The Limits of Liberty: African Americans, Indians, and Peons in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands, 1820--1860

In the decades surrounding the U.S.-Mexico war, the borderlands of Texas and Northeastern Mexico teemed with mobile peoples crossing to the other side in search of better working and living conditions. While these migrants authored virtually no written sources, they left their mark in other ways. They employed one of the few resources available to them--mobility--to pioneer alternative routes across the borderlands. Runaway slaves who sought freedom in Mexico, Mexican indebted laborers who sought liberal working conditions in Texas, and Native Americans who hoped to assert their cultural autonomy blazed routes across the Rio Grande/Bravo. But once they reached their destinations, the insecurity of conditions on the ground put very real limits on their liberty. For one thing, in the absence of more regular diplomatic options, Texan regulars and volunteers kept up constant military pressure on Mexico to return runaway slaves and punish errant Indians. For another, the poverty of the Mexican frontier and the inability of commanders to meet the challenges of the Texans and the needs of the migrants added to the insecurity. Meanwhile, Native tribes who immigrated to Mexico found that the inhabitants of the Mexican North thought of them no differently than the Comanches with whom they were at war. The situation was not much improved for the migrants who charted the opposite trajectory, escaping debt peonage in Mexico to find more liberal working conditions in Texas. Mexicans who failed to replicate the racism of West Texas often found their lives hemmed in by violence. Most threatening of all to these people "in-between," however, was the prospect of international cooperation between the United States and Mexico, both of whom sought to assert their sovereignty over the borderlands in the 1850s. Nevertheless, mobile peoples forced Northern Mexican officials to take a stand against slavery and racism, and the experience of peons in Texas nudged Mexicans towards embracing free labor. In the final analysis, border-crossers had a significant impact not only on the meaning of the borderlands, but also on the understanding that Northern Mexicans and Texans had of themselves, their societies, and their respective nations.