Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted with permission from Borderlands and the Mexican American Story, out August 20 from Crown Books for Young Readers. The excerpt consists of the book’s introduction followed by part of one of the chapters.
Mexican Americans have sometimes been called “the forgotten people.” They are the people who have disappeared through the cracks. The in-between people. They don’t fit in one category or stay in one place. They cross borders. Although they originally didn’t cross the border—rather, the border crossed them. Their ancestors had been living in what is now the American Southwest long before it became part of the United States. We’ll learn more about that later on.
Much of Mexican American history has been ignored or erased. In recent years, white politicians and school board officials in some Southwestern states like Arizona and Texas have prohibited students from learning the full truth about Mexican Americans. They are afraid that if students find out about this history, they might ask difficult questions. These politicians and officials say learning the truth about the past might cause division and “bad feelings.” The Mexican American students who learn about injustice in the past might get angry. They might want to change how things have always been done.
Sometimes people want to forget the bad parts of history—both those who are ashamed of what they did and those who suffered through it. Sometimes learning about history hurts. It feels like a wound. But if we want to heal from these wounds, we first have to learn the truth. We have to remember.
Mexican Americans and the Civil War: The Other Underground Railroad
You’ve probably heard about the Underground Railroad, a network of African Americans like Harriet Tubman and white activists who helped enslaved people from the South escape to Canada. But have you ever heard about the other underground railroad? The one that went to Mexico?
Most school history books don’t mention the role Mexican Americans played in helping enslaved Black people find their way to freedom. They’ve ignored how borderland Mexican Americans helped defeat the Confederate troops that tried to conquer the Southwest during the Civil War. One of the main reasons slavery had such a hard time thriving along the U.S.-Mexican border during the 1850s was because of Mexican American solidarity. Solidarity means standing together with people. Mexican Americans paid a heavy price for their actions of solidarity with African Americans.
Mexican Solidarity Made it Hard for Slavery to Thrive on the Border
The majority of El Paso’s early Anglo settlers supported slavery, but the number of enslaved people in this border community was low compared to the interior of Texas. The 1860 federal census counted fifteen enslaved African Americans in El Paso County. Simeon Hart, the wealthiest property owner in El Paso County, owned five enslaved African Americans. They were listed as: Charles Hart, 46 years old; Sally Hart, 48 years old; Patsy Hart, 22 years old; an unnamed female “Mulatto” born in Texas; and Charles, a six-month-old “Mulatto” baby.
It was difficult for the slave owners to keep great numbers of enslaved people in the El Paso region. The border provided an easy escape route for slaves in search of freedom. Felix Haywood, who had been enslaved in Texas as a young man, explained that there “wasn’t no reason to run up North. All we had to do was walk, but walk South, and we’d be free as soon as we crossed the Río Grande. In Mexico you could be free.”
Mexican president Vicente Guerrero had abolished slavery in Mexico in 1829. Guerrero was himself a descendant of enslaved Africans. In the 1850s, more than four thousand fugitive slaves escaped Texas, often with the help of Mexican American border residents. They found refuge in northern Mexico. Many Tejanos illegally hid enslaved people in homes and churches until they could be safely shepherded south of the border.
In 1859, a “free Mexican negro servant” sued his white American employer for fourteen dollars in unpaid wages in an El Paso del Norte (Ciudad Juárez) court. The Mexican court ruled in favor of the Afro-Mexicano. His former employer, who lived in Texas, organized an armed posse of eight white men who tried to kidnap the Black fronterizo from the steps of the courthouse. Armed Mexicans came to his defense. They forced the Anglo intruders back to the river, where they were arrested by Mexican lawmen.
Anglo slave owners punished Mexican Americans for taking the side of enslaved Black people. Texans felt very anxious about interracial alliances between African Americans and Mexican Americans, and that unease gave Anglos another excuse to kick out “disloyal” Tejanos and seize their properties.
In Colorado County, Texas, in the 1850s, Mexican Americans were accused of plotting together with enslaved African Americans to kill the “white masters.” The Anglo residents of the town declared that:
Without exception, every Mexican in the county was implicated. They were arrested, and ordered to leave the county within five days, and never again to return. . . . We are satisfied that the lower class of the Mexican population are incendiaries in any country where slaves are held, and should be dealt with accordingly.
In October 1854, a group of Texans had a meeting to discuss ways to stop brown and Black people from uniting. They decided to form vigilante groups “to persecute persons” who wanted to help enslaved people. They decided “all citizens and slaveholders were to work diligently to prohibit Mexicans from contacting blacks.”
In 1856, whites in Matagorda County, Texas, “held a meeting and ordered every Mexican to leave the county.” Mexican American men, one newspaper wrote, like to “hang round plantations, taking the likeliest [prettiest] negro girls for wives . . . and they often steal horses, and these girls, too, and endeavor to run them to Mexico.”
