Teresa Martín and Luisa Menéndez

In 1600, Teresa Martín and Luisa Menéndez were among the witnesses called before the expansionist governor of La Florida after the Spanish Crown demanded official testimonies regarding the land, resources, and potential wealth in the colonial interior of North America. Martín and Menéndez were considered ideal informants. As Indigenous women who had married Spaniards, both were closely associated with the first inland European settlement, a Spanish fort at the Catawba town of Joara. In these firsthand accounts, their descriptions of La Tama—a Native American paramount chiefdom in the Piedmont region of present-day Georgia—have long merited closer study as essential primary documents.

Teresa Martín & Luisa Menéndez: Indigenous Women from Appalachia in the Spanish Colonial Record translates and publishes two important transcripts of the governor's investigation in their entirety: the "Relación de la Tama y su tierra, y de la población de ingleses" (Account of La Tama and Its Land, and the English Settlement) and the paylist in which Martín claims her deceased husband's salary from the Spanish Crown. Read through the lens of Latin American testimonio, these documents extend the timeline of Indigenous literatures of America written in Latin script to the sixteenth century and underscore the indelible ties between the contemporary nations of Turtle Island (North America) and Abiayala (Latin America). They also suggest a more nuanced history of Latinx peoples in the southeastern United States.

With contributions from leading scholars, editors Melissa D. Birkhofer and Paul M. Worley critically examine these accounts in essays that reframe readers' current understanding of US history, literature, and culture.