Elosia Delen

I represent Elosia Delen, a free parda girl born in Louisiana. At the time of the 1820 census in Pensacola, I was 14 years old, and I lived with my father, Baltasar Centeno, a Spanish fisherman; my mother, Ysabel Shouen, a free parda woman; and my four siblings. I appear to have a different last name than my mother, so I may have been my mother’s child from a previous relationship in Louisiana, where we both were born. Families of mixed ethnicity like ours were quite common in Spanish West Florida, as the Spanish did not have the same social taboos as Anglo-American society. Also in our household was Francisco Reguera, an elderly man from Havana, also a fisherman, whose relationship to the family is unclear.