said in a video announcing the winners, “As a Latina woman living where Gálvez once governed, I think the representation of someone like me caught between languages and countries is something that really needs to be seen more often.” She continued, “We have the power to make that happen and to show young Hispanic children that they don’t have to fit the traditional mold of an American hero to change America.”
According to Teresa Valcarce, who immigrated from Spain in 1999 and became a U.S. citizen in 2007, her yearslong quest to have the portrait of Gálvez hung in the home of Congress, to make good on the 1783 resolution, was motivated by a desire for children like Colón to understand their connection to the founding of the United States. In a 2014 ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Capitol, Bob Menendez, then a senator from New Jersey, with Mayor Antonio Campos of Macharaviaya and other distinguished visitors from Spain listening from just a few feet away, argued that Gálvez should be seen as a founding father for Hispanics. Menendez said, “When we look to the contributions Hispanics have made to this nation, let’s first look at the man in this portrait who symbolizes that contribution.”
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Leveraging a representative hero of the Revolution to lay claim to an equal share in America is itself something of an American tradition, encompassing such figures as Tadeusz Kościuszko, Crispus Attucks, Deborah Sampson, and Haym Salomon. But Gálvez’s promoters on both sides of the Atlantic also expect too much of him. They want him to be someone Hispanics in the United States can see as a reflection of themselves. Gálvez promoters also want all Americans to see his army as a symbol of the promise of our multiracial democracy. But at least some schoolchildren getting off a tour bus at the Capitol will look at the portrait of Gálvez, in his fancy European clothing, and conclude that he’s a representative more of the Spanish elite than of their ancestors. And many Hispanics of African or Indigenous descent still reckon with legacies of inequality and racial exclusion that their service in the U.S. or Latin American militaries did not ameliorate. These are old rifts within Hispanic communities that the figure of Gálvez alone, and our presence at the time of independence, cannot reconcile.
Even so, placing Gálvez in the pantheon of the American Revolution really might help all Americans, even skeptics, see that Hispanics belong in this country. If we can plant our flag in the founding moment, we just might be able to change how we’re viewed. In Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda cast people of color as Founders as a provocative gesture toward inclusion. The figure of Gálvez requires no such reimagination, because he’s a real historical figure who was actually in the room where it happened, so to speak.
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