History of Afram's emigrating to Mexico, pre and post, Civil War.

[IllmaticDelta]

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Louisiana Creole-Mexican Connection

The family trees of many people in Louisiana tend to have missing branches. There may be a baptism certificate for a great-great-uncle at the local Catholic church, perhaps a marriage certificate later and a deed to property and records of one or two childrenbut there the line ends. No one knows what happened to this distant relative and his heirs. An elderly relative might vaguely remember hearing that long ago many acquaintances migrated to Mexico while others shipped out for France or Haiti, if they had other family residing there.
Little if anything has ever been written on these elusive emigres. They lost all contact with their families in Louisiana. Their descendants' names remain blank lines on genealogical charts, popular today with a new generation researching ancestral history. This is especially true for many Creoles who descended from free people of color - popularly called "les gens de couleur libre."

Mixed with French, Spanish, African, Indian or even German, Irish, or Italian bloodlines, the free people of color lived a tenuous existence in a caste-like system of antebellum Louisiana divided among three groups: whites in the upper caste, black slaves in the lower, and the free people of color in between. These Creoles were free to move about as they pleased, conduct commerce and trade, buy and sell property - including real estate and slaves - as well as serve in the militia and attend cathedral, opera, theater, and Free Masons meetings. Political office and the vote, however, were denied, and they could not intermarry with whites.

In the 1850s, as abolitionists infiltrated Louisiana's churches and social institutions with the message of serious conflict between North and South, free people of color became increasingly more of a liability to Louisiana's white population. Free people of color were generally well to do, well educated, and dominated trades such as leather working, iron making, and cigar rolling. They also had their own journalists, writers, educators and orators. They owned significant holdings in real estate, invested heavily in local banks, and lent money to many whites. But their financial and social clout was about to change.

Fearing an alliance between free people of color and rebellious slaves, Louisiana's whites, who were then a minority, attempted to reassert their authority and limit freedoms once taken for granted among free blacks. New regulations required free people of color to register with local municipal officers so that their numbers, locations, and professions could be monitored. It became illegal for them to assemble in groups of more than a few people and they were not allowed to leave Louisiana without permission. A white sponsor was required whenever they conducted business and they were obligated to carry papers proving their free status at all times. As if these restrictions were not humiliating enough, free blacks now had to observe the 9 p.m. curfew imposed on slaves.

Understandably, leaders among the free people of color were outraged by these restrictions. In response, many began liquidating their real estate and business holdings and transferring the proceeds to foreign banks. Free blacks with young families and long futures ahead of them saw greater opportunity beyond the borders of Louisiana and prepared to leave.



Mexico: A Land of Opportunity

One of the few written accounts of this migration is mentioned by Rudoiphe Lucien Desdunes, a free man of color, in his book Nos Hommes et notre Histoire published in 1911: "[In 1855] Mr. [Lolo] Mansion generously donated a part of his fortune for the relief of our people, and a number of them profited by his generosity, escaping the hardships of prejudice. Mexico and Haiti opened their doors to them."

The New Orleans Daily Delta newspaper of January 15, 1860, ran an article on the "exodus of free persons for Mexico and Haiti." The 1994 book, Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country, by Carl A. Brasseaux and others, states that in 1870 "many... Opelousas and Attakapas expatriates chose to join the free black colony near Veracruz. Some became merchants, engaging in trade with New Orleans."

Downtown Tampico has a distinctly New Orleans look.

Free from prejudice
Emigration to Mexico was a weighty but necessary decision. Few Louisiana expatriates left any written indication of their feelings regarding the move. But in a letter obtained from a family in New Orleans, Isidore Bordenave, from the city of Gutierrez Zamora, Mexico, wrote on Sept. 20, 1909, to his sister-in-law, Mrs. S. Bordenave, back home in Louisiana, what must have been the sentiments of many. Referring to his recent visit to the family in New Orleans, he wrote, "I still enjoy the company of you all. I am deprived of it, but at the same time it cannot be helped. New Orleans is a dead city for me. Here I enjoy life-in a desert, it's true, but life without any of the foolishness that makes the American Republic a dark ship... Those few days I have spent with you all have been very pleasant, but, at the same time, to see that I was unable, due to prejudice, to act as I would here, bled my heart and left a dark veil on the good time enjoyed." Bordenave died and was buried in Gutierrez Zamora in 1923.
Transportation to and within Mexico was by water. Passenger lists from ships of the time show dozens of young men, some married with one or two children, leaving together from New Orleans or the Port of St. Mary Parish. There was already a well established trade route between New Orleans, Tampico, Veracruz, and Havana with stops at smaller ports in between. Some of the newcomers had business ties with Mexico and Cuba which doubtlessly helped them settle into their new home country with ease. Others bought into settlement arrangements operated by men from Louisiana who brokered land deals. Many émigrés retained their U.S. citizenship and traveled back and forth in the early years between Mexico, Cuba, and Louisiana for business and personal reasons. Second and third generations, however, lost all contact with their Louisiana relatives.

