Teresa Martin and Luisa Menendez

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.x000D
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 inglés (Account of La Tama and its lands, 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 Abya Yala (Latin America). They also suggest a more nuanced history of Latinx peoples in the southeastern United States.x000D
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.

Author Biography

Melissa D. Birkhofer is a settler scholar who was born in Iowa and grew up in North Carolina. She is teaching assistant professor of English at Appalachian State University. Birkhofer was founding director of the Latinx Studies Program at Western Carolina University and is codirector of the journal Label Me Latina/o. With Paul M. Worley, she is co-translator of Miguel Rocha Vivas’s Word Mingas: Oralitegraphies and Mirrored Visions on Oralitures and Indigenous Contemporary Literatures. Paul M. Worley is a settler scholar from Charleston, South Carolina, and professor of Spanish at Appalachian State University, where he serves as chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. He is the author of Telling and Being Told: Storytelling and Cultural Control in Contemporary Yucatec Maya Literatures and, with Rita M. Palacios, coauthor of Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge. Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), holds degrees from Yale University and the College of William and Mary. Her work Going to Water won the Morning Star Award for Creative Writing from the Native American Literature Symposium and was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. She is coeditor of the Journal of Cherokee Studies and serves on the board of trustees for the North Carolina Writers’ Network.