South to Freedom: Silvia Hector Webber, Mexican American Allies, and the Underground Railroad to Mexico, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. July 21, 2026

South to Freedom: Silvia Hector Webber, Mexican American Allies, and the Underground Railroad to Mexico

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

July 21, 2026

Silvia Hector Webber’s life illuminates a little-known but essential chapter ofTexas history: the Underground Railroad did not lead only north. For many enslaved Black people in Texas and other parts of the Southwest, freedom lay south—across the Rio Grande and into Mexico. Their journeys depended first upon their own extraordinary courage, but they were also assisted by networks of Black, Mexican, Mexican American, and white residents who provided food, shelter, directions, transportation, and protection (Baumgartner, 2020; Hammack, 2024).

Born into slavery in 1807 in Spanish West Florida, in an area that later became part of eastern Louisiana, Silvia was sold at the age of 12 for $550, roughly equivalent  to $11,568 in U.S. dollars 2025 according to Wikipedia, 2025).

She later came to Mexican Texas as the enslaved property of John Cryer. Between 1826 and 1829, she met John Ferdinand Webber, a white settler and business associate of Cryer. By 1834, while Silvia remained enslaved, she had given birth to three children with Webber (Hammack, 2024).

Any account of their relationship must recognize the profoundly unequal and coercive conditions created by slavery. Silvia did not possess legal control over her own person, and under the doctrine governing slavery, her children could also be treated as property. Whatever bonds developed between Silvia and John existed within a system that denied her autonomy and placed her and her children in continual danger of sale, separation, and exploitation.

On June 11, 1834, Silvia and John negotiated with Cryer to secure freedom for Silvia and their three children. Cryer did not demand payment simply in money or land. He required that the Webbers provide him with a two-year-old enslaved boy and provide a three-year-old enslaved girl to one of his relatives (Hammack, 2024). Later records discussed in the Wikipedia account indicate that the Webbers did not deliver the children and ultimately forfeited a substantial portion of their Webberville property to settle the debt associated with Silvia’s and her children’s freedom (Wikipedia, 2025).

This episode exposes the moral horror at the center of slavery: freedom for one Black woman and her children was assigned a price to be paid through the enslavement of other children. Silvia’s story must therefore be remembered not only as one of perseverance and eventual liberation, but also as evidence of slavery’s immense suffering—the sale of children, the commodification of Black bodies, the vulnerability of families to separation, and the ability of enslavers to extract wealth from the human desire to keep one’s family together.

Even after Silvia and her children gained their legal freedom, they continued to experience severe anti-Black racism. The Webber children were prohibited from attending the local school with white children, requiring the family to hire a live-in tutor. Although some neighbors respected Silvia for her intelligence, kindness, and generosity, they did not treat her as a social equal (Hammack, 2024; Wikipedia, 2025).

Conditions deteriorated further after Texas separated from Mexico and established the Republic of Texas in 1836. The new republic expanded and protected slavery, outlawed interracial marriage, and severely restricted the rights that free Black people had possessed under Mexican law. As settlers from the slaveholding South moved into Central Texas, the Webbers faced growing hostility, discriminatory treatment, and threats of violence. They also feared that slave catchers or so-called "Blackbirders" might kidnap Silvia or the children and sell them into slavery (Wikipedia, 2025).

By the early 1850s, the danger had become so great that the family left Webberville and relocated to the Rio Grande Valley. They eventually settled near present-day Donna, Texas, across the river from Reynosa, Mexico. There, they established the Webber Ranch and operated a ferry across the Rio Grande (Hammack, 2024).

Family histories and regional accounts identify the Webber Ranch as a possible station on the southern Underground Railroad. Silvia was widely remembered for opening her home to people who were hungry, destitute, or seeking refuge. The Webbers reportedly fed and sheltered freedom seekers and used their ferry to help fugitives from slavery cross the Rio Grande into Mexico. Their neighbors, Matilda and Nathaniel Jackson, another interracial family, were also known to assist people escaping enslavement (Hammack, 2024; Wikipedia, 2025).

