Life and Death of Manuela Peñuelas

This painting commissioned by the National Park Service illustrates the birth of Manuela Peñuelas’ son alongside her death on the Anza colonizing expedition.

Illustration by Bill Singleton

Article written by Nicole Martin, PhD

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On October 23, 1775, at the start of the Anza colonizing expedition (1775-76), Manuela Ygnacia López Peñuelas¹ “gave birth to a very lusty boy at nine o'clock at night.” In his next diary entry, Juan Bautista de Anza wrote that in the early hours of the morning, after failing to remove the afterbirth, the mother “was taken with paroxysms of death.” Her body was taken to San Xavier del Bac Mission the next day and buried with church rites on the same day that her son was baptized.²

From the beginning, the Spanish expedition to colonize Alta California (upper California) was marked with life and death. Manuela was the only one of 240 colonists to die on the over 1200 mile trail from Tubac to San Francisco, but she was not alone in the hardship she bore. At least eight women were pregnant during the difficult trek, several giving birth along the way. Traveling without wagons and only pack animals, these women gave birth in the open or makeshift tents and carried their youngest children in their arms.³ What must these women have felt in this in-between state, far from the homes they knew and the new homes they hoped to make in an unknown land?

As the settlers traveled north from the Spanish empire, the American Revolution was in full swing. The Spanish colonists arrived at their destination in San Francisco just a week before the Second Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence.⁴ While the Anza expedition has long been overshadowed by these events on the eastern seaboard, both historical moments played pivotal roles. They shaped the American nation and the people who call it home and resulted in policies that displaced Indigenous peoples from their homelands.

Leaving Home

In 1769, Spain set out to establish a string of missions in California to colonize and convert the coastal Indigenous populations. A few years later, these settlements were in danger of collapsing. That prompted the Franciscan friar Junípero Serra to argue for the need to send “Spanish” or “Hispanicized” women and families. The Viceroy of New Spain responded by sending an expedition to establish an overland route from Sonora to northern California. Juan Bautisa de Anza, captain of the Tubac military fort in northern Sonora (now southern Arizona), led the cause. He succeeded in 1774 by using existing Indigenous trails and replicated the journey in 1775-1776 with settler families.⁵

View of the Santa Cruz Valley National Heritage Area near where Manuela died along the expedition route.

By Julius Schlosburg, courtesy Sonoran Institute, 2022

The families on the Anza colonizing expedition included 30 soldiers, their wives, and over 100 children. There were also Indigenous guides and servants. The group primarily reflected the lower castes of colonial New Spain – a mix of Indigenous, African, and European heritage. Why were these settlers willing to leave their homes and undertake such a dangerous trek across deserts and mountains? Manuela’s story provides insight into one family’s decision.

Born in the mid 1740s in the northwestern frontier of Sonora and Sinaloa to a military family that identified as creole (Spaniards born in the Americas), Manuela came of age in a period of great economic uncertainty and social strife. The Yaqui and Mayo peoples revolted in 1740 against settler encroachment on their lands. Ill treatment from landowners and mine operators prompted it. The revolt and subsequent retaliation by the Spanish resulted in great bloodshed on both sides.⁶ Manuela married Joseph Vicente Féliz in 1760. Once a powerful family, the Féliz hacienda had been destroyed in the fighting, likely wiping out Joseph’s inheritance. When Joseph signed up for the Anza expedition – including a pregnant Manuela and their seven children– he was likely hoping for a better, more prosperous future for his family in Alta California.⁷

Women’s Hardship on the Trail

Reproduction was at the heart of Spain’s New World empire colonizing efforts. For this reason, the primary chroniclers of the Anza expedition – Anza himself and Father Pedro Font, the expedition chaplain – meticulously recorded the pregnancies, births, and miscarriages that occurred on the trail. Most of the women on the expedition were illiterate and none of them left a written record. That left male voices as the only clues as to how the women endured.⁸

Mission San Xavier del Bac in Arizona is a significant historic site on the lands of the Tohono O'odham Nation and is where Manuela was buried, and her son baptized on October 25, 1775.

