Black and Brown

African Americans and the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920

Gerald Horne

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780814736739
• eBook ISBN: 9780814737927
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

Honorable Mention for 2005 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award Brings to light the lives of Black Americans living along the Mexican border during and immediately after the Mexican Revolution The Mexican Revolution was a defining moment in the history of race relations, impacting both Mexican and African Americans. For Black Westerners, 1910–1920 did not represent the clear-cut promise of populist power, but a reordering of the complex social hierarchy which had, since the nineteenth century, granted them greater freedom in the borderlands than in the rest of the United States.Despite its lasting significance, the story of Black Americans along the Mexican border has been sorely underreported in the annals of U.S. history. Gerald Horne brings the tale to life in Black and Brown. Drawing on archives on both sides of the border, a host of cutting-edge studies and oral histories, Horne chronicles the political currents which created and then undermined the Mexican border as a relative safe haven for African Americans. His account addresses Black people's role as "Indian fighters, " the relationship between African Americans and immigrants, and the U.S. government's growing fear of Black disloyalty. He also considers how the heavy reliance of the U.S. on Black soldiers along the border placed white supremacy and national security on a collision course that was ultimately resolved in favor of the latter. Mining a forgotten chapter in American history, Black and Brown offers tremendous insight into the past and future of race relations along the Mexican border.

CHAPTER 1
Before the Revolution

The Muslim armies that invaded and occupied Spain and Portugal beginning in 711 included the precursors of African Americans—soldiers from sub-Saharan Africa. Africans, consequently, were a factor in the New World virtually from the onset of Columbus’s journey, if not before.¹ Tucson is one of the oldest settlements in the nation now known as the United States. There are “claims that the city is even older than either of the contestants for first honors—Santa Fe and St. Augustine,” for “according to authentic records, Marcos de Niza and the Negro, Estevanico, explored Arizona in 1539…. We can place the date of Tucson’s settlement in 1555.”² The noted New Mexican archivist and writer Myra Ellen Jenkins has observed that the famed Pueblo Revolt of 1680, “which drove the Spanish from New Mexico for twelve years,” was led by a “Negro, or at least a mulatto.”³ Africans figure significantly in the early history of the “land of enchantment.” Consider Sebastian Rodriguez, a “pure bred Negro from Africa.” The “earliest mention of him is in 1689.” “Both of his parents were ‘jungle’ Negroes [sic]” and “might have come to New Spain by way of Brazil; his birthplace, however, was most likely a small river or the name of a district in Luanda [Angola].” A drummer with the military, he became a “town crier” in New Mexico and by 1697 was a major landowner in Santa Fe.⁴

According to Robert Lloyd Carlton, “around 20 percent of the Spanish-Mexican population of Upper California in 1790 had been of part-Negro ancestry.”⁵ “Many of the first settlers of Los Angeles,” says Scott Tadao Kurashige, “came from the Mexican city of Rosario located in the Sinaloa region where people of African descent and mixed ancestry were common.”⁶

As Mexico surged to independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century, those of African descent played a prominent role. “Father Miguel Hidalgo, the first leader of the revolt against Spain, issued several decrees in late 1810 demanding immediate manumission of all slaves on pain of death.”⁷ Theodore G. Vincent writes that the “mule driver Vicente Guerrero was Mexico’s equivalent of the United States’ Washington and Lincoln.” He was a “descendant of the 250,000 to 300,000 African slaves brought to colonial Mexico, he also had indigenous and Spanish roots.” To be sure, the color line in Mexico was not absent but it was not drawn as sharply as in the United States and, in any case, it was directed in the first place toward the indigenous population. Moreover, given ongoing tensions between the United States and Mexico, it made simple good sense for the latter to befriend the most disenchanted residents of the former.

In 1832 the German visitor Carl Christian Beecher compared the legal status of Afro-Mexicans with African Americans. “These blacks,” he said, “as is known, are free in the Republic of Mexico; which is to say, they enjoy, intimately, the same rights as do the rest of the inhabitants of the state, which is not the case in the United States of North America, where, as a result of the laws, or for prejudices, the blacks are humiliated and pressed down to the category of the lowest level of men.”

Guerrero had used “the September 16 independence celebration in 1829 to issue a presidential edict intended to definitely end the institution of slavery. Guerrero had the federal district official, Jose Maria Tormel, write the decree. Tormel had tried for three years to get the Congress of Mexico to definitively abolish slavery so as to discourage the influx of white settlers to Texas from the United States, who set up slave plantations thanks to special contracts and stood apart from the Spanish-speaking Mexicans.”⁸

Mexican officials “had attempted to abolish the slave system gradually through the Colonization Law of 1824, which emancipated slave children on their fourteenth birthdays. Another law in 1832 forbade the further importation of slaves into Texas, but white colonists”—who viewed this maneuver as a threat worthy of secession—“simply ignored this statute in the face of weak Mexican enforcement.”⁹ According to James SoRelle, these colonists were responsible for the fact that despite stubborn competition, “slavery in Texas was worse than in other states.”