The Webbers were part of a much broader history of resistance. Research on the Underground Railroad to Mexico demonstrates that Mexican residents and Mexican Americans participated in these freedom networks. People of Mexican descent guided escapees, shared information about routes and conditions across the border, offered food and hiding places, and sometimes helped freedom seekers evade slave catchers. Some endured intimidation and violence from slaveholders precisely because they assisted enslaved Black people seeking freedom (Baumgartner, 2020).

This history is important because it challenges the familiar geography of the Underground Railroad, which is usually imagined as moving north toward free states and Canada. It reminds us that another vital path led south through Texas and into Mexico. It also complicates histories that portray slavery and abolition exclusively through a Black-white framework. Mexican and Mexican American communities were not merely observers of enslaved people’s flight to freedom; some were active participants in making that freedom possible.

The story of Silvia Hector Webber therefore reveals a profound history of Black resistance, Mexican and Mexican American assistance, interracial family struggle, and cross-border solidarity. At the same time, it exposes the long reach of slavery and anti-Black racism: the buying and selling of children, the denial of education, the threat of kidnapping and re-enslavement, the dispossession of property, the displacement of free Black families, and the persecution of those who opposed slavery and the Confederacy.

This important history will be addressed this coming Saturday, July 25, 2026, with Webber family members and descendants present at the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin. The symposium, “Visibilizing a Freedom Fighter, Silvia Hector Webber: A Legacy of Resistance & Black Freedom in North America,” will bring descendants, scholars, genealogists, and community historians together to honor Silvia’s legacy and deepen public understanding of Black freedom-seeking, Mexican American solidarity, and cross-border resistance.

The free symposium will take place from 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. at the ESB-MACC, 600 River Street, Austin, Texas. As I shared in an earlier blog post, the gathering is part of the Webber Family Preservation Project and will highlight both the Webber family’s history and the important work descendants are undertaking to recover and preserve their ancestral histories, cultures, and historic sites (Valenzuela, 2026).

Source note: This account draws principally on historian María Esther Hammack’s archival research on Silvia Hector Webber, including her discovery and transcription of the 1834 freedom papers that secured freedom for Silvia and her three young children. It also draws on Hammack’s authoritative biographical entry in the Handbook of Texas Online and the Wikipedia entry “Silvia and John Webber.” Broader historical context regarding the southbound Underground Railroad and Mexico’s importance as a destination for freedom seekers comes from Alice L. Baumgartner’s South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War.

References

Baumgartner, A. L. (2020). South to freedom: Runaway slaves to Mexico and the road to the Civil War. Basic Books.

Hammack, M. E. (2024, March 20). The life and legacy of Silvia Webber: A pioneer of freedom in Texas (1807–1892). Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/webber-sylvia-hector

Wikipedia. (2025, May 28). Silvia and John Webber, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Silvia_and_John_Webber&oldid=1292671328

Valenzuela, A. (2026, July 17). Invitation: “Visibilizing a freedom fighter, Silvia Hector Webber: A legacy of resistance & Black freedom in North America” at the ESB-MACC, Sat., July 25, 2026. Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/07/invitation-visibilizing-freedom-fighter.html

Academic Freedom in Texas Higher Education is also a Latino Struggle, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. July 9, 2026

Academic Freedom in Texas Higher Education is also a Latino Struggle

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. 

July 9, 2026

I am grateful to see attention given to this important lawsuit challenging censorship in the Texas Tech University System. I also want to thank Lily Kepner for her tireless coverage of Texas education politics. My concern here is not with the messenger—far from it. We need more journalists willing to cover these consequential struggles with care and persistence. May her kind multiply.

My concern is that the issues named here—academic freedom, faculty governance, classroom censorship, LGBTQ+ rights, and the teaching of race, gender, and inequality—are urgent and consequential not only for Texas Tech, but for all of higher education in Texas.

That said, I want to gently but critically note an omission that matters. Latino communities, scholars, students, and organizations have been deeply and tirelessly involved in these very struggles across Texas—shoulder-to-shoulder with Black communities, LGBTQ+ communities, faculty organizations, civil rights groups, students, and other allies. These fights are not new to us. They are the same fights over curriculum, representation, Ethnic Studies, DEI, academic freedom, and the right of students to receive a truthful and complete education.

