Slavery In Mexico

Americans who were assimilated into cultures of the Iberian Peninsula have experienced an additional layer of obstruction by being caught in the middle of American, Spanish, Portuguese, Mexican and other national political struggles. Groups who have owned for millennia ancestral lands that span the Western United States and Central America have been dominated by missionaries, declared noncitizens, deported to reservations on scrap lands, into Mexico, and cycled back in to the States as itinerant laborers who are paid starvation wages. Spanish speaking peoples of all economic classes have, from the beginning of English colonization of North America, been seen as un-American and often a people to be forcefully subjugated to Anglo

immigrants to Mexico started trouble over their perceived right to hold workers hostage. During Mexico’s war of independence from Spain, revolutionaries declared the abolition of slavery in 1810 and reaffirmed it in 1813, but continued conflict with Spain made emancipation precarious. The new government’s Plan of Iguala again officially prohibited slavery in 1821, and President Guerrero signed another abolitionist decree in 1829. Mexico was serious about freedom. But Anglo capitalists fought against Mexico’s repeated crack-downs on their slave-dependent operations in Texas and in turn, Mexico considered Anglo-Americans undesirable immigrants because of their pro-slavery subversive

Those in charge of this republic, President Sam Houston, Secretary of State Stephen F. Austin, Chief Justice James Collinsworth, and others claimed control of the current state of Texas and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico. For the next nine years, until 1845 when the United States annexed Texas, plantation capitalists from the southern U.S. streamed into Texas territories. In that period, the total hostage population rose by 557.53%, and by 1845, enterprises with 1 to 4 hostage laborers rose by 340.33% and businesses with more than 50 rose by 750.00%.[1] Mexicans who formerly were legal citizens born in Mexico were at this time unofficially demoted to second class status and subjected to deportation, land thefts, harassment and lynching. While Texicans gathered in their profits, the multitude of land feuds among Anglos and Tejanos illustrated that this war for independence was clearly fought for capitalistic hegemony rather than Enlightenment ideals, although they used patriotic stories like that of the Alamo and Davy Crocket to elevate the revolt to a moral struggle and a war for