The Eureka Colony is an example of a brokered land deal. In 1859, Louis Nelson Foucher, a well known free man of color from New Orleans who had distinguished himself in architecture and mathematics, contracted with a wealthy Mexican family to purchase a large area of fertile farmland with access to the Panuco River south of Tampico. There he settled, along with 100 families from New Orleans. The project was short lived since sketchy records indicate that Eureka Colony burned in 1861 and that the families who were to move there instead relocated to Tampico.

Municiapl palace in Jalapa, capital of the state of Veracruz.








Of interest to musicologists is the family of Thomas Marcos Tio, a musician and teacher from New Orleans who was among the settlers ot Eureka Colony. His sons, Louis and Lorenzo Tio, were born and raised in Tampico. In 1877 Mrs. Tio and the children moved back to New Orleans where Louis and Lorenzo, dubbed by locals as "the Mexicans," were clarinetists. They worked as musical arrangers in marching bands and minstrel shows and eventually figured prominently in the development of jazz. Their father remained in Tampico until his death in 1881.
The migration of free people of color from Louisiana to Mexico in large numbers in the late 1850s was very possibly due in part to the influence of the wildly popular president of Mexico at the time, Benito Juarez (18061872). Although no direct link can be documented thus far, people in Mexico are well aware that Juarez spent 18 months in political exile in New Orleans from December 1853 to June 1855, rolling cigars in the French Quarter to make ends meet. He associated openly with free men of color. It is also known that he took room and board at the home of a free woman of color on Royal Street and was nursed - probably by her - through a bout of yellow fever in 1854.

Gehman interviews the Probo (Provost) family in Guiterrez Zamora.


A full-blooded Indian, Juarez suffered racial discrimination during his New Orleans stay. Certainly he was aware of the ever more precarious position of the free blacks in the city and very likely offered to send for them once he returned to Mexico. Along with other renegade Mexican politicos headquartered in New Orleans at the time - including Melchor Ocampo and Guillermo Prieto - Juarez risked returning to his homeland to shape a new constitution and lead the chaotic government in 1857. He saw the need for hardworking, stable families, like the ones he had met in New Orleans, to settle the country. Except for the interruption of the Juarez tenure by French military occupation between 1862 and 1867, Louisiana families of color were welcomed by Mexican leaders. There is no evidence that they participated in the military or government under Juarez but some descendants recall talk of land grants and business associations with the Juarez regime.
One significant result of research into Louisiana's exiles in Mexico has been the discovery of direct descendants of Henriette Delille, the free woman of color who founded an order of nuns of African descent, the Sisters of the Holy Family, in New Orleans in 1846. Delille is currently under consideration for canonization at the Vatican. Her great-nephew Bernard Vincent, and his wife Celeste Simms, left Opelousas, Louisiana, with their two young children in 1891 for Cabezas, Mexico, where they prospered and added another 11 children to their family. Two granddaughters of Bernard Vincent and one great-granddaughter - who bears a striking physical resemblance to Delille - visited the Sisters at their convent in New Orleans in 1999 to share their family's history, thus becoming the first Delille relatives to be discovered by the order.

Dville Press / Mary Gehman

 

[IllmaticDelta]

repost from another thread

The lengths many white jazz writers and even some latino critics will go to put their names into the origins of jazz

Alot of false info out there claiming this guy below was Mexican/Latino and using this false info as proof of latinos being Jazz founders


Dude was Creole of Color native to New Orleans whose fam migrated to mexico and then came back to New Orleans. Slick white/latino music critics tried to paint this dude as a Mexican to lay claims as Jazz being some sort mongrel music that comes from various nations

Lorenzo Tio, the real facts!

 

[IllmaticDelta]

William Henry Ellis (1864–1923)

william Henry Ellis, influential African-American entrepreneur, stockbroker, and proponent of the African-American emigration movement of the 1890s and early 1900s



was born a slave to Charles and Margaret Ellis on June 15, 1864. His parents had been brought by Joseph Weisiger from Kentucky to Texas in 1853. In 1870 the Ellis parents had gained their freedom and relocated to Victoria, Texas, where they established a home for themselves and their seven children.

In his youth, William Henry Ellis attended school in Victoria with his sister, Fannie, while his other siblings held full-time jobs as laborers or servants. Sometime during his teenage years, Ellis learned to speak fluent Spanish.

During his early twenties, Ellis was employed by William McNamara, a cotton and hide dealer, and constantly conducted business with Spanish-speaking businessmen. Eventually, Ellis made a name for himself in the trade. Around 1887, Ellis settled permanently in San Antonio, Texas, and began calling himself “Guillermo Enrique Eliseo,” spreading a fabricated story of his Cuban and Mexican ancestry in newspapers and social circles to conceal his real racial identity, thus enjoying some of the freedoms other African Americans could not experience at the time. He balanced these two identities for the rest of his life.

By the early 1890s, Ellis was swept into Texas politics. In 1888 he gave a speech in support of Norris Wright Cuney that landed Ellis an appointment to the Texas Republican Party’s Committee on Resolutions. By 1892, Ellis was nominated to represent the 83rd District in the Texas Legislature but lost the election to A.G. Kennedy, a white Democrat. Ellis would never seek public office again.

As time went on, Ellis began embracing ideas of African American colonization abroad, especially in Mexico. He was once quoted as saying, “Mexico has no race prejudice from a social standpoint.” Twice during the 1890s, Ellis attempted to create a colony for blacks in Mexico from the southern United States. Both attempts would fail. The first, started in 1889, fell through by 1891 due to lack of financial support and backing from the Mexican government. The second, in 1895, was an exodus of nearly eight hundred people from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that failed when several cases of smallpox broke out after settlement in near Tlahualilo in northern Mexico, forcing almost all to return to the United States.

Ellis eventually moved to New York City, New York where he was the president of a series of mining and rubber companies, all heavily invested in Mexico. In 1903 after starting a family of his own at age thirty-nine, Ellis traveled to Ethiopia and established unofficial economic ties in a visit with King Menilik. Ellis returned to New York in 1904 and bought a seat on Wall Street. By 1910, facing economic troubles, Ellis sold his seat and moved his family to Mexico, where he would spend the rest of his days.

William Henry Ellis died at the age of fifty-nine on September 24, 1923, in Mexico City, Mexico.

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The Strange Career of William Ellis: Texas Slave to Mexican Millionaire

The odds were certainly against William Henry Ellis, who was born into slavery on a Texas cotton plantation near the Mexico border.

But a combination of sheer moxie, an ability to speak Spanish and an olive skin allowed Ellis to reinvent himself. By the turn of the 20th century, he was Guillermo Enrique Eliseo, a successful Mexican entrepreneur with an office on Wall Street, an apartment on Central Park West and business dealings with companies and corporations halfway around the world.

His unusual life story is told in a new book titled The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire by Karl Jacoby, a professor in the history department and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. Ellis “learned how to be what people wanted him to be, and how to be sure that people would see what they want to see,” Jacoby said.

Jacoby came across this larger-than-life character 20 years ago, when “he introduced himself to me in the archives.” One of the scholar’s research interests is the U.S.-Mexico border. “Even though it’s geographically peripheral, it’s actually quite central to both countries,” he said. “The borderlands become very important to how ideas of race are shaped in both countries. All these questions about immigration and who is an American get played out at the border.”

When Jacoby was a graduate student at Yale, his advisor encouraged him to look in old U.S. State Department records for anything interesting regarding the border. As Jacoby perused the pages and pages of dry documents, he came across an 1895 report about a businessman trying to bring African American sharecroppers from Alabama to work on Mexican plantations.

That’s unusual, he thought; everyone thinks of emigration going in the other direction. But it made sense; in the 1890s, southern states were instituting Jim Crow laws and some African Americans were looking farther south for freedom since Mexico had no formal segregation. The relocation effort failed, but Jacoby wanted to know who the man was behind the idea.

The difficulty of accessing data, much of it on microfilm, made a thorough search difficult, so Jacoby put aside this intriguing character, William Ellis, and wrote other works on border history, including Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History.

Ellis was hard to find for good reason. He was in the midst of transforming himself into Eliseo, erasing his blackness in the eyes of government officials and census takers, while maintaining it in other settings. He was aided by the advent of the railroads, which could whisk a man away from his past. “He’s a self-made man in the sense that he represents the rags-to-riches story that American culture just loves,” said Jacoby. “But he’s also self-made in the sense that he’s making up this identity for himself, and not just accepting the identity other people try to force on him.”

In the 1880s, Ellis moved to San Antonio, then the center of commercial trade with Mexico, and found a job facilitating these exchanges. Around the same time, he began introducing himself as Guillermo Enrique Eliseo, the Spanish version of his name. “For a while he has these two separate lives,” Jacoby said. “In San Antonio he’s a Mexican, and elsewhere he’s an African American.”

Not long after his sharecropper plan came to nothing, locals realized that Ellis was not Mexican; the city directory then put a C by his name, denoting “colored.” He disappeared, grew a large mustache, straightened his hair and bought an elegant wardrobe, later surfacing in New York City as a Mexican businessman at the height of the Gilded Age.

As trade opened up during the Mexican dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, Eliseo, who one State Department official at the time described as having a “hypnotic power of persuasion,” became a millionaire. He gave investors access to in-demand Mexican goods such as copper, a crucial mineral for electrification projects; rubber, for industrial uses; and vanilla for the delicious novelty, ice cream.

“One of the points I’m trying to get at in the book is that ultimately William Ellis moved between this African American identity, and this Mexican identity, which is usually treated as ‘passing’ for another race,” Jacoby said. “In the 19th century, a person could only be one or the other, but for Ellis, these identities were equally real.”

By the turn of the century, Ellis was one of the first African Americans on Wall Street. “He was born a slave in poverty and ends up living on Central Park West and having an office on Wall Street right next to J.P. Morgan,” said Jacoby. “It’s another reminder of how race is ultimately a fiction that we tell ourselves to divide people for one another. His story suggests how fluid race can truly be.”

 

[Brer Dog]

Great thread! I remember reading that jack Johnson tried to encourage AAs to go to Mexico. He even started up a company to help get them land.

Johnson encouraged Black Americans to abandon the oppressive atmosphere of the United States and to make their home in Mexico. Hoping to encourage Black migration to Mexico, he started “Jack Johnson’s Land Company” in Mexico City to sell land to Black Americans, placing ads for the company in Black newspapers that read:

"Colored People. You who are lynched, tortured, mobbed, persecuted and discriminated against in the boasted ‘Land of Liberty…’ OWN A HOME IN MEXICO where one man is as good as another."

The U.S. government viewed Johnson’s statements and activities as a serious threat. During World War I – which was happening at the same time as the Mexican Revolution – there had been concerns that Black Americans would not feel loyalty towards the United States, and might side with enemy nations. Germany had even tried to convince Mexico to invade the United States, and some believed that Black Americans might join forces with such an invasion.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

The Mascogos (also known as negros mascagos) are an afrodescendant[1] group in Coahuila, Mexico. Centered on the town of El Nacimiento in Múzquiz Municipality, the group are descendants of Black Seminoles escaping the threat of slavery in the United States.

After the forced move of the Seminoles and Black Seminoles from Florida to Indian Territory, a group led by Seminole sub-chief Wild Cat and Black Seminole chief John Horsemoved to northern Mexico.[2] The group settled at El Nacimiento in 1852.[3] They worked for the Mexican government to protect against Indian raids. Many of the Seminoles died from smallpox and a large number of those remaining eventually returned to the United States along with some of the Black Seminoles.[2]

In May 2017, the Governor of Coahuila Rubén Moreira Valdez signed a decree that recognized the tribu de los negros mascogos as a "pueblo indígena de Coahuila".[1] He said that he hopes the Mascogos can begin receiving funds from the Instituto Nacional de Pueblos Indígenas by 2018.[1] Moreira Valdez also highlighted that the history of the Mascogos, Kickapoo and Chinese immigrants were now included in the state's history textbooks.[1]

Culture
Mascogo may derive from Muscogee.[3] The capeyuye, religious songs accompanied by hand clapping, are performed at funerals, New Years and Christmas.[3] In 2015, a capeyuye album titled Mascogo Soul featuring four Mascogo matriarchs was published.[4] The Mascogos celebrate the Juneteenth.[3] During the festivities, the community is visited by family members and Black Seminoles from Brackettville, Texas.[5] Mascogo traditional dishes include soske (a type of atole), tetapún (bread made from camote), pumpkin or piloncillo empanadas and pan de mortero.[3]

The traditional costume of the Mascogo women is a long, polka-dotted dress, an apron and a kerchief tied around the head.[3] As of 2016, the only "pure Mascogo" was 85-year old Lucía Vázquez, a result of frequent out-marriage in the community.[3] According to Homero Vásquez, an elderly Mascogo whose mother was from Chihuahua, starting in the 1930s there was an influx of farmers to the region; resulting in an increase of marriage with outsiders.[3] There is significant migration to other parts of Mexico and the United States of the young people of El Nacimiento due to a lack of opportunities.[3] Afro-Seminole Creole is used for the capeyuye and is spoken mostly by the elderly.[5]

 

[IllmaticDelta]

^^Has an Afram ancestral stand that migrated from Virginia-->Louisiana-->Texas-->Mexico

Sophie, meanwhile, was an African American woman from Virginia and her surname is uncertain. The couple moved to Louisiana together around 1815 and their first known child was born there around that time.

“Virginia never would have tolerated their relationship, but with Louisiana, there was a whisper of a chance,” Smolenyak writes in a blogpost. “Slaves were allowed to buy their freedom and that of others. They could also marry, and mixed race couples and children were both more common and more likely to be free.”

The Towns family spent about a decade in Louisiana, at least some of it in Ouachita parish, she added. In 1826 they moved to the Nacogdoches in the new country of Mexico, which had decided to eliminate slavery and was also encouraging immigration.

Smolenyak continues: “Not long after arrival, David took advantage of living under Mexican law to free his wife and their six children born to date, confessing that, ‘It is painful to him that at a given time he claimed some brother, or other family member, as his own property.’

“I fully realise how naïve it must have seemed to many when I claimed at the outset of this article that this was an interracial love story, but I genuinely believe that this couple was one of the rare exceptions. It’s a harsh reality that most multiracial offspring of this era were the result of rape, an entirely lopsided power dynamic, or both. But the Townses moved from Virginia to Louisiana for better circumstances, and then to Mexico where the entire family could finally be free.”

The couple had at least nine children over more than two decades and remained together until her death in 1838. They were regarded as husband and wife by their neighbours and Towns repeatedly helped their children retain their freedom, even when American immigrants brought slavery with them, causing tensions.

A census taken in 1835 revealed that the family included Juan (later John), who would become Lin-Manuel Miranda’s fourth great-grandfather. The race columns, a legacy of the days of Spanish dominion, were left blank as preferred by the Mexican government.

But in 1836 the Republic of Texas was born, and with it came a fresh threat to the family. All free persons of colour were given until 1842 to leave Texas unless they were able to get Congress to exempt them. Otherwise they would be sold “at public sale, to the highest bidder”.

Towns petitioned for an act of Congress on behalf of his family: “It is with extreme sorrow that they find by an act of the last Congress, they are allowed but a short time longer to remain within the limits of this Republick, unless your honourable bodies will, as is allowable by said act, relieve your petitioners from its operation, and by a measure of kindness and generosity permit them to remain in a land endeared to them by almost every tie that can bind the affections to any country.”

Smolenyak adds: “It is somewhat heartening that some white neighbours were appalled that long-time residents were being forced to choose between exile or slavery, and a number stepped up to add their names. In fact, the signatories on David’s paperwork read like a Who’s Who of early Texas history.”

Ultimately, the Ashworth Act (named after another affected family) was passed into law in December 1840, allowing free people of colour who had arrived in Texas before independence the right to remain. Towns’s offspring went on to live in various corners of Texas and Mexico.

Smolenyak found that David and Sophie’s son, Juan/John, married Mary Ann Smith, an Alabama-born daughter of African Americans. Ensuing generations in this branch of his family tree mostly chose spouses who were Mexican or of Mexican (and possibly Mestizo) heritage. “So if you think about it, this portion of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s family was multiracial, multicultural and multinational. In short, they have a lot in common with his Puerto Rican forebears,” she said.

Lin-Manuel Miranda's ancestry is as multifaceted as Hamilton

 

[Jemmy]

William Henry Ellis (1864–1923)




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The Strange Career of William Ellis: Texas Slave to Mexican Millionaire

WOW. We have so much history to be proud of. Great thread.

 

[Red Shield]

Great thread! I remember reading that jack Johnson tried to encourage AAs to go to Mexico. He even started up a company to help get them land.

Never knew that about Jack

 

[2Quik4UHoes]

I work for a filmmaker that’s working on a documentary film which goes in depth on this migration of Black people. Maroonage in America is seldom discussed because it shows Black people in a positive light.

Hearing bits of the story from the side, this is a very powerful history and imo extremely integral for Black people today to learn about. Resistance was very real and more prevalent than we are taught.