![]() ![]() Kelley, “but it wasn’t anywhere near as well organized” as the better-known operation that led to Canada. “When I hear the term ‘Underground Railroad’ applied, I don’t complain,” says historian Sean M. With slavery came the desire for freedom, and that’s where the narrative of “Pathways to Freedom” turns, adjusting its lens toward Mexico. “I did not realize,” Talley says, “how abundant the African race is in Mexico,” but she soon learned that even more Africans were brought as slaves to colonial Mexico than were brought to colonial America. Until then, says Talley, “I never thought about Afro-Mexicans.” The exhibition, funded in part by the Michigan Humanities Council, emphasizes the shared experiences and history of black Americans and black Mexicans. The two met at a peace festival in Mexico in 2010 and became friends. “Those stories were not told,” says Patricia Ann Talley, “because those stories ended up in Spanish.” But even in Mexico the stories aren’t widely known, continues Talley, a Detroit native and African American who lives in Mexico and who initiated the “Pathways to Freedom” exhibition with Candelaria Donaji Mendez Tello, an Afro-Mexican. ![]() ![]() While there is abundant documentation, not to mention folklore, pertaining to the network of guides and sanctuaries that helped enslaved people escape to freedom in northern states and Canada, the record is less abundant concerning the Underground Railroad that led to Mexico. “Most people are surprised,” says Patrina Chatman, the museum’s curator of exhibitions. Wright Museum of African History, on view through March 31. This may be history, but it comes as news to many attending the exhibition “Pathways to Freedom” at Detroit’s Charles H. The Underground Railroad also ran south-not back toward slave-owning states but away from them to Mexico, which began to restrict slavery in the 1820s and finally abolished it in 1829, some thirty-four years before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. ![]()
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