Luis de Carabajal y Cueva, born in Mogadouro, Portugal, to Gaspar de Carabajal and Francisca de León, Jewish conversos, had at age eight gone with his family to Sahagún, in the Kingdom of León.

After his father died his tutor, Duarte de León, had sent him back to Portugal.

After spending thirteen years in Cape Verde, Africa, as a royal accountant in the slave trade, he had sailed to Seville and married Guiomar de Ribera, a lady from Lisbon whose father was also in the slave trade.

Motivated shortly thereafter by financial losses and marital problems, Carabajal had sailed for New Spain in his own ship as second in command of the Spanish Indies fleet.

Upon his arrival he had been appointed mayor of Tampico.

Mayor Carabajal had in the fall of 1568 rounded up seventy-seven Englishmen marooned on the Tamaulipas coast by John Hawkins, who had lost some of his ships in a fight with the Spanish fleet at Veracruz.

When this exploit was reported to Viceroy Martín Enríquez de Almanza, he was so impressed that he had commissioned Carabajal a captain, sending him to open a road between Pánuco province and the Mazapil mines.

Later he was sent to chastise hostile Indian bands at the mouth of the Río Bravo (Rio Grande).

He claimed to have punished the natives responsible for the massacre of four hundred castaways from three ships wrecked on the coast en route to Spain—presumably the Padre Island shipwrecks of 1554.

During the campaign, he had crossed the lower Rio Grande into what is now Texas, becoming the first Spanish subject to do so.

Accused of using his authority to trade in enslaved Indians, Carabajal had been summoned to Mexico City to defend himself.

He soon left there for Spain, where in March 1579 he had proposed to the Council of the Indies to develop all the ports from the Río Pánuco to Santa Elena on the Atlantic coast; to settle the area between Tampico and the mines of Mazapil and Zacatecas; and to extend exploration and settlement across Mexico "from sea to sea."

Phillip II, King of Spain, grants him the title of governor and captain-general with the mission to "discover, pacify and settle" a new province in New Spain to be called Nuevo Reyno de León, two hundred leagues inland from the port of Tampico.

Significantly, the charter allows the Blood Purity Laws (Pureza de Sangre), which stipulate that Spanish immigrants to the New World be at least three generations of Old Christian, to be lifted in an effort to encourage migration to this remote province beset by attacks by indigenous tribes.

This Northern Province will therefore become a target for migration by Iberian conversos, i.e., New Christians.

Nuevo Reino de León (The New Kingdom of León) had originally been founded by Alberto del Canto, although frequent raids by Chichimecas, the natives of the north, had prevented the establishment of almost any permanent settlements.

In consideration of the appointment of governor, Luis de Carabajal y Cuevo undertakes to colonize the territory at his own expense, being allowed to repay himself out of the revenues.

His original jurisdiction is to comprise a somewhat ill-defined territory, beginning at the port of Tampico, extending along the River Panuco, and thence turning northward; but it is not to exceed 200 leagues either way.

It would seem to have included Tamaulipas, as well as the present states of Nuevo León and Coahuila, and parts of San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas, Durango, Chihuahua and Texas.

Nuevo Reino de León will eventually become (along with the provinces of Coahuila, Nuevo Santander and Texas) one of the Eastern Internal Provinces in Northern New Spain.

Carabajal, receiving his royal patent as governor on May 31, 1579, had sailed onboard the Santa Catarina with one hundred families, most of them recruited from his own and his wife's kin.

Arriving in Mexico in 1580, he begins to prepare for his occupancy of the territory.

He plants his colony in 1582 on a site formerly called Santa Lucia, and names the place City of León.

He also establishes a settlement called San Luis Rey de Francia.

Luis de Carabajal y Cueva, a Spanish-Portuguese adventurer, slave-trader, and from 1579 governor of Nuevo León, had been allowed one hundred soldiers and sixty married laborers, accompanied by their wives and children, to pacify and colonize the new territory.

It is safe to assume that a number of these early colonists were Spanish Jews, who, as conversos like the Carabajal family, had hoped to escape persecution and find prosperity in the New World.

In this expectation they are disappointed, for within a decade after their settlement a score of them are openly denounced and more or less severely punished for Judaizing.

There seems to be an extensive colony of them in Mexico in 1590.

Don Luis had brought with him to Mexico his brother-in-law, Don Francisco Rodríguez de Matos, and his sister, Doña Francisca Nuñez de Carabajal, with their children.

While in the midst of prosperity, and seemingly leading Christian lives, they are seized in 1590 by the Inquisition.

Doña Isabel is tortured until she implicates the whole of the Carabajal family, who, with the exception of Don Baltasar, are imprisoned.

The latter succeeds in escaping to Tasco, and is condemned to death in his absence.

Carabajal, also accused by the Inquisition of heresy,  is condemned to a six-year exile from New Spain, but will die in prison in 1595 while awaiting the execution of his sentence.