What is Día de los Negros? The Juneteenth celebration that Black Seminole descendants have kept alive in Mexico for over 100 years
The Día de los Negros explainer covers a little-known tradition in Coahuila, Mexico, where descendants of enslaved people who fled the U.S. in the 1850s still gather every June 19.
As millions of people across the United States mark Juneteenth on June 19, a small community in northern Mexico holds its own version of the same celebration, one that predates the federal holiday by decades. The Día de los Negros explainer starts in El Nacimiento de los Negros, a village in Coahuila, Mexico, where the Mascogos, descendants of Black Seminoles who escaped enslavement in the United States, have commemorated June 19 for over 100 years. TheGrio’s comprehensive guide to the origins of Juneteenth notes that Día de los Negros is one of the international expressions of the holiday, commemorated by formerly enslaved Black people who fled Texas and settled in Mexico south of the Texas border. As theGrio also reported this week, Juneteenth continues to carry complicated meaning for Black communities across the country, even as its recognition has grown globally. According to the Instagram reel posted by @thealphacatsyndrome, the tradition is rooted in a history that many people, including Mexicans living in the United States, have never been taught.
The story begins in the 1850s, when Black Seminoles, a people of mixed African and Seminole descent who had formed communities in Florida, were faced with removal and the threat of re-enslavement after the Indian Removal Act. Rather than comply, a significant group crossed into Mexico, where slavery had been abolished in 1829. They settled in what is now Coahuila, where the Mexican government granted them land in exchange for military service protecting the northern frontier from raids.
Their descendants, the Mascogos, have never stopped marking June 19. The Día de los Negros explainer is really a story about cultural memory: each year, the celebration in El Nacimiento includes horse parades, music, and traditional foods including tetepun, a sweet potato bread that traces back to their Seminole and African roots. The event draws Mascogos from across the region and has grown in visibility in recent years as Mexico’s government has worked to restore Afro-Mexican history to the national record.
The holiday is less widely known among Mexican communities in the United States, in part because Afro-Mexican history was systematically erased under the colonial caste system, which ranked people by skin color and effectively marginalized Black heritage from the national identity. Mexico received an estimated 200,000 to 250,000 enslaved Africans during the transatlantic slave trade, far more than is commonly acknowledged, and their descendants are concentrated across states including Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Veracruz, as well as in Coahuila.
Over the last two decades, the Mexican government has taken steps to address this gap, including adding a third root, alongside Indigenous and European heritage, to the official national narrative. In 2020, Mexico’s constitution was amended to explicitly recognize Afro-Mexican communities as a distinct group with rights to cultural preservation. El Nacimiento and its June 19 celebration are now part of that broader effort to restore what the colonial record tried to bury.