Spanish immigration to Hawaii

Spanish immigration to Hawaii began in 1907 when the Hawaiian government and the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association (HSPA) decided to supplement their ongoing importation of Portuguese workers to Hawaii with workers recruited from Spain. Importation of Spanish laborers, along with their families, continued until 1913, at which time more than 9,000 Spanish immigrants had been brought in, most recruited to work primarily on the Hawaiian sugarcane plantations.

Hawaiian historians, such as Reginald Yzendoorn and Richard W. Rogers, defended the possibility of the first European discovery of the Hawaiian Islands by Spain, especially by the Spanish sailor Juan Gaetano, since several 16th-century documents and maps detailed islands in the same geographical position that received the name: "La Mesa" in the case of Hawaii, "La Desgraciada" to refer to Maui, "Ulloa" to Kahoʻolawe, and "Los Monges" to Lanai and Molokai. In addition, other logbooks, such as those of the corvettes Descubierta and Atrevida, make these islands coincide at the same point in the Pacific Ocean. Likewise, geographers who had access to privileged information about the Spanish expeditions, such as Abraham Ortelius, did not fail to locate islands called “Los Bolcanes” and “La Farfana” at those same coordinates.

Perhaps the first Spanish immigrant to take up residence in Hawaii was Francisco de Paula Marín (1774-1837), a self-promoting adventurer who knew several languages, and served King Kamehameha I as an interpreter and military advisor. Later Marin may have advised Kamehameha's son Kauikeaouli (Kamehameha III) on Hawaii's fledgling cattle industry, as Marin had spent time in Spanish California, and Kauikeaouli visited there in 1832 to observe the California cattle industry first-hand. Kauikeaouli was greatly impressed with the horsemanship and cattle handling skills of the Spanish vaqueros of California, and he invited several of them to Hawaii to teach those skills to his own people. The native Hawaiians these vaqueros trained became the "Paniolo", or "Hawaiian cowboys", who carry on a tradition of horsemanship and cattle ranching to the present day. There were, no doubt, other Spanish adventurers who arrived throughout the mid-19th century on whaling ships, but their numbers would have been few.

The rise in the late 1800s of the sugar industry in the Hawaiian Islands created a huge demand for laborers to work on the sugarcane plantations. The Hawaiian government, with the support of the plantation owners, initially brought in contract laborers from China to fill this need, but public sentiment gradually turned against continued importation of the Chinese, and Portuguese workers were recruited to take their place. Then there was also the issue of the plantation overseers. These men, the Field Bosses, were tasked to see that the laborers did the “proper amount of work” even if they had to be “tough.” In California the Andalucians established communities in the orchard towns and settled down. Over the years, the next generation of Hawaiian Spaniards gradually left the orchards and started new occupations in the Santa Clara Valley and other California regions.