"Mexico in His Head": Slavery and the Texas-Mexico Border, 1810-1860‪.‬

In September 1851, six years after Texas was annexed by the United States and fifteen years after independence from Mexico, Guy M. Bryan, politician and slaveholder of Brazoria County, wrote his brother-in-law in response to a proposal to swap a tract of land for a slave. Bryan seems to have liked the idea and planned to inspect his brother-in-law's slave that evening, but a disturbing rumor prompted him to reconsider. "The negroe he has got Mexico in his head," he wrote, referring to the prospect of seeing the slave escape to the south, adding, "on this account I may not buy." The record is silent on whether Bryan went ahead with the deal, but his dilemma reveals something of the nature of slavery in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands: enslaved residents of Texas invested the border with a set of meanings that formed the core of an oppositional culture, shaping numerous acts of resistance. (1) Historians of Texas slavery have long recognized that Mexico attracted and harbored refugees from the state's plantations. But in chronicling the efforts of enslaved Texans to reach freedom in Mexico, scholars have overlooked two important issues. First, they have generally treated the border itself as an unproblematic given, ignoring not only the conflicts that resulted in the frequent redrawing of the boundary between the U.S., the Texas Republic, and Mexico/New Spain, but also the changing significance of the border that accompanied each shift. The issue warrants serious consideration. National boundaries delineated the scope of state power, which, through military support and the passage of slave codes, was vital to the maintenance of slavery. A second, and closely related issue is the ability of enslaved Texans to project a definition of the border. They did not simply react to the various redrawings of the border; in the crucible of their own interpretive communities they invested the border with liberationist significance, helping to set off a chain of events that resulted in Texas independence and the establishment of a slaveholding republic. Ironically though, the drawing of a clear border between slavery and non-slavery only inspired more flight toward the Rio Grande. (2)