(Spanish) The son of Nuno.

Today the Spanish surname Nunez is concentrated in two sections of Louisiana: (1) St. Bernard Parish and nearby New Orleans and (2) the southwestern part of the state where people of that name first settled in Vermilion Parish and later spread westward into Cameron and Calcasieu parishes.* Each of the two areas was settled by unrelated Nunez families and at different times. Although most of the Nunez descendants in the two areas have been common folk, several became prominent in Louisiana politics, agriculture, and other professions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The first members of the Nunez clan to settle in St Bernard Parish were among the Canary Islanders (Isleños) who came in 1779, recruited by the Spanish government as colonists. Passenger lists of the several ships that earned the colonists give the names of only one Nuñez family, that of Manuel Nuñez Villavicencio accompanied by wife Josefa Suárez and five children, including two sons, Estéban and Ignacio. The few published church records of St. Bernard Parish suggest that Manuel and his sons were probably the progenitors of the Nunez families in that area.

Like the other Isleños Manuel settled along Bayou Terre-aux-Boeufs,4 one of the few marsh-free areas of the parish, as a small farmer and fisherman. In the mid-nineteenth century most of his descendants were living in the upper part of the bayou (between Reggio and St. Bernard) where Vincent Nuñez (m. María Serpas), grandson of Manuel, was a prominent merchant and sugar planter.

One of his sons, Estevan E. Nunez became sheriff of St. Bernard Parish during the 1870s, and in turn several of the latter's sons entered law, one, N. H. Nunez, becoming a district judge. More recent descendants have been state senators from St Bernard Parish.

By the 1870s several families had moved to New Orleans,8 which today contains about 10 percent of the Nunez households of the state.

The Nunez clan of southwestern Louisiana probably descends from a single progenitor, Joseph (José) Nuñez, native of Galicia, northwestern Spain, who came to the Attakapas probably toward the end of the eighteenth century or beginning of the nineteenth;9 apparently he had no connection with the Spanish colonists recruited to establish the town of New Iberia in 1779. About 1802 Joseph married an Acadian girl, Marie-Rose Richard, settling on the Vermilion River probably between present Abbeville and Lafayette. Having registered a cattle brand in 1804,12 Joseph apparently dealt as much in livestock as in farming, a characteristic livelihood of most Nunez families of southwestern Louisiana well into the present century. His three sons, Célestin (m. ca. 1825 Marie Broussard), Joseph, Jr. (m. ca. 1824 Marie Toups), and Jean-Sébastien (m. 1832 Clémentine LaPonte), began to move into the prairies west of Abbeville probably in the 1840s and by the 1850s their sons had firmly established the Nunez name in Vermilion Parish.

For instance, Joseph-Adrien (eldest son of Joseph, Jr with Marie Toups) accumulated a ranch of 14,000 acres that extended from the coastal marshes well into the prairies west of the Vermilion River, with a homestead a Nunez Island (present community of Nunez);14 he was also an antebellum state representative and senator of Vermilion Parish.

By the 1880s a son of Célestin, Sébastien (m. Émilie Trahan), had moved farther westward to settle on the cheniers within the coastal marshes near he community of Creole in present Cameron Parish16 likely to engage in the cattle industry that had developed along the Louisiana-Texas coast. Later migrations took other Nunez descendants into southeastern Texas