Salvador Cortés Rubio was relieving himself on the side of Highway 77 in Ardmore, Oklahoma, on June 7, 1931, when a car pulled up behind his Ford coupe. Two white men got out of the car and asked Cortés what he was doing. Although Cortés lived in Kansas, he knew enough about the South to button his pants and run back toward the car, where his 18-year-old brother and another friend were waiting. Just as Cortés Rubio got back to the Ford, he heard two shots and then the words, “Put your hands up.” Cortés Rubio slowly lifted his arms, looking in horror at the two lifeless bodies inside the car.
Cortés Rubio’s brother, Emilio, and their friend Manuel Gomez were killed by two off-duty police officers, Deputy Sheriffs William Guess and Cecil Crosby. Their murders were among thousands at the hands of police, tasked with enforcing even minor transgressions of racial norms in the South. The violence directed against people of color such as Cortés Rubio and Gomez was a violation of the founding principles of the United States, for each victim was denied the “unalienable rights” of “life” and “liberty” promised in the Declaration of Independence.
Salvador Cortés Rubio was relieving himself on the side of Highway 77 in Ardmore, Oklahoma, on June 7, 1931, when a car pulled up behind his Ford coupe. Two white men got out of the car and asked Cortés what he was doing. Although Cortés lived in Kansas, he knew enough about the South to button his pants and run back toward the car, where his 18-year-old brother and another friend were waiting. Just as Cortés Rubio got back to the Ford, he heard two shots and then the words, “Put your hands up.” Cortés Rubio slowly lifted his arms, looking in horror at the two lifeless bodies inside the car.
Cortés Rubio’s brother, Emilio, and their friend Manuel Gomez were killed by two off-duty police officers, Deputy Sheriffs William Guess and Cecil Crosby. Their murders were among thousands at the hands of police, tasked with enforcing even minor transgressions of racial norms in the South. The violence directed against people of color such as Cortés Rubio and Gomez was a violation of the founding principles of the United States, for each victim was denied the “unalienable rights” of “life” and “liberty” promised in the Declaration of Independence.
The history of the United States is often told as a centuries-long fight to fulfill those founding principles, with two major turning points: the Civil War, when the abolition of slavery enshrined those “unalienable rights” in law, and the Civil Rights Movement, which helped make those legal guarantees a lived reality.
As recent scholarship has emphasized, the architects of these shifts were ordinary Americans—the enslaved people who escaped to Union lines before and during the Civil War, and later, the African Americans who boycotted the segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama; who sat at segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina; and who marched on Washington, D.C.
Indeed, the young men murdered in Ardmore, Oklahoma, were also part of that broader movement to push the United States to fulfill its founding principles. But unlike the enslaved people escaping during the Civil War or the African Americans marching on Washington in 1963, they were not Americans. They were Mexican citizens, attending college in the United States.
In response to their murder, the Mexican Embassy in Washington pressured the State Department to investigate. Gov. William H. Murray of Oklahoma tried to defuse the controversy by offering two $15,000 college scholarships in the name of the murdered students. But the Mexican press ridiculed this gesture as “Compensation, Yankee Style.” El Universal Gráfico concluded in December, “There can be no doubt that the machinery of justice functions badly, very badly, in Yankeeland.”
The injustice of the Jim Crow South, so easy to ignore within the United States, became a source of embarrassment when aired on the international stage. The Mexican government demanded compensation, and the U.S. Congress responded by passing a bill on Feb. 25, 1933, to offer $30,000 to the families of the deceased as an “act of grace.”
Although foreigners and foreign nations rarely figure in the history of the United States’ founding principles, the family members of the murdered young men had the leverage to fight for justice precisely because they were citizens of another country. From the United States’ founding, foreigners could, and often did, rouse public opinion against inconsistencies that Americans preferred to ignore.
A portrait of former slave Felix Haywood, who had escaped to Mexico for emancipation, seen in San Antonio on June 16, 1937.Library of Congress
As early as 1775, the English essayist Samuel Johnson lambasted the slaveholding revolutionaries in the 13 colonies: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
Foreign governments could also pressure the United States through diplomatic channels. The Chinese government called on the State Department to stop mob violence against Chinese immigrants in the American West during the 19th century. The Soviet Union, perhaps more cynically, was also determined to expose the hypocrisy of U.S. claims of freedom. The U.S. branch of the Communist International, for example, helped to organize and fund the defense of the Scottsboro boys, nine African American teenagers and young men accused without evidence of raping two white women on a train in 1931.
The Mexican government was no exception, and it had more levers to pull than most other countries because of its proximity to the United States. At both inflection points in United States history—the end of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement—Mexico played an important role.
On April 5, 1837, Mexico’s Congress abolished slavery, less than a year after the Republic of Texas had won its independence from Mexico. The timing was no coincidence. Abolition afforded Mexico a kind of moral power in the wake of its defeat in the Texas Revolution. Like Johnson during the American Revolution, Mexican diplomats did not hesitate to point out that the Texas revolutionaries, for all their talk of “liberty” and “rights of man,” were destroying the “true liberty” of enslaved people. Not only did this sentiment galvanize international support for Mexico, but it also led enslaved people to escape in greater numbers across the Rio Grande, destabilizing slavery in Texas and the Mississippi, where cotton agriculture was booming.
