page_title: Spanish Americans
section_title: Hawaii
hierarchical_section_title: Spanish Americans / Principal areas of settlement / Hawaii
caption_attribution_description: English: Spanish children disembarking from the SS Heliopolis in Honolulu, Hawaii - "Immigrants arrive after many weary weeks at sea". The Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu, Hawaii). April 30, 1907. p. 3.
context_page_description: Spanish Americans are Americans whose ancestry originates wholly or partly from Spain.
  Spanish Americans are the longest-established European-American group with a continuous presence in Florida since 1565 and are the eighth-largest group in the United States of America.
  Most Americans of Latin American descent have Spanish ancestral roots due to five centuries of Spanish colonial settlement and large-scale immigration after independence. By this criterion, white Hispanic and Latino Americans largely overlap with "Spanish Americans", with the caveat that the former group can include European ancestries other than Spanish, and self-reported white Latinos often have some Amerindian ancestry. However, the term "Spanish-American" is used only to refer to Americans whose ancestry originates directly from Spain, and excludes Americans who immigrated from Latin America and have Spanish origins. Basque Americans and Catalan Americans may or may not be considered Spanish Americans, as they form a separate linguistic group from other Spaniards. Like other Europeans, people directly from Spain are considered White/Caucasian.
context_section_description: Spanish immigration to Hawaii began when the Hawaiian government and the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association (HSPA) decided to supplement their ongoing importation of Portuguese workers to Hawaii with workers recruited from Spain. Importation of Spanish laborers, along with their families, continued until 1913, at which time more than 9,000 Spanish immigrants had been brought in, most recruited to work primarily on the Hawaiian sugar plantations.
  The importation of Spanish laborers to Hawaii began in 1907, when the British steamship SS Heliopolis arrived in Honolulu Harbor with 2,246 immigrants from the Málaga province of Spain. However, rumored poor accommodations and food on the voyage created political complications that delayed the next Spanish importation until 1911, when the SS Orteric arrived with a mixed contingent of 960 Spanish and 565 Portuguese immigrants, the Spanish having boarded at Gibraltar, and the Portuguese at Oporto and Lisbon. Although Portuguese immigration to Hawaii effectively ended after the arrival of the Orteric, the importation of Spanish laborers and their families continued until 1913, ultimately bringing to Hawaii a total of 9,262 Spanish immigrants.
  Six ships between 1907 and 1913 brought over 9,000 Spanish immigrants from the Spanish mainland to Hawaii. Although many of the Portuguese immigrants who preceded them to Hawaii arrived on small wooden sailing ships of less than a thousand gross tonnage capacity, all of the ships involved in the Spanish immigration were large, steel-hulled, passenger steamships.
caption: Spanish children from the SS Heliopolis after arriving in Hawaii.
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