Luisa de la Rua was a daughter of Francisco and Josefa Falcon de la Rua, early settlers of the third Spanish period of Pensacola, Florida, which began with Benardo Galvez' siege and ouster of the British there in 1781.

In 1804, Luisa was married to one Francisco de la Rosa, this occuring in New Orleans with both of her parents in attendance, as shown in the records of St. Louis Cathedral, to wit:

Don Francisco de la Rosa, native of Pueblo de Gueman, Archdiocese of Seville Province of Andalusia in Spain, son of Don Francisco de la Rosa and of Doña Maria Mezia, now deceased
Married August 20, 1804
Doña Luisa de la Rua, native of Pensacola, daughter of Don Francisco de la Rua and of Doña Josefa Suarez Falcon,
Witnesses: Don Antonio de Argote, Don Jose Renes, Don Jose Pena, Doña Carlota Jardelat and the expressed parents of the contracting.

Francisco de la Rosa owned and operated a goleta (schooner) sailing regularly out of New Orleans and delivering goods to the Texas coast for the supply of the Spanish garrisons operating there, including the garrison at Bexar (modern San Antonio). At some point, to the tune of 19,000 pesos, Francisco "financed" a shipment to Governor Manuel Salcedo for the benefit of the garrison, which was floundering for lack of funding from Madrid. While waiting for payment, Francisco died when his ship was lost in a storm in Matagorda Bay, resulting in the loss of all aboard.

Whether to investigate her husband's death or to seek recovery of monies owed him by the Spanish provincial government is unclear, but Luisa, in 1809, traveled north through western Louisiana to Natchitoches and then across the Sabine River (and the infamous "Neutral Zone") to Nacogdoches where she stayed long enough to appear on the Spanish census of that year. She and her party, (which included a Miguel de la Rua ), then continued down the old "El Camino Real" to San Antonio.

Once there, she did, in fact, begin to petition the authorities for payment, to little avail. To make matters worse, the events engendered by the Magee-Gutierrez expedition (1812-13) were a distraction and to make matters very much worse, Salcedo himself was brutally murdered by rogue elements of that effort.

She never returned either to New Orleans or Pensacola, but remarried to Mariano Lopez of San Antonio and remained there until her death in 1820. The subject of some study by historians, her Last Will & Testament, preserved in the Bexar Archives at the University of Texas, reveals the travails of women in the Spanish Borderlands and the effects of Spanish law on their fortunes.

Luisa was originally interred at the old Campo Santo de San Fernando cemetery and was among those, in the mid 1800s, moved to the then new San Fernando Cemetery #1.