Latin American History, From Coast to Coast

On Sept. 8, 1565, the Spanish conquistador Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and 800 Spanish settlers founded San Agustín (St. Augustine) in Spain’s La Florida colony, the latter meaning in Spanish “the flowery” or “land of flowers.” Perhaps with a colonial viewpoint toward religious conversion, Menéndez invited the Indigenous Timucua people, who had lived in the area for half a millenium by the time of Menéndez’s arrival, to mass and a meal of thanksgiving after arrival.

This first thanksgiving, as it were, occurred at San Agustín 56 years before the more-well-known Pilgrim harvest festival of thanksgiving at Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts. Many Americans associate the modern holiday of Thanksgiving with the Pilgrim version of history, mostly because the British eventually took over La Florida, and they and the American colonists liked their version better. Generational, institutional bias aside, the Spanish established the wooden Castillo de San Marcos (Castle of San Marcos) shortly after arrival—the first European settlement to be established in North America.

In the centuries that have followed, the modern-day United States has been shaped by Hispanic history and culture, which many groups will likely get a feel for as they read about and then tour evocative sites and neighborhoods around the country. In fact, Americans of Latino descent make up 20% of the U.S. population, which is roughly 65 million doctors, lawyers, professors, bricklayers, chefs, nurses, construction workers, journalists, students, psychologists, CEOs, and every other profession one can imagine. Heritage + History decided to look more closely at several group-friendly sites and neighborhoods that illustrate just how deep and intertwined the heritage of Latin Americans is within broader American history.

AROUND FLORIDA

Returning to Castillo de San Marcos, a succession of the initial wooden forts on the site either burned down readily or rotted away as termites found the walls tasty. By 1668, ambitious pirates pillaged San Agustín, killing 60 residents while the soldiers bravely hid out the siege in the rickety Castillo. With an infusion of Spaniard funding after the San Agustín fiasco, La Florida Gov. Manuel Sendoya (really, Timucua laborers) began in 1672 to build the limestone Castillo de San Marcos, which still stands today and is a national monument within the city of St. Augustine, Florida.

The fort was built with coquina, a type of limestone common in the area developed over thousands of years, in part, from crushed, compacted, and chemically “glued” together clamshell fragments. The resulting limestone is porous, and the Spaniards did not know if it was sturdy (which is kind of important in a fort). Nevertheless, it is abundant in the area and seemed more substantial than the wooden alternatives, so they winged it with coquina. The Spaniards finished initial construction in 1695. The coquina walls were tested in battle seven years later, when English forces from Charleston (South Carolina, today) conquered San Agustín and bombarded the Castillo with cannonballs, a time-honored and usually effective method of breaching wood, granite, and other hard-rock fortresses. But, due to the porous limestone of the garrison, the cannonballs either bounced off the walls or sank into the walls a few inches and stopped, and the English did not significantly damage Castillo de San Marcos.

Today, the group-friendly Castillo de San Marcos National Monument includes the only still-standing 17th-century military garrison in the U.S., the coquina limestone 1795 fort that was subsequently redesigned and enlarged. The National Park Service offers historical and cultural presentations, musket and cannon firing on weekends, and self-guided tours of the fort’s casements and exhibits therein using the national monument’s Android or iOS app. Note, the park service wisely closes the popular gun deck during thunderstorms with lightning.

Along the Florida Atlantic coast just north of downtown Miami on the campus of Miami Dade College, the 1925 Freedom Tower reopened in September 2025 after a two-year restoration. One of Miami’s first skyscrapers at 289 feet tall, the Mediterranean Revival-style Freedom Tower was originally the offices of the Miami Daily News. After the 1959 Cuban Revolution, waves of Cuban immigrants came to the U.S., and from 1962 to 1974, the building served as an Ellis Island of the South, helping an estimated 400,000 Cuban immigrants with financial aid, health care, food, and other support. The distinctively yellow skyscraper with ornate layers at the top was likely easy to spot amid the city’s skyline.

