Making their way to Mexico: Reconsidering Black Mobility and Liberation in North America

This presentation will focus on the hidden history of the Black American experience in Mexico during slavery. Participants will take a journey on the Underground Railroad beyond the U.S. border to the South. It will highlight how Black liberation connected and shaped (and continues to shape) the histories of Mexico, the US and Canada. The presentation will also examine how Afromexican communities today are not only leading the recovery and preservation of their legacies, but continue fighting to access resources, most importantly during pandemic times. 

María Esther Hammack is the 2021-23 Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a Mexican scholar and public historian whose work centers and connects, through a gender lens, the histories of liberation and abolition in North America and the Black Diaspora in Mexico. She is currently revising her first book, Channels of Liberation: Black Freedom Across the US-Mexican Global South, a work that examines & recovers the transnational experiences of Black Americans, situated as freedom fighters, who left the United States for Mexican spaces.

Register for the Zoom presentation: https://csun.zoom.us/j/84345948960