Enslaved people escaped to Mexico by any means available. Some traveled by water, requisitioning canoes and flatboats, fashioning rafts from firewood, concealing themselves on board the ships docked at New Orleans. Most, however, escaped by land. They lurked in river bottoms, sought shelter in abandoned houses, and hid beneath overturned boats along rivers and canals. Each month, about a dozen freedom seekers reached Matamoros, across the Rio Grande from Brownsville. Two hundred and seventy arrived at Nuevo Laredo in a single year. In 1860, six of the nine slaves that the census takers tallied in Brownsville, Texas, were labeled “fugitives from the state.”
Enslavers in Texas and Louisiana were concerned by the number of enslaved people escaping to the south. Residents of Washington-on-the-Brazos, 80 miles northwest of Houston, worried in local newspapers about fugitive slaves “lurking” in the river bottoms. Rumors circulated of Mexican troops assembling on the Rio Grande to drive the Anglo upstarts out of Texas. “The frequent occurrence of the running off of our negroes is becoming so great an evil that it calls for a remedy,” wrote one citizen to the governor of Texas in 1851.
No policy could stop the flight of enslaved people across the Rio Grande. Diplomats from the United States demanded an extradition treaty that would return freedom seekers to their enslavers. But their Mexican counterparts refused to negotiate in 1850—and in 1851, 1853, and 1857. The return of fugitive slaves would not even be considered, complained the U.S. secretary of state in 1853.
Undeterred, local authorities set to work negotiating their own extradition treaties with the state governments of Coahuila and Nuevo León. When these efforts also failed, white southerners proposed annexing the states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and Coahuila.
As Mexico became known as a beacon of freedom, the landscape of slavery in the south-central United States began to shift. No man “in his senses” risked bringing “a large gang of negroes south of the Colorado,” lest they escape, lamented one newspaper based in Richmond, Virginia. An English-language newspaper in Matamoros confirmed that prospective immigrants chose not to settle in South Texas for the “unsafety of bringing slaves.” The area around the mouth of the Rio Grande was declared “non-slaveholding” due to its closeness to Mexico.
Historians have argued that the antislavery movement in the northern states contributed to a growing sense among white southerners that their property rights would never be secure within the United States. The flight of enslaved people to Mexico added to their sense of embattlement. In this way, Mexico’s policies and the enslaved people who invoked them undermined slavery in the United States. The Mexican government would continue to call on the United States to live up to its founding principles in the century that followed.
The reward notice for a captured slave in the Galveston Weekly News on May 11, 1858. Stephen F. Austin State University
Mexico’s role in the United States’ struggle for civil rights continued into the 20th century. In 1917, the Mexican Congress ratified a new constitution. Drafted in the midst of the Mexican Revolution, the constitution was the first in the world to guarantee both social and economic rights to citizens.
To make good on that guarantee, Article 27 permitted the expropriation and nationalization of land and mineral resources, including assets valued at the $1 billion that were owned by U.S. investors. In 1923, the two governments agreed to a commission that would “adjust amicably claims arising from losses or damages suffered by American citizens” during the Mexican Revolution. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson expected the tribunal to hold the Mexican government responsible under international law for its redistributive policies. But as historian Allison Powers has shown, Mexican citizens instead used the commission to challenge the unjust treatment of people of Mexican descent in the United States.
In the same way that Jim Crow laws targeted African Americans in the South, “Juan Crow” laws discriminated against Black and Mexican-descended communities in the Southwest. Earlier in 1923, the same year the commission was established, police in Grayson County, Texas, arrested eight Mexican citizens and forced them to confess to the crime of vagrancy. The charge had no basis, but their forced confession was enough to land them each with a $170 fine. One man refused to pay on principle. The others did not have the money. Under the Texas Penal Code, those who could not pay would be leased out at the rate of 50 cents per day.
For weeks, the eight men worked by day on a road construction crew and slept by night, as they later testified, in “a veritable cage.” They could not challenge their conditions under state law. Nor were they likely to succeed in federal court, because the United States government promised at the end of Reconstruction not to interfere in the local affairs of the Southern states.
But the U.S.-Mexico Claims Commission did give the men an opportunity to challenge their detention. The eight men argued that their arrest, incarceration, and forced labor violated the “fundamental principles of international law.”
Even if “it may possibly be true that there are legal provisions in Texas which permit this type of cruelty,” Mexican Foreign Ministry lawyers noted, any law that “imposes forced labor for a long period of time on persons who are not delinquent is far below an International Standard.” The tribunal—one commissioner from the United States, one from Mexico, and a neutral umpire from the Netherlands—ultimately agreed. They further ruled that the United States should pay the eight men $100 each for every day of their incarceration.
The eight men filed one of as many 40 claims before the U.S. Mexico Claims Commission, challenging convict leasing, lynching, and exploitative labor contracts such as sharecropping. To discredit these cases, lawyers for the State Department argued that the federal government was not responsible for the actions of state authorities.
The problem was that U.S. citizens demanded compensation before the commission on the same principle: that the Mexican government was liable for property seized by state authorities. To secure redress for investors would mean exposing to international scrutiny the civil rights abuses of the Jim Crow South.
“The revolution that began in 1776 has not ended,” U.S. President Donald Trump told Congress on Feb. 24, 2026. “It still continues, because the flame of liberty and independence still burns in the heart of every American Patriot.” Trump, of course, has long believed that immigrants coming to the United States are a threat to these patriotic values.
The Mexicans on the Texan borderland who provided shelter for those fleeing slavery before the Civil War—and the Mexican immigrants who filed claims against the United States in the 1920s—suggest a different story. Rather than threatening the founding principles of the United States, citizens of other nations pressured the federal government to live up to those ideals. The rest of the world might not lead the United States away from its heritage but, rather, back toward it.