Mexican Americans were kicked out of Austin twice—once in 1853 and again in 1855. According to a report by a Mexican delegation, “some of the families of the victims of these extraordinary persecutions had begun to arrive in Mexico on foot and without means, having been obliged to abandon all their property in order to save their lives.” Mexican Americans fought back. They joined armed resistance movements like the one led by Juan N. Cortina.
Juan Cortina: Our Only Crime is Being Mexican
Juan Cortina was a Mexican American leader who defended his borderlands community from displacement and white violence. He and his followers fought against Anglo abuses in South Texas during the Cortina Wars (1859–1861). White newspapers dismissed him as a local “Mexican bandit.” It was a way to diminish him—make him look small and unimportant. But Cortina led an extraordinary life. He took part in some of the most important historic events of his time. During his life he fought to defend his community from American, Texan, Confederate, and French invaders. Many fronterizos considered him a hero.
Cortina enlisted in the Mexican army when he was twenty-two years old and fought against the U.S. invasion of Mexico. He commanded a force of Mexican vaqueros during the Mexican American War. After the war, the new borderline divided his family’s ranch. Part of it was in Mexico and the other part in the United States.
Cortina saw how Anglos used violence, fraud, and rigged laws to cheat his family and other Mexican Americans out of their lands. “Flocks of vampires, in the guise of men,” he wrote, robbed Mexicans “of their property, incarcerated, chased, murdered, and hunted them like wild beasts.” He and other Mexican Americans organized an armed resistance movement.
On July 15, 1859, Cortina and fifty Tejanos captured the city of Brownsville and released all Mexican prisoners from the local jail. Cortina’s proclamations after the capture of Brownsville gained the wide approval of fronterizos. He denounced the robbery of Tejano lands through violence and legal manipulation. One proclamation stated:
Our purpose has been as you have seen . . . to punish the infamous villainy of our enemies. They, with a multitude of lawyers, form a band in concert, to dispossess the Mexicans of their lands.
Cortina explained that his movement was motivated by the “sacred right of self-preservation.” His enemies were those who “rob us, without any cause, and for no other crime on our part than that of being of Mexican origin.”
The Texas Rangers were sent to put down the Cortina rebellion but were not able to capture him. The Texas Rangers were a special state police force created by the newly formed Republic of Texas in 1835 to protect the Mexican border. By calling the Mexicans “bandits,” Anglos pretended Cortina’s uprising had no valid political motives. Some historians have called Cortina a “social bandit” because he sometimes stole cattle from Texans as revenge for the theft of Mexican lands. Robin Hood, who “stole from the rich to give to the poor,” is an example of a social bandit.
But Mexican American scholar Américo Paredes didn’t think Cortina’s actions were about stealing from the rich to give to the poor. Paredes believed that Cortina’s movement was about regaining dignity and justice for the Mexican American community. This is why Anglos wanted to capture Cortina so badly.
The Texas Rangers were frustrated that they couldn’t catch the Mexican American leader. They began to kill innocent Mexican Americans who had nothing to do with the uprising. When the Texas Rangers failed, the U.S. government sent the army to south Texas to stop the rebellion. They killed a large number of Cortina’s men. But they didn’t kill his ideas. Cortina and his group went into hiding and switched to long-term guerrilla warfare. They would attack the white troops suddenly, then run away and hide before the soldiers knew what hit them. The Mexican American resistance leader was never captured by the U.S. military.
In 1861, Cortina joined the Union Army against Confederate Texas during the Civil War. The Civil War (1861–1865) was fought between Northern (Union) and Southern (Confederate) states, mostly over the question of slavery. He and thirty followers attacked the town of Carrizo, Texas. His troops lost that initial battle against Confederate troops led by Colonel Santos Benavídes. This was one of the first battles that pitted Texas Mexicans on opposite sides of the conflict against each other during the Civil War.
Cortina later joined the Mexican army and fought for President Benito Juárez against the French invasion of Mexico. French Emperor Napoleon III wanted to make Mexico a French colony. The French planned to sell weapons to the Confederates in exchange for cotton. Some historians think that if the French had won, they might have helped the South win the Civil War by providing much-needed weapons and supplies. President Lincoln and the Union were against French intervention in Mexico, but the Southern Confederacy recognized Emperor Maximilian I. He was the European monarch the French had imposed on the Mexicans.
The Mexican army led by Ignacio Zaragoza Seguín defeated the French invasion forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. He was born in what is now Goliad, Texas, and was the nephew of Tejano leader Juan N. Seguín. Juan Cortina also took part in this battle, which is celebrated today as Cinco de Mayo. As a result of this loss, the European invaders were forced back to their country.
As commander of the Mexican Army of the North, General Juan Cortina continued to support the Union during the Civil War. In September 1864, Cortina crossed the river into Texas with three hundred men and three cannons. His Mexican troops joined the Union Army attack against the Confederates in south Texas.
Cortina was not the only Mexican American who fought against the Confederacy. Thousands of Mexican Americans did their part to defeat the Southern pro-slavery forces during the Civil War. Their story has never been fully told.
Copyright © 2024 by Race2Dinner and David Dorado Romo.