Today, the tower, which is a National Historic Landmark, holds the collections of the Miami Dade College of Art and Design, and the college’s museum in the tower includes the permanent exhibition “Languages of Migration,” offering immersive galleries reflecting on Cuban American history and art, plus additional rotating exhibitions. The museum is open every day except Tuesdays.

Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood is 3 miles inland from Freedom Tower. The historically Cuban area around mural-rich Calle Ocho (Southwest Eighth Street) is filled with Cuban restaurants, bakeries, rum bars, art galleries, cigar shops, fruit stands, and music everywhere. Stop at the Little Havana Visitor Center to get oriented. Máximo Gómez Park (also known as Domino Park) is often filled with players engaged in intense games of dominoes.

One of the best ways to experience Little Havana is to devour Cuban foods and drinks, including vaca frita, shredded beef grilled with garlicky mojo sauce and served with sweet plantains, and foamy espresso-and-sugar-rich Cuban coffee brewed in moka pots. Wash everything down with a glass of sugar cane juice. Mainstay establishments include Versailles Restaurant, Cafe La Trova, and Azucar Ice Cream Co., and Little Havana Tours offers walking tours of the neighborhood, including a food tour that concludes with a traditional Cuban meal.

Tampa’s Ybor City neighborhood, much of which today is a national historic landmark, is a diverse melting pot influenced by Cuban, Spanish, Italian, German, and Jewish immigrants. It formed around Don Vicente Martinez-Ybor’s cigar factory that opened in 1886, the city’s first, and neighborhood cigar shops with workers hand-rolling stogies today include Tabanero Cigars, Tampa Sweethearts Cigar Co., and J.C. Newman Cigar Co. Pull out your phone to photograph Ybor City’s wandering, free-roaming, herky-jerky chickens, which have meandered the neighborhood for more than a century and are protected by a city ordinance that designates Tampa a bird sanctuary. The Ybor City Museum State Park offers tours of a typical cigar worker’s casita and demonstrations of cigar hand-rolling. Groups can get around Ybor City aboard the free TECO Line Streetcar.

AROUND THE COUNTRY

San Antonio Missions National Historical Park in Texas comprises four Catholic Spanish missions dating to the 1700s (Mission Concepción, Mission San José, Mission San Juan, and Mission Espada). San Antonio’s most famous mission, Mission San Antonio de Valero, known more widely as The Alamo, also played a prominent role in Spanish and Texas history, and all the city’s missions offer group tours, some led by National Park Service rangers.

The City of Angels—Los Angeles, California—embraces its origins, including at El Pueblo de Los Ángeles Historical Monument, a thriving neighborhood near Union Station that is considered the birthplace of LA. Check out the teeming Olivera Street Mexican Marketplace and the eye-opening Chinese American Museum Los Angeles, and walking tours are available to coordinate through El Pueblo’s website.

Chicago’s National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture is in the heart of Paseo Boricua (Division Street) in the Humboldt Park neighborhood, a traditionally Puerto Rican-American neighborhood. The museum offers both self-guided and docent-led tours, with the latter limited to 10 participants, although larger groups of up to 50 people can book more than one docent tour or choose to self-guide.

The museum is in the Humboldt Park Stables and Receptory building, dating to the late 1800s, and it is the only museum in the continental U.S. focused on Puerto Rican art and culture. Visitors enter through a brick archway of the one-time carriage garage (called a “Receptory”) into a Queen Anne courtyard festooned with ornate mosaics reflecting Puerto Rico and the island’s culture. The museum’s exhibits in the building’s stables celebrate the diverse economic and cultural contributions of Puerto Rican-Americans to society in Chicago and across the nation.

By Todd R. Berger

Main Image: Mission San Antonio de Valero (The Alamo), San Antonio, Texas; Credit: Visit San Antonio