Overview
From the late 18th century into the mid 19th century, Seminoles and formerly enslaved Africans banded together in Florida to protect one another from slavery and colonial incursion. After decades of alliance and intermarriage, they became known as the Black Seminoles. Eventually, the U.S. government forcibly removed their tribe from Florida and relocated them to Oklahoma. Once there, some came to the decision to escape to Mexico where they eventually became known as los Negros Mascogos.
The following history draws almost exclusively on Shirley Boteler Mock's Dreaming with the Ancestors: Black Seminole Women in Texas and Mexico. It is divided into sections that cover (roughly) the following periods of time:
~1700 - 1835
The Trail of Tears and the Second Seminole War
1819 - 1842
1840 - 1846
1846 - 1849
1849 - 1850
El Nacimiento - The Birthplace
1850 -1867
Caught Between Revolution and Civil War
1857 - 1920
1930 - 2015
Safeguarding a Culture
Gullah Origins of Mascogo Identity
Like most descendants of the people kidnapped and sold to Europeans as a source of free labor in the Americas, the Negros Mascogos do not know their specific origins in West Africa. Nonetheless, threads of West Africa culture persisted among the captured manifesting while enslaved as Gullah culture, a culmination of different traditions from the many different peoples captured. One big example of such tradition is the capeyuye. Another was the construction of houses. Still more included certain ceremonies and complicated naming traditions.
The capeyuye was a fusion of the call and response singing accompanied by group clapping and stomping, a style of singing popular in many regions of West Africa to this day, the singing of Protestant hymns. The infusion of Christian religion undoubtedly was the only reason the singing of such spirituals was permitted since captors were persistent in erasing all past history and culture of the peoples they had kidnapped.
Escape to Florida - Becoming Seminole
Many people who freed themselves from slavery as far north as the Carolinas escaped to Florida. As early as the mid 1700s, Seminole leaders such as Chief Payne and his brother Billy Bowlegs began offering official refuge in Seminole lands to people escaping colonial slavery.
In exchange for a place to live where they would be unbothered, the descendants of West Africans entered into a political relationship with Seminole leaders similar to a tribute relationship. The Seminoles provided specific areas for escapees and their descendants to build their own self-governed villages and in exchange those villages supplied the Seminole family which had allotted them the land and its inherent protection with some of the food and goods their villages produced. For many years, this was how the two populations functioned together. There was some intermarriage, but first and foremost they operated more as an alliance of distinct small villages than as a single community.
Through these alliances and intermarriages came an exchange of culture. They found similarities between Seminole culture and West Africa derived Gullah culture, such as polygyny, matrifocal organization, and complicated naming practices (names were not only reused, but changed often depending on things like marital status). Seminoles also shared multiple foods and their preparation techniques with the refugees. Many of these foods and techniques would be incorporated into daily survival and some would prove crucial at multiple junctures in their descendants lives. Among these were the habits of drying strips of pumpkin and goat, the use of sotol to make a grain meal and sofkee, a gruel made from corn. These foods would became a necessity for survival more than once in the course of the people's history.
Guerilla Warriors
The purchase of Florida from Spain in 1819 and President Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830 precipitated a years long war in Seminole lands known as the Second Seminole War. With it came a fierce guerilla war and martial expertise for the Black Seminole men helping their allies to defend their land.
This fierce martial prowess would have lasting consequences for the Black Seminoles as they would later be sought after by both the U.S. Army and the Mexican government for military services against Indian raiders. The resume of tactical violence would also thrust some men, like John Horse, into leadership roles and provide them with valuable skills when the people would later escape to Mexico.
Indian Territory
Traditions like raising livestock and drying foods were mostly uninterrupted while the Black Seminoles were in Indian Territory though because of being so close to so many pro-slavery factions, they did not feel safe enough to build permanent housing until they left the territory.
Because of the proximity to so many potential kidnappers--compounded by the very real loss of multiple children stolen from families during this time--most of the Black Seminoles ended up clustering around Fort Gibson in hopes of protection from the U.S. Army. Lt. Col. Loomis, who was in charge of the fort, was sympathetic to the hardships of the Black Seminoles and tried to recover their stolen children, unfortunately with no success. He or his wife did, however, tutor some of the children and teach them to read and write, a skill that would prove immensely valuable to them in the future.
Journey to Mexico
Following an order from President Polk that nullified earlier promised made to the Black Seminoles, John Horse and Wild Cat decided it was time to leave Indian Territory. They departed in November 1949, under cover of the hunting season.
This arduous journey would prove the reliability of food traditions as well as the skills of guerilla warriors. Along the way, the group planted crops whenever they could, made sofkee, a gruel made from cornmeal, and dried meats and melons for preserved, travel-ready foods.
As for the guerilla skills, the path to Mexico was a dangerous one plagued by slavers and raiders. Regularly, the groups would have to separate, stage diversions, and fight roving bands.
Birth of the Mascogos
The Black Seminoles crossed into Mexico in 1850. Though welcomed, their needs were not prioritized. They were left to wait near the border, camping in areas outside of towns like Piedras Negras, while the Mexican government decided what land to allot them.
Not having land immediately designated for them did not stop the Mexican government from demanding immediate assistance with Indian raiders. The men called away, women and children were again left alone to hide themselves as best as they could from both raiders and slavers, relying on their dried foods to sustain them.