In Texas, where the “Old South” merged seamlessly with the “Wild West,” brutal confrontations occurred between masters and enslaved Africans. But unlike their besieged compatriots elsewhere in the country, the latter had a convenient escape hatch on the border. They found it simpler to escape to the south than to the west or north. Interviewed in 1937, ninety-two-year-old San Antonio resident Felix Haywood, a former slave, chortled, “There was no reason to run up north. All we had to do was to walk south, and we’d be free as soon as [we] cross[ed] the Rio Grande. In Mexico you could be free.” The former slave Walter Rimm felt similarly. “All we had to do was walk, but walk south and we’d be free as soon as we crossed the Rio Grande. In Mexico you could be free,” he added with emphasis. “They didn’t care what color you were, black, white, yellow or blue. Hundreds of slaves did go to Mexico”—actually thousands—“and got on all right. We would hear about them and how they were going to be Mexicans. They brought up their children to speak only Mexican [sic].”¹⁰

U.S. slaveholders recognized early on that abolitionism in Mexico was the open backdoor facilitating the massive flight of capital in the form of enslaved Africans. As early as 1833 the authorities of New Orleans contacted the Mexican government about their effort to recover their “property” which had escaped and found refuge south of the border.¹¹ Confederate Texans found it hard to forget that enslaved Africans in that state escaped and fought with Mexico against them and their predecessors during the war of the 1830s.¹²

A century later, the famed Negro journalist J. A. Rogers, in writing of “Vicente Guerrero—Liberator of Mexico,” acknowledged, “It would be interesting to know, however, just how large a part the decree [of emancipation] by this Negro president played in the presence of Texas in the American Union today, for the revolt of Texas from the Mexican republic was clearly inspired by the fact that the temper of the Mexican masses was against slavery.”¹³ Mexico’s reputation as an abolitionist stronghold may explain why the famed black frontiersman Jim Beckwourth was accused of siding with Mexico during the 1846 war.¹⁴

This hearty pioneer was not alone in his presumed pro-Mexican predilections. James N. Leiker is no doubt accurate in writing that “during most of the nineteenth century, African Americans held Mexicans in higher esteem than other immigrant groups.” “Tejanos even aided runaway slaves by hiding them in homes and churches until they could be shepherded into Coahuila or Tamaulipas.” There was an “overall friendly tone of black-Hispanic interaction.”¹⁵

Because of the threat of contagion posed by “free West Indian, Northern and Latin American sailors, among others, the port of Galveston too required captains to either deny their black sailors shore leave while in port or to place them in jail for the duration of the ship’s visit.” Though Texas had bolted from Mexico, it could not forget that the noted abolitionist Benjamin Lundy, who published the fierce antislavery polemic “The War in Texas” in 1836, “had received permission from Mexican authorities to establish a colony of free Negroes [in Corpus Christi] prior to the Texas Revolution.” As it turned out, slavery—or rather the “freedom” to engage in slavery—was a “primary cause of the Texas Revolution, affected debates regarding the annexation of Texas” by the United States, and “played a considerable role during the Mexican-American war and in Manifest Destiny generally, and, of course, was the reason why Texas joined the Confederacy at the start of the Civil War.”¹⁶

As the Civil War approached, there was powerful incentive for enslaved Africans to flee to the south. In 1857 the inveterate traveler Frederick Law Olmsted quoted a Mexican official saying that the fleeing Negroes “could make money faster than Mexicans themselves could, because they had more sense. [And] the Mexican government was very just to them, [so] they could always have their rights as fully protected as [if] they were Mexican born.” In addition, discrimination against the Indians was a higher priority in Mexico than that against those of African descent, thus creating at least a small opening for opportunity. Still, “Afro-Mexicans,” who often faced more discrimination than arriving U.S. Negroes, sought to “escape the laws of caste in Central Mexico [and] signed on to help settle the wilds of California. There many took important political office after Mexican independence. During the ‘Yankee’ invasion of California in 1847, it was said that the strongest resistance was mounted by Governor Pio Pico and his brother Andres, the zeal for Mexico on the part of these two Afro-Californianos clearly being related to the fears of the type of law the legally racist United States would impose.”¹⁷

It was also the indefatigable Olmsted who recalled during his stay in antebellum Texas that he heard “stories” of the “danger to slavery in the West by the fraternizing of the blacks with the Mexicans. They helped them in all their bad habits, married them, stole a living from them, and ran them off every day to Mexico.”¹⁸ One of the many reasons for lingering hostility toward those of Mexican origin in Texas was the perception that they were hostile toward slavery. In the 1850s local slaveholders in a Texas neighborhood were infuriated simply because “several Mexican families moved into the vicinity.” They charged that the “Hispanic Texans aided slave runaways and intermingled in a spirit of equality with bondsmen, thus stirring up ‘insubordination.’” Thus “they adopted and enforced extra-legal methods of ridding the community of ‘rascally peons’ as well as curbing the freedom of Austin slaves … the vigilantes summarily ejected about twenty families and other Mexican Texans received equally rough treatment the next year.”¹⁹

