Remembering Manuela Peñuelas

By Nicole Martin, Ph.D. 

Manuela Ygnacia López Peñuelas is remembered as the only member of the Anza colonizing expedition of 1775-76 to die during the 1200-mile journey to colonize San Francisco, California. On the first night out from the final assembly point in Tubac, Arizona the expedition stopped to overnight at La Canoa, now known as Historic Canoa Ranch. As written in expedition leader Juan Bautista de Anza’s diary, Manuela “gave birth to a very lusty boy.” In his next entry, he recorded that in the early hours of the morning the mother “was taken with paroxysms of death.”   

Manuela came of age in a period of great economic and social strife. Born in the 1740s, she grew up in the northwestern frontier of Sonora and Sinaloa in a military family that identified as creole–Spaniards born in the Americas. In 1760, she married Joseph Vicente Féliz. Once a powerful family, the Féliz hacienda had been destroyed in fighting between encroaching settlers and the Yaqui and Mayo peoples. 

Joseph likely signed up his family, including a pregnant Manuela and their seven children, in hopes of securing a more prosperous future in San Francisco. Considering gender norms of the time, Manuela probably had no say in the decision that would force her family to travel over a thousand miles across inhospitable lands. 

The expedition welcomed large families of mixed ancestry and pregnant women. Franciscan friar Junípero Serra believed “Spanish” or “Hispanicized” women and families would save Spain’s collapsing California missions and help assimilate local Indigenous populations. For this reason, the Anza expedition included 30 soldiers, their wives, and over 100 children, as well as Indigenous guides and servants. 

Expedition chroniclers meticulously recorded the health, births, miscarriages, and emotional states of the eight pregnant women on the trail. Traveling only with pack animals, these women gave birth in makeshift tents and carried their youngest children in their arms. It is astonishing that more women did not suffer Manuela’s fate.  

While Manuela’s passing was a tragedy, her life and fortitude reveal just as much as her death about the Spanish colonists who shaped the American nation at its inception.  

Manuela’s descendant, Stella Cardoza, speculated on Manuela’s death. “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.” Cardoza admires Manuela’s strong character, noting that Manuela had already travelled over 500 miles through the desert just to reach Tubac.

On the same day that her son was baptized, Manuela was buried with church rites at San Xavier del Bac Mission. “She died young,” Cardoza reflects, “yet left her footprints in the Sonoran Desert sands.”