Indeed, many of us have researched, documented, testified, organized, and published on these issues for years, including the harms produced by SB 17, attacks on DEI, the chilling of race- and gender-conscious scholarship, and the broader dismantling of democratic governance in Texas higher education. Latina/o students and faculty are not peripheral to this story. 

We are central to so much of it.

That is why it is disappointing to see the article frame the issue almost exclusively through Black communities and Black professors, without also naming the Latino communities and scholars who are likewise targeted by these policies and who have been in the struggle from the beginning. In Texas, this omission is especially consequential. 

Latina/o students make up a major share of the state’s public higher education population. Many of the programs, courses, histories, and pedagogies now under threat—Mexican American Studies, Latina/o Studies, Ethnic Studies, bilingual education, immigration studies, borderlands history, and critical policy research—speak directly to our communities’ lives and futures.

This is not a call to diminish the anti-Blackness at work in these attacks. Quite the opposite. Anti-Black racism must be named clearly and confronted directly. But in Texas, anti-Blackness, anti-Latino racism, anti-immigrant politics, anti-LGBTQ+ attacks, and hostility toward gender justice are intertwined in the same authoritarian project. The struggle for academic freedom is strongest when we name all of the communities whose knowledge, histories, and presence are being targeted.

So yes, this lawsuit matters. It deserves support. The chilling of faculty speech and the restriction of what students can learn should alarm everyone who cares about democracy.

But the public narrative should also reflect the full coalition of communities that has been fighting this fight. Latino communities are not bystanders. As reflected in this very blog, we are part of the intellectual, legal, pedagogical, and political resistance to censorship in Texas higher education—and have been for a long time.

And this is not about recognition for recognition’s sake. It is about accuracy, accountability, and coalition. When the state targets race, gender, sexuality, immigration, Ethnic Studies, and DEI, it is not targeting one community at a time. It is targeting the very conditions that allow for a multiethnic/multiracial democracy to exist in public higher education.

Professors' union sues Texas Tech System over LGBTQ, race teaching restrictions

By Lily Kepner,Staff WriterUpdated July 8, 2026 1:05 p.m.

Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, authored Senate Bill 26, which would invest more than $4 million in teacher pay increases.

Jay Janner/American-Statesman

A national professors' union and its Texas chapter are suing the Texas Tech University System’s chancellor and regents for restricting professors' ability to teach about LGBTQ identity, gender and race, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court.

Brandon Creighton, chancellor of the Texas Tech University System and a former Republican state senator, announced last academic year that the five universities he oversees could not teach courses that advocate for race or gender “prejudice” or mention that more than two genders exist.

In April, he canceled all academic programs “centered on” sexual orientation and said professors “generally” cannot teach courses that include LGBTQ themes.

Wednesday’s lawsuit, filed by the American Association of University Professors and its Texas chapter, alleges that the decisions violate the First and 14th amendments and censor course discussion.

“This case presents an extraordinary system of censorship in higher education, in which professors in the Texas Tech University System are prohibited from teaching the most basic scholarship, while at the same time not fully comprehending the contours of prohibitions that place them under threat of losing their employment and livelihood,” lawyers for the professors' union wrote in the filing. “To make matters worse, professors cannot reasonably make sense of what is and is not prohibited, further chilling their classroom speech.”

Creighton said in a statement that the university system is confident its policies are “lawful and compliant.”

“Our commitment to academic integrity and the First Amendment rights of our students and faculty will not be distracted by lawsuits as we continue our mission to deliver rigorous academic programs, relevant coursework, and groundbreaking research,” Creighton said.

What do the policies restrict?

Creighton, who championed legislation restricting faculty input and diversity, equity and inclusion practices at universities during his time in the Texas Legislature, has said the restrictions ensure the Texas Tech University System provides “rigorous” and valuable degrees.


There is no law restricting what can be taught in Texas higher education. In 2023, Creighton authored Senate Bill 16, which would have restricted teaching that compels students to adopt beliefs that one race or sex is superior. The bill did not pass.

A higher education reform bill he authored, Senate Bill 37, succeeded in giving regents more power over curriculum and defanging faculty governance in 2025, but it did not include specific restrictions on race and gender. Initial drafts included those limitations.


