WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

Throughout the early modern era, female migration from Spain to its colonies in the Americas, Europe and the Pacific remained numerically marginal, constituting less than a tenth of long-distance flows. Nonetheless, as commonplace narratives suggest, migrating Spanish women possessed a prominent social role in securing European families’ elevated social-legal status in the racialized colonial hierarchy, and advanced transatlantic business interests through marriage into urban elites.

This paper examines female transatlantic migration from a macro-historical perspective, asking what factors created obstacles or facilitated access to migration flows. I argue that the elite-family model is inadequate, as women of lower status could gain access to long-distance migration and even move outside the purview of patriarchal controls, depending though on circumstances on both sides of the Atlantic. Women (and men) of humble origins could access such destinations as Buenos Aires, where racial-economic inequalities were less entrenched than in Mexico City, an urban center heavily based on indigenous labor. From the Spanish side, in regions as Galicia women of humble origins could engage in migration networks connected via peninsular ports to the New World, thus moving independently of elite family networks.

I examine both sides of the Atlantic, looking at differences in gendered economic and familial roles across regions of origins in Spain, and between the race and class makeup of colonial cities. Furthermore, I look at changes in gendered migration in the post-colonial transition of the early nineteenth century – an era of haphazard political modernization despite the persistence of racial and economic structures.

I employ large datasets of female and male migrants collected from church records and censuses from archives on both sides of the Atlantic. I use Spatial analysis (GIS) to analyze migration networks connecting Spanish regions to urban destinations in the New World.