NPS Photo

“Women at the time of the Anza expedition were subject to the will of their fathers and husbands,” explains Stella Cardoza, a descendant of Manuela’s family.⁹ Spanish patriarchal norms demanded that women be chaste, submissive, modest, and timid. While women certainly contested and pushed back against these norms, most of the women likely had very little say in their husband’s decision to join the expedition.¹⁰ Many, like Manuela, were already used to difficult conditions living in remote posts of the Spanish empire. In fact, Manuela’s family first traveled over 500 miles through the inhospitable Sonoran desert to reach Tubac, where the expedition began.

As tough and seasoned as the women were, carrying and bearing a child on the trek was an incredible and dangerous hardship. Font carefully noted each time a pregnant woman fell “violently ill” or “indisposed.” In one instance, he recorded how a woman confessed to him that she was “very fearful of dying.”¹¹ Anza observed how another woman who had the misfortune to miscarry “woke up in the morning with her whole body swollen, so I deferred the continuation of our march.”¹² Anza repeatedly decided to delay the expedition in order to provide time for women to recover from giving birth, although this often meant only one day of rest before continuing the march.

This illustration commissioned by the National Park Service depicts a woman colonist holding a baby on the Anza expedition.

By David Rickman, NPS Photo

When reflecting on her ancestor’s experiences, Stella speculates,“It could be that Manuela, after so many pregnancies, was not strong enough to endure her last child’s delivery. The mental and physical stress of preparing for the journey must have been very debilitating.”¹³ While the Anza and Font diaries reveal that the expedition’s pregnant women struggled and feared death, they do not tell us if the women felt loss for their old home or excitement for a new home. We also cannot know if they felt a kinship as mothers with the Native women who assisted the expedition. Nor do we know how they felt about contributing to a colonizing effort that took Indigenous homelands and sought to eradicate Native lifeways.

What their actions reveal, though, is that the pregnant women of the Anza expedition showed great resilience in the face of so much loss and hardship. “I have great admiration for Manuela,” Stella explains. “She must have had a strong character along with a loving heart for her family. She died young yet left her footprints in the Sonoran Desert sands.”¹⁴

Home and Homelands Exhibition

This project was made possible through the National Park Service in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation.

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¹ Manuela Peñuelas name varies considerably depending on the document (most commonly Maria or Manuela Piñuelas), but the author has decided to use the name and spelling adopted by a descendant of Manuela’s family, Stella Cardoza.

² Diary of Juan Bautista de Anza, October 23, 1775 - June 1, 1776, Web de Anza, University of Oregon, October 23, 24, 1775. See also Expanded Diary of Pedro Font, September 28, 1775 - June 5, 1776, Web de Anza, University of Oregon, October 23, 25, 1775. Both diaries are based upon Herbert E. Bolton's English translation of the diaries in Anza's California Expeditions, Volume III, 1931.

³ Peter L. Gough, Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail Historic Resource Study (July 2012), 74-75.

⁴ Patricia N. Limerick,“13 Heroic Strategies for Today’s Heroic People of Ambition,” Colorado Central Magazine, September 1, 1999.

⁵ Antonia I. Castañeda, “Engendering the History of Alta California, 1769-1848: Gender, Sexuality, and the Family,” California History 76, no. 2/3 (Fall 1997): 239. See also Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 32.

⁶ For more on this rebellion, see Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on Indians of the Southwest, 1533-1960 (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1962), Chapter 2: Mayos and Yaquis.

⁷ All information about Manuela’s background comes from Stella Cardoza, interview by Nicole Martin, National Park Service, 10/16/2023. Cardoza is a descendant of Manuela’s and has researched her background extensively.

⁸ Gough, Juan Buatista de Anza, 182, 186-87.

⁹ Cardoza, interview. Stella is Manuela’s second cousin, five generations removed.

¹⁰ Castañeda, “Engendering the History of Alta California,” 245-46.

¹¹ Expanded Diary of Pedro Font, November 5, 6 and December 24, 1775.

¹² Diary of Juan Bautista de Anza, November 9, 10, 1775.

¹³ Cardoza, interview.

¹⁴ Ibid.