Regardless, university systems have increasingly adopted policies to restrict what professors can teach after a Texas A&M University professor was fired at Gov. Greg Abbott’s urging for teaching about gender identity.

The viral fallout ultimately resulted in the president of Texas A&M stepping down, and the A&M System restricting courses that “advocate” for gender identity or race. Before Creighton was appointed, the Texas Tech University System banned teaching that there were more than two genders, and the University of Texas System also announced an audit of courses concerning gender identity.

The professors' union lawsuit specifically targets two decisions from Creighton that go further. In one of his first acts as chancellor, Creighton banned advocacy or promotion of race or sex-based “prejudice.”

In April, when he announced the cancellation of programs that teach sexual orientation, or gender identity, Creighton instituted a “strict prohibition on (sexual orientation or gender identity) content in all core and lower-level undergraduate courses,” and on “instruction that advocates for concepts of inherent racial or sexual superiority, inherent bias, or collective guilt.” That order did not apply to teaching about historical events tied to LGBTQ and civil rights.

The legal filing states Creighton’s orders are too vague, “chilling” any speech that has to do with LGBTQ identity, gender or race. The Texas Tech System provided guidance on its restrictions, but the suit maintains that the orders suppressed professors' academic freedom.

TJ Geiger, the vice president of the Texas Tech University AAUP chapter, said that the policies have led to confusion across campus, leading to self-censorship and “inconsistent” directives to professors on what they can teach. The limits ultimately hurt students, who “are not getting a full, accurate, and complete education” if professors are censoring their teaching, he said.

“It’s just been a really tumultuous time leading to what I’ve characterized as intellectual and professional triage,” Geiger said. “Our otherwise good work and effort that would have gone into teaching and research has been directed toward trying to figure out where the lines are in terms of what we’re supposed to say or not say.”

What is the lawsuit seeking?

The 84-page court filing asks a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas to prevent Creighton’s directives from being enforced.


Antonio Ingram, senior counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, a legal organization focused on racial justice that is representing the professors' union, said the restrictions have prevented professors at Texas Tech University’s medical school from teaching about health disparities based on race, and left law professors unsure about how to teach about legal victories for racial equality.

A spokesperson for Creighton did not immediately respond to the claims.

“These are targeting Black communities, Black professors,” Ingram said. “We want the federal court in El Paso to declare the memorandums unconstitutional based on First Amendment violations, based on vagueness, and based on its racial discrimination.”

This is a breaking story that will be updated.


July 8, 2026|Updated July 8, 2026 1:05 p.m.

Lily Kepner

HIGHER EDUCATION REPORTER

Lily Kepner started at the American-Statesman in October 2023. She has appeared on BBC, NPR and Texas Standard to talk about her coverage, which has spanned the impact of state laws and politics on the University of Texas, pro-Palestinian protests, free speech, the anti-DEI ban, LGBTQ student belonging and more. Kepner graduated with honors from Boston University's College of Communication in 2023, where she received the college's highest awards for writing and journalism leadership and led the award-winning student newspaper as Editor-in-Chief. In her time with the American-Statesman, she contributed to reporting that won an Edward R Murrow Award for breaking news, won the School Bell Award for Outstanding Feature from Texas State Teachers Association, and Critics Choice for Best of Austin in the Austin Chronicle. Previously, she has been published in USA Today, The Boston Globe, The National Catholic Reporter and GBH. Kepner is passionate about accountability and service journalism and encourages anyone to reach out to her to tell their story or share a tip.

The Tragedy of Internalized White Supremacy: A Response to the Rise of White Nationalist Hispanics by Russell Contreras & Astrid Galvan

The Tragedy of Internalized White Supremacy: A Response to the Rise of White Nationalist Hispanics by Russell Contreras & Astrid Galvan

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

July 2025

A March 2022 Axios report, “The Rise of White Nationalist Hispanics,” authored by Russell Contreras and Astrid Galvan, paints a disturbing picture of what happens when systemic racism, cultural erasure, and historical amnesia collide. Of course, this is what Republicans want to engineer even more profoundly in the American psyche with their censorious campaigns against books, CRT, DEI, tenure, academic freedom, and the like.

That a small but vocal number of Latinos—many of them with deep ties to the very communities under attack—are now aligning themselves with white nationalist rhetoric should alarm all of us. This is not new, but it is newly visible, more organized, and more dangerous.

