Mixed Race Studies

Why This Mexican Village Celebrates Juneteenth

Texas Monthly
2019-06-19

Wes Ferguson

Descendants of the Negro Mascogo people of northern Mexico gather to celebrate Juneteenth in the village of Nacimiento de los Negros. Photograph by Wes Ferguson

Descendants of slaves who escaped across the southern border observe Texas’s emancipation holiday with their own unique traditions.

The morning before Juneteenth, Corina Harrington and her sister Miriam Torralba left San Antonio shortly after sunrise and headed south to Mexico, retracing a portion of the same route their African American ancestors followed in 1850 when they escaped slavery in the United States and fled to freedom south of the border.

The sisters arrived around midday at their father’s house in the ranching village of Nacimiento de los Negros in Coahuila, about three hours south of Eagle Pass. As afternoon drifted toward evening, the blue silhouettes of the Sierra Madres were all but obscured by clouds, as siblings, cousins, extended family members, and childhood friends kept arriving in twos, threes, or fours. They strolled over to the cool and swift Río Sabinas to swim in water as clear as any Hill Country stream. They politely tasted the dried and shredded meat of a mountain lion that one of their cousins shot on their dad’s nearby goat ranch, and they laughed and reminisced and readied for one of the most important days of the year in a village whose name literally means “Birth of the Blacks.”…

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Acquanetta

Jungle Frolics
2009-10-15

Richard Beland

Acquanetta was born Mildred Davenport on July 17, 1921, and, depending on your source, was of either black or American Indian origin. A few writers have claimed she was Cheyenne Indian; possibly they’re confusing this with reports of her being from Cheyenne, Wyoming, or having been born in Ozone, near Cheyenne. However, by most accounts she was born on an Indian reservation and raised in Norristown, Pennsylvania. These conflicting reports may be due to the possibility that she had both black and Indian blood in her. (Adding to the confusion regarding her ethnic origins, some still report that she was born in Venezuela!)…

...The Arizona Republic for August 22, 2004, reported that Acquanetta’s brother, 85-year old Horace A. Davenport, was present at her funeral. A retired judge, Horace Davenport was, according to the Pennsylvania Bar Association, “the first African-American judge in Montgomery County.” Horace said that he’d never seen any of Acquanetta’s movies.

Bill Feret, in his 1984 book, Lure of the Tropix, said of Acquanetta, “She has never clarified her ambiguous origins, which over the years have varied between being an Arapaho Indian from Wyoming, a Latin from Venezuela, or a black girl from Pennsylvania…” Certainly, her exotic and sultry beauty and the ambiguity of her past added to the mystique.

Perhaps the 1940 United States Census can clear up matters: Mildred Davenport was born in 1921 in Newberry, South Carolina and was residing in Norristown, Norristown Borough, Montgomery, Pennsylvania with her parents, William and Julia, and five siblings, including Horace and Catherine (spelled “Kathryn” in a Jet article). Each member of the family is identified as “Negro” (race) and “African American” (ethnicity)…

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