Plazas and Power: Canary Islanders at Galveztown, an Eighteenth-Century Spanish Colonial Outpost in Louisiana

During the late 18th century Spain sent several hundred Canary Islanders (Isleños) to serve as soldiers and settlers in its Louisiana colony. Galveztown, in the Isle d’Orleans, was a planned settlement consisting of a fort and adjacent village. Galveztown was beset by disease, hurricanes, floods, drought, and war. By the 1790s the villagers were described as living in “the most abject want and misery.” In an effort to explain why the Isleños remained at Galveztown as long as they did, the nature of social control in Spanish North America must be understood. In particular, this article examines how Spanish colonial town planning functioned as a form of social control. It is argued that town plazas were the materialization of Spanish efforts to use the cultural landscape as a means of controlling colonial populations. As such, the materiality of the plaza at Galveztown may be reflected in the archaeological record.