- Black Seminole tribal members of El Nacimiento de los Negros have celebrated their model of Juneteenth because the 1870s.
- When Mexico outlawed slavery a long time earlier than america, hundreds of Black Texans discovered a brand new path to freedom.
- Their descendants meet in Coahuila, Mexico, yearly for Juneteenth celebrations.
Simply over 100 miles from the Texas-Mexico border, a small mountain city in Coahuila, Mexico, is making ready for his or her annual Juneteenth celebrations.
El Nacimiento de los Negros, translating to “Beginning of the Blacks,” is residence to a neighborhood of Afro-Indigenous households that hint their roots again to america. Referred to as “Mascogos,” the group are descendants of Black Seminoles who discovered a house in Mexico after fleeing slavery and the specter of slave catchers within the US.
Black Seminoles have been previously enslaved individuals who escaped the plantations they labored on and aligned themselves with the Indigenous Seminoles of Florida. The joined forces with the Indigenous tribes to combat the US within the Seminole Wars.
Within the 1800s, many Black Seminoles have been compelled to relocate from locations like Georgia and Florida to areas designated Indian Territory in Oklahoma. Throughout that point, Black Seminole chief John Horse, who had each Indigenous and Black ancestry, led a gaggle of individuals to Mexico, the place slavery had already been outlawed. A gaggle settled in El Nacimiento in 1852.
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The Southern Underground Railroad
When the Common Congress of the United Mexican States fully outlawed slavery in 1837, enslaved folks in Texas had a viable path to freedom by going southward. Notably, within the 1936-1938 federal Slave Narrative undertaking, emancipated freeman and San Antonio-born Felix Hayward remarked: “There wasn’t no cause to run up north… All we needed to do was to stroll, however stroll south, and we would be free as quickly as we crossed the Rio Grande.” By 1849, African Individuals started to make the journey into Mexico.
Specialists estimate that as much as 10,000 folks crossed the border to Mexico to safe their freedom and escape slavery, creating what is called the Southern Underground Railroad.
Opposite to the Union’s settlement to return runaway slaves below the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Mexican legislation supplied freedom for escaped slaves as soon as they touched Mexican soil. Lots of these escaped enslaved folks, alongside Indigenous teams of Mexico, helped defend the Northern Mexican border in alternate for acres of land in Coahuila.
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Celebrating Juneteenth in Mexico
Juneteenth marks the official finish of slavery on June nineteenth, 1865 when 250,000 Black folks in Galveston, Texas have been knowledgeable of their freedom by government decree. Historians estimate that as some Black Seminoles traveled forwards and backwards from El Nacimiento to Brackettville, Texas, Juneteenth celebrations unfold to Mexico as early because the 1870s.
For greater than 100 years, Mascogos in El Nacimiento have celebrated what they name “Dia de los Negros,” or “Day of the Blacks,” on June nineteenth. Many Black Seminole descendants nonetheless embark on the pilgrimage from elements of Texas to El Nacimiento to have fun the day. Conventional delicacies features a candy potato bread known as tetapún and slow-cooked asado pork. The dishes mix Indigenous, Black, and Mexican cultural inspirations.
After generations in northern Mexico, many members of the Black Seminoles in El Nacimiento strictly communicate Spanish. Nonetheless, the hymns handed down from African American descendants are nonetheless sung in English on Dia de los Negros, together with “Swing Low, Candy Chariot” and “This Little Gentle of Mine.”
As extra Black Seminole descendants are leaving El Nacimiento to seek out work in Texas or different elements of Mexico, many Mascogos are frightened their tradition is waning.
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To prioritize preservation, members have established the Museo Comunitario Tribu Negros Mascogos for native artwork, a lodge, a restaurant, and secured federal funding for neighborhood gardens. In 2017, the governor of Coahuila declared the Mascogo tribe as Indigenous folks of the northern Mexican state.
As Juneteenth was formally acknowledged as a US federal vacation in 2021, tribal members are planning to advertise cultural tourism as a supply of assist and revitalization for the enduring city, and prevailing traditions, of El Nacimiento de los Negros.