Certainly, “to many blacks, the words ‘border’ and ‘Mexico’ meant freedom and opportunity.” Texas officials estimated that by 1855 more than four thousand black fugitives, valued at more than $3.2 million, had entered northern Mexico.²⁰ “By the mid-1850s several Texas counties had passed laws prohibiting Mexicans from communicating with slaves.” In a precursor to the “Plan of San Diego” during the Revolution, Colorado County’s “Anglos hanged three blacks and evicted all Mexicans after uncovering a supposed plot to kill local whites and fight their way to the border.”²¹ This occurred in 1856 as regional tensions over slavery skyrocketed. Reportedly, two hundred enslaved Africans were involved. In addition to liquidating most of the Euro-Americans there, they planned to plunder their homes and then escape with sufficient capital to establish a livelihood. The accused were said to have accumulated pistols, knives, guns, and ammunition.²²

It was in Mexico’s interest to attract U.S. Negroes to their northern border as a firewall against further Euro-American advance; recognizing this, enslaved Africans were inspired to make ever more desperate plans for escape. To say that the border was permeable is an understatement. One reason that there had not been many Negroes in antebellum Brownsville, to cite one example among many, is that before the Civil War slave owners had hesitated to bring their enslaved Africans to such Texas border towns for fear they might scurry across the border.²³ Thousands of enslaved Africans were able to escape into Mexico without trouble because the border, called the Rio Grande in the United States, was little more than a heavy-duty stream. There was “scarcely a bend in [this] river,” said one commentator, that “cannot be forded with the exception of a few feet of swimming.” This also meant that aggressive filibusters from the United States could easily invade Mexico.

In fact, the two phenomena were linked, as filibusters wanted to seize Mexican soil in order to extend the border further south, providing a further buffer for slaveholding and making capital flight more difficult. Sam Houston himself “lost” two slaves and he was far from being alone. One filibuster complained acridly in the 1850s, “Something must be done for the protection of slave property in this state. Negroes are running off daily. During the past week, seven slaves left this portion of the country. Let the frontiers of slavery begin to recede and when or where the wave of recession may be arrested God only knows.” Getting Mexico “Americanized and Southernized” was therefore a fervently held objective for filibusters.²⁴

Little wonder. In San Antonio in 1855 one slave owner concluded glumly that Negroes “cannot be kept here without great risk to their running away.” At that time the country south of San Antonio was open, flat, and uninhabited, the Mexican border was not far away, and, of course, there were always Mexicans more than happy to aid enslaved Africans in escaping. Moreover, often these Africans took slave owners’ property with them when they escaped, compounding the loss. This led to the creation of a “vigilance committee and a police force to stop the practice.”²⁵

The latter had to contend not only with rebellious Negroes and their Mexican allies but also with Native Americans imbued with a firm sense of sovereignty. In the southwest, for example, “the Kiowas also quickly emerged as the deadliest of the southwestern Amerindians. In proportion to the numbers, they killed more Anglo-Americans on the Texas-Kansas frontier than the Comanches.” It is striking that the Indians were referred to as “red niggers,” a telling indication of the weight of slavery on the minds of English-speakers. Moreover, the leader of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, who served as Secretary of War from 1853–1857, was “decisive for the West in a way that few Americans notice…. It was his army and his policies, renewed in the 1870s after they were aborted in the Civil War, that carried out the final conquests of the western Amerindians.”²⁶ Though the “Buffalo Soldiers” were to become a major spearhead against Native Americans, before the Civil War their mutual opponents often linked the sad fates of Black and Red alike.

Though the Mexican government was notorious for its unfavorable treatment of Indians, they sought assiduously to attract the Seminoles of Florida who had warred against the United States for years. The Seminoles, who in a sense had merged with runaway enslaved Africans in Florida, “were attracted strongly by the idea of the Mexican colony.” They established the Seminole maroon settlement in Coahuila, Mexico, which became an object of hatred for the slave owners of Texas after Mexico helped them fight off U.S. slave hunters in the 1850s.²⁷ Interestingly, the Seminoles had fled a “Hispanic”-dominated Florida for a “Hispanic”-dominated Mexico, for “once Florida became a territory of the United States the Indian, African and white worlds that had once coexisted and shared space were deliberately separated.”²⁸

In a foretaste of the intoxicating era of the Revolution, in the antebellum era Mexico never relinquished the notion of trying to “persuade the Ind...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Before the Revolution
• 2 A Tale of Two Negroes
• 3 Bordering on Revolution
• 4 A Border Drenched in Blood
• 5 Buffaloed Soldiers
• 6 Black and Brown Defenders of White Supremacy?
• 7 Negroes Invade Mexico
• 8 “Kill the ‘Gringo’ Men!”
• Epilogue: Revolution Delayed
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author