Crossing Borders: Enslaved Afro-descendants and Conflicts over Slavery between Mexico and the United States, 1821-1860

• In Event: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Political Economy between Mexico and the United States

Abstract

Differences between Mexico and the United States in policies about Afro-descendants after independence, along with the economic importance of slavery in the process of nation- and state-building, motivated enslaved African Americans to escape from the United States and cross the border into Mexico, causing conflicts between various actors. This paper examines the relations between these nations through the political conflicts around slavery and migration of enslaved African Americans to Mexico between 1821 and 1860 with documents from Mexican and American archives. In the context of political affairs that affected both territories, including Texas colonization since 1821, the Texas Independence War and the Mexican-American War, among others, I argue that the abolition of slavery was an issue that not only divided the Mexican elites, but was also was a source of conflict between the Mexican central government, local officials north and south of the border and southern American slaveholders. My study also demonstrates that enslaved Afro-descendants from the United States constructed social imaginaries about Mexico as a country without “racism” that offered possibilities of social promotion. Those imaginaries convinced them to cross the border and as a result they became historical agents of the conflicts that shaped the Mexican and the American nations in the nineteenth century.

Author

• María Camila Díaz Casas, Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia