The morning before Juneteenth, Corina Harrington and her sister Miriam Torralba left San Antonio shortly after sunrise and headed south to Mexico, retracing a portion of the same route their African American ancestors followed in 1850 when they escaped slavery in the United States and fled to freedom south of the border.
The sisters arrived around midday at their father’s house in the ranching village of Nacimiento de los Negros in Coahuila, about three hours south of Eagle Pass. As afternoon drifted toward evening, the blue silhouettes of the Sierra Madres were all but obscured by clouds, as siblings, cousins, extended family members, and childhood friends kept arriving in twos, threes, or fours. They strolled over to the cool and swift Río Sabinas to swim in water as clear as any Hill Country stream. They politely tasted the dried and shredded meat of a mountain lion that one of their cousins shot on their dad’s nearby goat ranch, and they laughed and reminisced and readied for one of the most important days of the year in a village whose name literally means “Birth of the Blacks.”
“We never knew it was called Juneteenth,” Harrington, 45, said of the holiday commemorating the emancipation of Texas slaves in 1865. In Nacimiento, where Harrington was born and raised until she was seven and where she has returned nearly every summer since, the June 19 festival and reunion is known as el Día de los Negros, the Day of the Blacks.
Although few black people remain in northern Mexico, the region was once home to thousands who escaped slavery in the United States. Mexico outlawed slavery in 1829, an underlying factor in Texas’s declaration of independence seven years later. In 1836, there were an estimated 5,000 slaves in Texas, a number that ballooned by 1860 to 182,500—more than 30 percent of the state’s population.
Freedom lay just across the Rio Grande. Maria Esther Hammack, a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, estimates that as many as 10,000 slaves followed a clandestine Southern Underground Railroad to Mexico. Most of them fled from Texas, but she’s found evidence of slaves escaping to Mexico from as far away as North Carolina.