From Louisiana to Mexican Tejas and then to Tamaulipas: seeking freedom in the U.S.-Mexican border
Main Article Content
Abstract
This article discusses the search for freedom by enslaved people in Louisiana, before the abolitionist laws that banned slavery in the United States in 1865. From the study of fugitive men and women, first to Spanish and Mexican Texas territory and then to northern Mexican states such as Tamaulipas, we can observe that despite living in highly oppressive systems, thousands of enslaved people constantly fought for their own freedom and that of their families during the nineteenth century. Even while abolitionist discussions were taking place around the world, they risked their lives and those of their families to seek freedom and better living conditions. Therefore, it is intended to decenter abolitionist laws as milestones of freedom, emphasizing the struggles for emancipation undertaken by enslaved people.
Downloads
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
La cesión de derechos no exclusivos implica también la autorización por parte de los autores para que el trabajo sea alojado en los repositorios institucionales UNLP (Sedici y Memoria Académica) y difundido a través de las bases de datos que los editores consideren apropiadas para su indización, con miras a incrementar la visibilidad de la revista y sus autores.
References
Berlin, I. (1998) Many thousands gone. The first two centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge y Londres: Harvard University Press.
Díaz Casas, M.C. (2018) “In Mexico you could be free, they didn’t care what color you was”: afrodescendientes, esclavitud y libertad en la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos, 1821-1865. Tesis de doctorado en Historia y Etnohistoria, Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia: México.
Hämäläinen, P. (2008) The Comanche Empire. New Haven y Londres: Yale University Press.
Herschthal, E. (2016) Slaves, Spaniards, and Subversion in Early Louisiana: The Persistent Fears of Black Revolt and Spanish Collusion in Territorial Louisiana, 1803–1812. Journal of the Early Republic 36(2), 283-311. Doi: 10.1353/jer.2016.0036
Hilton, S. (2013) Spanish Louisiana in Atlantic Contexts: Nexus of Imperial Transactions and International Relations, En C. Vidal (ed.), Louisiana. Crossroads of the Atlantic World (pp. 70-86). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hoonhout, B. y Mareite, T. (2019) Freedom at the fringes? Slave flight and empire-building in the early modern Spanish borderlands of Esequibo-Venezuela and Louisiana-Texas. Slavery & Abolition, 40(1) 61-86.
Jordan, T. (1967) The imprint of the upper and lower south on the mid-nineteenth-century Texas. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 57(4), 667-690.
Lundy, B. (1847) Life, travels and opinions of Benjamin Lundy including his journeys to Texas and Mexico. Philadelphia: William Parrish.
Northrup, S. (1970) Twelve years a slave. Washington: Dover publications.
Pinnen, C. (2017) Slavery, race and freedom on the Spanish-Anglo borderlands. The Latin Americanist, 551-568. DOI: 10.111/tla.12169
Roberts, K.D. (2003) Slaves and Slavery in Louisiana: The Evolution of Atlantic World Identities 1791-1831, Tesis de doctorado, Universidad de Texas en Austin.
Rupert, L. (2013) Seeking the water of bapism: Fugitive Slaves and Imperial Jurisdiction in the Early Modern Caribbean, En L. Benton, R. Richard (eds.), Legal pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850 (pp. 199-231). New York: New York University Press.
Scott, R. (2005) Degrees of freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery. Cambridge: Havard University Press.
Torget, A. (2015) Seeds of empire. Cotton, slavery and the transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Vázquez, J. y Meyer, L. (2001) México frente a Estados Unidos. México: El Colegio de México.
Vidal, C. (2013) Louisiana in Atlantic Perspective, En C. Vidal (ed.), Louisiana. Crossroads of the Atlantic World (pp. 1-17). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.