Knowing the danger the families they were responsible for were left in, both John Horse and Wild Cat complained constantly to Mexican officials to find lands for their people further away from the border.
In 1851, the Mexican government officially designated Hacienda de Nacimiento at the foot of the Santa Rosa Mountains be alloted to the Seminoles, Black Seminoles, and Kickapoos. Along with this designation, each group was supplied with agricultural tools and seeds for crops. For the Black Seminoles specifically, the Mexican government has an additional designation: the title of Mascogos for their tribe. It was the first official documentation of their collective identity and it came with certain requirements and restrictions. For example, it was conditional on their conversion to Catholicism and use of Spanish names. The name changes they accepted readily enough, but the Catholicism was no more than lip service for many who were still devout Evangelicals from their Gullah ancestors. Purportedly, some Catholic customs and rituals were integrated into their culture but it was not across the board.
A Home in Mexico
President Benito Juarez formalized in writing the Negros Mascogos' claim to Nacimiento in late 1866 after they had been forced to leave it for some years by a duplicitous Mexican official seeking to help wealthy landowners stake a claim to the farmland there. Though land disputes would pop up throughout the following decade, this was more or less the date Negros Mascogos were granted continual occupation and land rights to Nacimiento.
Officially a permanent settlement, the people built permanent housing, including the split-log houses they'd fondly utilized in Florida. They also accepted opportunities to learn from Mexicans in nearby towns and constructed homes in the Mexican style, along with acequias, or irrigation ditches for their gardens and crops. These necessities were among the first aspects of Mexican culture adopted by the Negros Mascogos, alongside some light Catholicism.
Celebrating Juneteenth
On June 19th, 1965, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation and months after the end of the Civil War, almost 2,000 Union troops marched into Galveston, Texas, to physically announce over loudspeakers that slavery was illegal and any person held in slavery was officially free. This day of freedom would become known as Juneteenth.
Because Los Negros Mascogos were either descendants of those who'd escaped or had forged their own paths of freedom from U.S. slavers, when news reached them of the events of Galveston, Texas, they were moved to celebrate, and have done so consistently every year since.
The segment below is a from a local Texas news channel discovering this fact in 2023. Like many visitors to Nacimiento for the Juneteenth celebration, people are awed by the vibrant mix of culture and food.
Beyond the new annual holiday the Negros Mascogos would celebrate hereafter, Juneteenth and the aftermath of the American Civil War more broadly, would have a huge ongoing impact on their communities. The Black Seminoles who has stayed in Indian Territory were reportedly thriving in the Seminole Nation. This led some leaders of the Negros Mascogos, John Horse among them, to desire to return to Indian Territory with the ultimate goal of being part of the Seminole Nation.
Just as the Mexican government had needed assistance from incessant Indian attack, so too did the United States require the same assistance following the end of their civil war. Having acquired quite the reputation as warriors, the U.S. military warmly welcome the Negros Mascogos back into the U.S. Following negotiations with the Army, they came to an agreement the Negros mascogos would serve as scouts in a new army detachment called the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts. In return for their military services, the Black Seminoles hoped they would be permitted to again live in Indian Territory or be given their own land in Texas. Neither happened. Instead, many were eventually forced to move back to Mexico by 1875 simply because they could not support their families with the salaries they were paid. Others continued living on in Texas, particularly near Brackettville, but maintained close relations with those in Nacimiento.
In the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution people throughout the land were exhausted by the civil wars that had devastated the people, land, and economy. Officials were motivated to develop a national cohesiveness and identity and invested heavily in projects designed to do just that.
One of those projects was schooling, including investment in rural schools, and within that educational framework, instruction in pride and obedience to a concept known as the mestizaje. The mestizaje was a vision of a "colorblind" Mexico, a Mexico based on the blending of indigenous and European identities that just so happened to favor whiteness above all.
There was not a lot of room for the Negros Mascogos (or any Afromexicans for that matter) in this conception of national identity.
Invisibility in México
The Negros Mascogos lived in relative cultural isolation from the rest of Mexico until the 1930s. The violence of the Mexican civil wars did not entirely skip over Nacimiento, but the majority of men living there were able to avoid conscription by offering their free labor to haciendas willing to harbor them, by hiding in the mountains as they had from Indian raiders, and in some cases by donning dresses.
Nonetheless, not all could escape and some men were conscripted into guerilla bands led by Pancho Villa and other revolutionaries. In response some Negros Mascogos such as John Payne, joined forces with the federales in order to fight the hated Villa and his army. In response, Villa kidnapped several Negras Mascogas and took them with him to Veracruz where he hoped to hold them as hostage until John Payne and the other Mascogo men fighting with the federales surrendered.
In 1914 the United States inserted itself into the conflict and seized the port of Veracruz. A sympathetic Spanish man offered to help and passed along a note from one of the women, Mirtes Payne, to the Americans. The news of the missing women made its way to Brackettville. Family members of the kidnapped women made their way to Nacimiento to confirm the women were indeed gone.
Safeguarding a Culture
The culture of Los Negros Mascogos is a blend of many into one and its oldest traditions are safeguarded and passed down by the elder women of the tribe.
Two aspects of their culture demonstrate the melding of the distinct identities of their ancestors. One is a tradition of song and another a tradition of food.