Analysis Of Citizens Of Nowhere: Fugitive Slaves By Sarah E. Cornell

Sarah E. Cornell. “Citizens of Nowhere: Fugitive Slaves and Free African Americans in Mexico, 1833–1857.” Journal of American History 100, no. 2 (September 2013): 351-374. In the article written by Sarah E. Cornell in 2013 titled Citizens of Nowhere: Fugitive Slaves and Free African Americans in Mexico, 1833–1857, she argues: historians whom in the past have written about slave flight to Mexico focused on the geopolitical context rather than their lives in Mexico. As for the historians who have focused on the lives of fugitive slaves, tend to say African Americans were not subjected to any type of racial discrimination in Mexico. The author writes “Historians who study fugitive slaves in Mexico often cite Frederick Law Olmsted… in which

However Cornell argues that this is historically incorrect because “These stories may convey a kernel of truth about Mexico’s more fluid racial system, but as the historian Paul Foos has noted, most of these stories are improbable” (370). Cornell claims these stories were used as a tool to wipe out African American’s from USA land, she explains this by writing “White southerners who wanted all people of African descent on U.S. soil to be removed to Mexico likewise had ulterior motives for portraying Mexico as a land of legal and social equality” (370). Cornell addresses how historians have left out the daily lives and struggles fugitive slaves faced, she writes “They faced obstacles built upon their identities as people who had lived in a system of racialized labor in the United States and as a sometimes-racialized other in

She also puts a big emphasis in stating the further struggles they faced attempting to keep their freedom in Mexico. This article uses the timeline between the 1830’s which was when African Americans in the U.S first heard of the opportunity to gain freedom in Mexico, through about the late 1850s when white Americans in the U.S agreed they wanted African Americans out, and that the best way to achieve this was sending them to Mexico. Some of the important events that occurred between the 1830s-1850’s were Mexico’s refusal to extradite fugitive slaves in 1833, the U.S claiming there was a huge problem in the great amount of slaves who fled to Mexico in 1836, the U.S invasion in Mexico in 1846, the migration of African Americans away from the U.S.-Mexican border in 1852, and Mexico’s focus on class and accomplishments rather than race in the late