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In 1968 Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress. In 1972 she launched a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, breaking another political barrier.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| Throughout Coahuila[1] (2020) | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
 Múzquiz, Coahuila, Mexico | |
| Languages | |
| Mexican Spanish, Afro-Seminole Creole | |
| Religion | |
| predominantly Catholic | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| African-Americans, Creek Freedmen, Black Seminoles, Gullah, Biloxi |
| Part of a series on ethnic |
| African Americans |
|---|
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The Mascogos (also known as negros mascagos) are an Afro-descendant[2] group in Coahuila, Mexico. Centered on the town of El Nacimiento in Múzquiz Municipality, the group are descendants of Black Seminoles escaping the threat of slavery in the United States.
After the forced relocation of the Seminoles and Black Seminoles from Florida to Indian Territory, a group led by Seminole sub-chief Wild Cat and Black Seminole chief John Horse moved to northern Mexico.[3] The group settled at El Nacimiento in 1852.[4] They worked for the Mexican government to protect against Indian raids. Many of the Seminoles died from smallpox and many of those remaining eventually returned to the United States along with some of the Black Seminoles.[3]
Mascogo oral tradition indicates that the group potentially absorbed remnants of the Biloxi people, fleeing to Coahuila to avoid encroachment by Anglo-American settlers.[5]
In May 2017, the Governor of Coahuila Rubén Moreira Valdez signed a decree that recognized the tribu de los negros mascogos as a "pueblo indígena de Coahuila".[2] He said that he hopes the Mascogos can begin receiving funds from the Instituto Nacional de Pueblos Indígenas by 2018.[2] Moreira Valdez also highlighted that the history of the Mascogos, Kickapoo and Chinese immigrants were now included in the state's history textbooks.[2]
Mascogo may derive from Muscogee.[4] The capeyuye, religious songs accompanied by hand clapping, are performed at funerals, New Years and Christmas.[4] In 2015, a capeyuye album titled Mascogo Soul featuring four Mascogo matriarchs was published.[6]
The Mascogos celebrate Juneteenth.[4][further explanation needed] During the festivities, the community is visited by family members and Black Seminoles from Brackettville, Texas.[7] Mascogo traditional dishes include soske (a type of atole), tetapún (bread made from camote), pumpkin or piloncillo empanadas and pan de mortero.[4]
The traditional costume of the Mascogo women is a long, polka-dotted dress, an apron and a kerchief tied around the head.[4] As of 2016, the only "pure Mascogo" was 85-year old Lucía Vázquez, a result of frequent out-marriage in the community.[4] According to Homero Vásquez, an elderly Mascogo whose mother was from Chihuahua, starting in the 1930s there was an influx of farmers to the region resulting in an increase of marriage with outsiders.[4] There is significant migration to other parts of Mexico and the United States of the young people of El Nacimiento due to a lack of opportunities.[4] Afro-Seminole Creole is used for the capeyuye and is spoken mostly by the elderly.[7]
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Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
The Mascogos (also known as negros mascagos) are an Afro-descendant group in Coahuila, Mexico. Centered on the town of El Nacimiento in Múzquiz Municipality, the group are descendants of Black Seminoles escaping the threat of slavery in the United States.
Juneteenth, officially Juneteenth National Independence Day, is a federal holiday in the United States. It is celebrated annually on June 19 to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. The holiday's name, first used in the 1890s, is a portmanteau of June and nineteenth, referring to June 19, 1865, the day when Major General Gordon Granger ordered the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas at the end of the American Civil War. During the Civil War period, slavery came to an end in various areas of the United States at different times. Many enslaved Southerners escaped, demanded wages, stopped work, or took up arms against the Confederacy of slave states. In January 1865, Congress proposed the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution for the national abolition of slavery. By June 1865, almost all of the enslaved population had been freed by the victorious Union Army or by state abolition laws. When the national abolition amendment was ratified in December, the remaining enslaved people in Delaware and Kentucky were freed. Early Juneteenth celebrations date back to 1866, at first involving church-centered community gatherings in Texas. They spread across the South among newly freed African-Americans and their descendants and became more commercialized in the 1920s and 1930s, often centering on a food festival. Participants in the Great Migration brought these celebrations to the rest of the country. During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Juneteenth celebrations were eclipsed by the nonviolent determination to achieve civil rights, but they grew in popularity again in the 1970s, with a focus on African-American freedom and African-American arts. Beginning with Texas by proclamation in 1938, and by legislation in 1979, every U.S. state and the District of Columbia has formally recognized the holiday in some way. Juneteenth was recognized as a federal holiday in 2021, when the 117th U.S. Congress enacted and President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law. Juneteenth became the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was adopted in 1983. Juneteenth is also celebrated by the Mascogos, descendants of Black Seminoles who escaped from slavery in 1852 and settled in Coahuila, Mexico.
The term Freedmen refers to descendants of people of African American descent who were enslaved by what are known as the Five Civilized Tribes. As sovereign nations within the United States, each tribe is at liberty to define their relationship to their Freedmen, with some allowing Freedmen petitions for enrollment in the tribe, and others explicitly forbidding the enrollment of Freedmen or outright disenrolling any that had historically at one point been enrolled. The Chickasaw Nation has never enrolled their enslaved. The term is also applied to those who are descended from those enslaved African descendants who voluntarily joined and/or held kinship with the Seminole Nation, including those who had fled from the Seminole Nation when it adopted the practice of slavery, to Mexico — these people today being known as Mascogos.) The term Freedmen is sometimes applied in literature as encompassing both the enslaved and emancipated, as well as either class' decendants. Freedmen, both enslaved and free, who were amongst these tribes, were forcibly deported alongside members of the tribes from the now-Southeastern United States westward to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears.
There are two languages spoken by the Seminole tribe of the southeastern United States, both of the Muskogean language family: Muscogee Seminole language, spoken in Oklahoma and Florida Mikasuki language, spoken in Florida In addition, Afro-Seminole Creole is spoken by Mascogos in Coahuila, Mexico, and by some Black Seminoles in Texas and Oklahoma.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Joe Louis.
