"Demandando la protección de las leyes a su favor": Freedom Fighters in Mexican Spaces

Join this virtual presentation by María Esther Hammack, M.A., PhD. Barra Postdoctoral Fellow | McNeil Center for Early American Studies. University of Pennsylvania. Introduction by Provost Ben Vinson. This talk will highlight little known stories of Black Americans, situated as freedom fighters, who left the United States to claim their liberation in Mexican spaces, before 1868. It will first offer a brief history of the processes that forged Mexican freedom and abolition to help contextualize the push and pull factors that enabled people held enslaved across the United States to pursue freedom in destinations south of US slavery. It will present little-known, but key actors foundational to these histories of liberation and abolition across the US-Mexico borderlands. It will also overview the importance of their experiences and legacies to the histories that connect the US and Mexico, their past, present and future. And to conclude, it will showcase a few of the geographies traversed by freedom fighters who fought to be free.

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