re: How many white people in Louisiana have Spanish last names?

Blake Miguez is A 7th generation Louisianan. I have 2 nephews with the same surname.

Who opened the gates of Toledo?

Spanish Colonial Louisiana on 64Parishes.com

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Spain governed the colony of Louisiana for nearly four decades, from 1763 through March 1803, returning it to France for a few months before France sold it to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The Spanish colonial period began with uncertainty and a major rebellion, but by its end Louisiana had reached a new level of prosperity. By employing effective administrators who were culturally sensitive to the colony’s French-speaking Creole population, the Spanish accomplished what the French had never done—transform Louisiana into a stable, growing outpost.

During the Spanish colonial period, there was a dramatic expansion of slavery in the young colony. The plantation economy drove the slave trade and grew in the mid-1790s as cotton and sugar replaced tobacco and indigo as the region’s major cash crops. The arrival of thousands of enslaved Africans, combined with Spain’s liberal manumission policies, also contributed to an increase in the colony’s population of free people of color, or gens de couleur libres. Trade connections multiplied—both up the Mississippi River toward the expanding American West and downriver toward the Gulf of Mexico—as New Orleans grew into a vital port. By the time Louisiana was sold to the United States, it had been transformed from a sparsely settled zone into a dynamic center for trade....

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Galvez
Marquez
Martinez
Sanchez
Franquez
Jimenez
Perez
Hernandez
Fernandez
Menendez
Rodriguez

There were large Spanish Colonial settlements in New Iberia, Ascension Parish, and St. Bernard Parish during the Spanish Colonial period. After Louisiana was sold to the US many moved to Baton Rouge which was still Spanish at that time. If you have ancestry that was in these areas in the early 1800s, you likely have Spanish and/or Canary Island ancestry.

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I knew about how a lot of the Cubans here in Fla are descended from Canary Islanders, but I didn't know the same is true about the Spanish people in Louisiana.

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In case you miss my other post. The below is the reason of your post. Majority of Spaniards that came to the Americas aren’t originally from the Canary Islands but passing thru on their way to the Americas.

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The Canary Islands was like a staging area for Spaniards coming to the new world. Kind of like a pre-Ellis island. Go there from the Spanish mainland, and then get their final assignments to the Americas.

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Cantrelle is a Spanish surname.