The Black Mexican President Who Abolished Slavery in Texas Long Before Juneteenth
And why you've never heard of him
So listen.
I wasn’t gonna say anything. I was gonna let y’all have your red velvet cake, your freedom ribs, your TikTok dances in Galveston. But then I saw someone online ask if Latinos were even involved in Juneteenth like it was a guest list at a birthday party. Like:
“Were we even invited?”
Ma’am. We helped build the house. Then got erased from the building records.
So now I have to say something. Because here’s the thing:
Today is Juneteenth.
June 19th. The only American holiday that celebrates a lie ending late. On this day in 1865—two and a half years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation—enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas were finally told they were free.
Not freed, exactly. Just… informed.
Like: Hey, our bad. You were supposed to be free this whole time. Hope the unpaid labor wasn’t too traumatic.
Juneteenth is a celebration, yes.
But it’s also a reminder that freedom in America, like truth in America, rarely shows up on time.
It gets delayed. Censored. Minimized. And when it finally arrives, it’s like:
“What’d I miss?”
Everything. You missed everything.
🛑 First, let’s be clear: Spain ran the longest, deepest slavery empire in the Americas.
Including Texas, before there was a United States.
Americans like to tell the slavery story like it started in Virginia and ended with Lincoln. But slavery in the Americas started with Spain and Portugal in the 1500s, and they didn’t just dabble—they built a global machine.
Spain enslaved Indigenous people in North, Central, and South America—including Texas. (By the way, the word Texas comes from the Native Caddo word Tejas, which means “friend”—and is what the Caddo said to the Spanish before the Spanish enslaved and genocided them. Cute, right?)
And when the Indigenous numbers fell from genocide, disease, abuse, and overwork?
The Spaniards replaced enslaved Indigenous people with enslaved African people.
Millions upon millions of them.
That’s why 95% of the African diaspora in the Americas ended up in Latin America and the Caribbean—not the United States. Brazil, Cuba, Colombia, Peru, Haiti, Mexico—these weren’t side notes. These were the epicenters of African chattel slavery. They were the blueprint that the English followed in the U.S.
So when people act confused about Black Mexicans, or Afro-Colombians, or enslaved Indigenous people in New Mexico, just know:
The story of enslaved people in the Americas is older than the country of the United States.
America didn’t invent the disgusting machine.
It just upgraded it.
Texas was a Spanish colony. Then a Mexican state. Then a Confederate fantasy.
Before Texas was wearing stars and stripes, it flew two other flags:
The flag of New Spain, under Catholic monarchs who enslaved everyone they could reach
And the flag of Mexico, a new republic that abolished slavery in 1829
That abolition came from Vicente Guerrero, an Afro-Indigenous president of Mexico (yes, that’s right—Mexico had a Black president in the 1800s) who said:
“Slavery has no place here.”
🕊 Who Was Vicente Guerrero?
Vicente Guerrero (1782–1831) was a Mexican revolutionary general, statesman, the second president of Mexico, and the first Afro-Indigenous head of state in the Americas.
Born in Tixtla—now the Mexican state of Guerrero, named after him—he was of African, Indigenous, and possibly Spanish descent. His father was a mule driver. Guerrero was largely self-taught. He rose through the ranks of the Mexican War of Independence with brilliant guerrilla tactics and relentless commitment to liberation.
When Spanish loyalists tried to bring back colonial rule, Guerrero resisted again. He was elected president in 1829.
💥 His Boldest Act? He Abolished Slavery.
In 1829—36 years before Juneteenth—Guerrero formally abolished slavery throughout Mexico, a nation that included, at the time, Texas. Galveston.
His words?
“Freedom is the primary good that God has granted to man.”
He knew it wouldn’t be popular with the powerful.
He did it anyway.
🔥 How Did the Elite Respond? They Overthrew and Executed Him.
Shortly after abolishing slavery, Guerrero was ousted in a coup led by white conservative elites (yep—Mexican, all of them. Where do you think the Spanish landed, y’all?)
Despite being a war hero and president, he was executed by firing squad in 1831.
His crime?
Being too dark, too radical, and too devoted to true liberation.
🕯 Why You’ve Never Heard of Him
Because his existence breaks the American colonial narrative. Guerrero was:
A Black and Indigenous man who led armies—in Spanish
A revolutionary who abolished slavery in Texas
A president who paid with his life
A historical figure who doesn’t fit any neat box the U.S. knows how to teach
He’s inconvenient history—
Which makes him essential.
🧓🏽 Who was in Texas when Juneteenth happened?
Not just Confederates. Not just cotton planters.
Texas in 1865 was full of people the U.S. still doesn’t know how to count:
Afro-Mexicans—many descended from Africans trafficked through Veracruz
Indigenous Nations—Comanche, Lipan Apache, Tigua, Coahuiltecan
Genízaros—Native people enslaved by Spanish settlers and “freed” into permanent poverty
Mestizos—mixed by force, baptized by empire, erased by paperwork
So when the Union Army rolled into Galveston?
They didn’t just roll into Dixie.
They rolled into borderlands haunted by empire.
🔁 Texas, 1836: When freedom meant “let us keep our slaves.”
White Southerners who’d just moved into Mexican Texas with their enslaved labor force heard Mexico say, “Slavery is abolished.”
And they said:
“What if we ignore that?”
Mexico said: “You can’t.”
Texas said: “Bet.”
That’s how we got the Texas Revolution:
A war for “freedom”—to keep enslaving people.
🎭 Let’s talk about “Latino.” Because it’s not helping.
The U.S. Census created “Hispanic” in 1970. “Latino” followed. Both are invented labels meant to:
Flatten dozens of cultures,
Collapse centuries of colonization,
And keep messy truth off the books.
It’s not a race.
It’s not a culture.
It’s a filing cabinet full of ignorance.
You cram Afro-Mexicans, genízaros, white Cubans, Indigenous Guatemalans, and Asian Peruvians into one label and guess what?
You erase the histories.
You flatten the trauma.
You make it easier to divide and control.
So no, “Latinos” weren’t at Juneteenth.
But the Afro-Mexicans, mestizos, and Indigenous survivors who now get called that—often mistaken for “new arrivals” in a country their ancestors helped build?
They were already part of the story.
They were just erased. Again.
🧱 White supremacy thrives on keeping us apart—and invisible.
Let’s be real:
White supremacy survives by making sure the oppressed know nothing about each other.
They don’t want:
Black African diaspora
Indigenous Americans
Brown mestizos
…to compare notes.
They don’t want us realizing:
We were ALL enslaved—under different flags
We were ALL displaced, redlined, criminalized, undereducated
We were ALL portrayed as lazy, criminal, undeserving, or “not really American”
We were ALL used to replace each other—then told to fear each other
And when we try to come together?
The system gives us one school, one job, and says: “Fight for it.”
But here’s the truth:
The history of the current Brown “Latino” migrant is not all that different from the Black American’s.
Go back far enough and you’ll find:
We were all trafficked—across oceans, across borders, sometimes without ever leaving home
We were all brutalized by empire
We were all taught to survive by staying silent
But hear me now:
We are not rivals.
We are cousins.
Colonized differently. Liberated incompletely.
Still fucking fighting.
✊🏽 And we mustn’t fight one another.
Juneteenth is a United States holiday.
It must remain so.
But it happened on twice-colonized land,
in a region that had witnessed Indigenous and African slavery under Spain, Mexico, and the United States.
And the first person to outlaw slavery there?
Was a Black Mexican president who spoke Spanish.
So if you’re celebrating Juneteenth today—and I hope you are—
celebrate it loud.
Celebrate it proud.
But also:
Celebrate it truthfully.
Because freedom didn’t just arrive late.
It arrived twice erased.
If this shook something loose in you—if it made you rethink what you were taught, or what you weren’t—share it. Forward it. Talk about it. Teach it.
And if you want more essays like this—rooted in truth, rage, and ancestral memory—
👉🏽 Subscribe to this newsletter. Paid, if you can. Because being a truth-teller in a nation like ours is…expensive. In many ways.
I write about history that white supremacism has tried to erase, voices they still try to silence, and the important unifying stories that still need telling.
We were never meant to be divided.
Let’s remember our way back to each other.
Thank you for great information, documentation and perspective. I didn't know this history of Texas and Mexico and I doubt many Americans know it. It certainly isn't taught in American Schools.
Thank you for the history lesson. Thankfully we can still learn something new every day.