Hispanic Highlight: Teresa Valcarce helped Congress fulfill a 231-year-old promise

Known as the “Portrait Lady” in Congress, Teresa Valcarce led the quest to fulfill a Continental Congress Resolution that was 231 years overdue. Turns out it was harder than she initially thought.

Teresa was born and raised in Spain and became a U.S. citizen in 2007. Years later, she read an article that reported on an unkept promise the Continental Congress had made to honor Bernardo de Gálvez by hanging his portrait in the room where Congress convened and took on the task to see the promise carried through. 

First, she called the office of the official Senate historian, which dug up the resolution. She proceeded to occupy her spare time researching the portrait and getting people who would listen fired up about it. Among them, Senator Bob Menéndez. 

After months of work and even commissioning a portrait of Gálvez (copy of a private collection one in Spain), Teresa participated in the unveiling of the painting on the west wall of S-116, a room the Senate Foreign Relations Committee uses to host official coffees with heads of state.

Bernardo de Gálvez served as governor to Spanish-controlled Louisiana during the American Revolutionary War. During his tenure, he defeated the British Army in Pensacola (West Florida) and allowed colonial troops to access the Mississippi River as a critical supply line. Thanks to Teresa’s conviction of giving credit where credit is due, on December 16, 2004, the U.S. Congress awarded Gálvez honorary citizenship.

When she is not thinking about more ways to further connect Spain and the US, Teresa works at the Center for the Child Care Workforce, A Project of the American Federation of Teachers Educational Foundation. In addition, she produces a weekly newsletter for Spaniards in DC that currently has over 800 subscribers.

She has been featured over 200 times on multiple major media in both the US and Spain, including a Telemundo Emmy-award winning coverage.