Pointing his rifle at the kidnappers, Del Fierro ordered them to surrender. One was waving a pistol at his wife’s maid, a young Black woman named Mathilde Hennes, who had escaped slavery in Louisiana, made the long, dangerous journey to Mexico, and become a valued member of Del Fierro’s household. He threw off the covers, grabbed his rifle and confronted two men in his living room. She was particularly struck by the story of Manuel Luis del Fierro of Reynosa, in the state of Tamaulipas, who was startled awake by screaming on the night of August 20, 1850. “It really caught my attention, because I didn’t know that enslaved people were escaping into Mexico, and I never would have suspected that Mexican citizens and officials were protecting them,” says Baumgartner, now an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern California. Hicks and husband Jackson helped many Black people flee slavery. She found plenty of documents about cattle rustling and Lipan Apache raids, but she also came across records of a completely unexpected kind of violence-between American slave catchers crossing the Rio Grande and Mexicans who fought against them.Ĭardenas holds a photo she believes shows her great-great-great-grand-mother Matilda Hicks, a former slave. In 2012, as a Rhodes scholar studying violence on the U.S.-Mexico border in the early and mid-19th century, she was hunting through state and municipal archives in northern Mexico. Perhaps no one has done more to advance our understanding than a historian named Alice Baumgartner. The history of southbound runaways, preserved in scattered fragments, presents scholars with enormous challenges of research and interpretation. He would cross them into Mexico in boats.” Nathaniel was a nice, generous, courageous man, a humanitarian. The runaways knew they could get help here-food, clothing and work if they wanted it. “There were Black, white and mixed-race people all living together, raising cattle in a place that was very remote, where they could be left alone. “Nathaniel bought 5,535 acres of land right here by the river and established the Jackson Ranch,” says Cardenas. She already had three children by another man, and she had seven more with Nathaniel.”Ĭardenas produces a faded, blurry, copied photograph, a family heirloom, showing a woman she believes is Matilda Hicks, her great-great-great-grandmother, tall and thin and wearing a white dress. “He married a slave that he freed, Matilda Hicks, and they came out here in covered wagons in 1857. “He was a white man from Alabama named Nathaniel Jackson,” says Cardenas. This article is a selection from the July/August issue of Smithsonian magazine Buyĭiana Cardenas at the grave of her great-great-great-grandfather Nathaniel Jackson, a white settler who owned a ranch in Texas near the Rio Grande.ĭiana Cardenas’ great-great-great-grandfather, who died in obscurity, was among the staunchest allies of slaves escaping south. Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 For example, they’ve learned that while there was no organized network of assistance, no celebrated “conductors” like Harriet Tubman guiding them to the next safe haven, slaves escaping to Mexico did sometimes receive help along the way. And though the journeys of enslaved people to Mexico are of the utmost importance, the scale of the southern migration was more modest, numbering between 3,000 and 10,000 people, compared with an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 who fled north of the Mason-Dixon line.īut in recent years scholars have begun to uncover a wealth of information about the southbound freedom-seekers. Nor were they interviewed by researchers, or recruited by antislavery organizations. No one who escaped slavery by going to Mexico wrote a firsthand account of the experience, as Frederick Douglass and others did about escaping north. Until recently, the southbound Underground Railroad, as some scholars call it, has been largely overlooked, mainly because it left so few traces in surviving records. “She loved to come here, and tell me stories about our family history, and all the runaway slaves we helped and took across the river into Mexico.” “Her name was Adela Jackson, and we were close,” she says. Stylishly dressed and coiffed, wilting slightly in the heat and humidity, she holds up a photograph of her grandmother. Diana Cardenas, a high school English teacher from Pharr, Texas, stands in her small family cemetery between the Rio Grande and the new border wall.
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