It is no accident that figures like Nick Fuentes and Enrique Tarrio carry Latin American heritage yet advocate for the same ideologies that have historically dehumanized, excluded, and punished his and our own people. What we are witnessing is the violent logic of internalized oppression, passed down across generations and intensified in a political climate of fear, disinformation, and performative nationalism.

Internalized oppression happens when an individual from a minoritized group adopts the same stereotypes and pejorative views that the dominant group holds toward their own.

I’ve spent my career in education fighting for equity, truth-telling, and the inclusion of our histories in school curricula. And this is why Ethnic Studies matters. This is why we must teach our children where we come from—not just geographically, but socially, politically, and spiritually. We must dislodge the myths of racial innocence that shield Latino communities from confronting our own complicity in anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and yes, anti-Mexican-ness and anti-Latino-ness as a whole.

To be clear: these individuals do not represent the majority of Latinas/os. The overwhelming majority of our community believes in justice, in equality, and in solidarity with other marginalized people. But we must also confront how a lack of historical education, coupled with conservative media echo chambers and political manipulation, has left too many vulnerable to ideologies that are rooted in prejudice, violence, and exclusion.

This is not just about individual choices—it is about a system that rewards proximity to whiteness and punishes solidarity with the oppressed. It's about a multibillion-dollar misinformation machine that targets Latino voters with lies and fear-mongering. It’s about a country that has too often failed to fully recognize Latinos as part of its racial conversation—until we show up in the wrong places, saying the wrong things. The "black-white" binary erases Latinos from public discourse.

The antidote is education. The antidote is collective memory. The antidote is love for our people that doesn’t depend on assimilation, erasure, or the politics of rejection that engenders self-hatred. We must teach our youth that their worth is not measured by how close they can get to whiteness, but by how rooted they are in justice, culture, and truth.

White nationalist Hispanics are a contradiction. They are also a warning. If we do not confront the deep scars of colonialism—within our families, our communities, and our institutions—then the cycle continues. But we have a choice. We can choose historical memory over triumphalist myth-making, solidarity over supremacy, and love and healing over hate.

We can do better. Much better. The time to choose is now.

-Angela Valenzuela

The rise of white nationalist Hispanics

• Russell Contreras,
• Astrid Galván

Nick Fuentes, the leader of a Christian-based extremist white nationalist group, speaks to his followers in Washington 

D.C. Photo: Zach D. Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Image

Nick Fuentes, identified as a "white supremacist" in Justice Department filings, made headlines last week for hosting a white nationalist conference in Florida. His father is also half Mexican American.

The big picture: Fuentes is part of a small but increasingly visible number of far-right provocateurs with Hispanic backgrounds who spread racist, antisemitic messages.

Driving the news: Cuban American Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, a group the Anti-Defamation League calls an extremist group with a violent agenda, was arrested Tuesday and charged with conspiracy in connection to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

What they're saying: Experts tell Axios far-right extremism within the Latino community stems from three sources: Hispanic Americans who identify as white; the spread of online misinformation; and lingering anti-Black, antisemitic views among U.S. Latinos that are rarely openly discussed.

• Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State University, said in an interview that the trend is "part of the mutation that takes place as the racist fringe tries to become more mainstream."
• Racism is deeply rooted in Latin American and Caribbean nations, where slavery was common, Tanya K. Hernández, a Fordham University law professor and author of the upcoming book, "Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias," told Axios. "In Latin America, white supremacy is alive and well.”
• Even families who have been in the U.S. for generations can often bring those biases with them.

Between the lines: The U.S. trend, fueled over the course of Donald Trump's presidency and the pandemic, extends beyond movement leaders to a broader network of participants, some of whom have faced hate crimes charges.

• Last month, Jose Gomez III, 21, of Midland, Texas, pleaded guilty in federal court to three counts of committing a hate crime for attacking an Asian American family, including two children, he believed to be responsible for the pandemic.
• In 2018, Alex Michael Ramos, a Puerto Rican resident of Georgia, was sentenced by a Virginia District Court to six years in prison for his role in a beating of a Black man in Charlottesville, Virginia, following the "Unite the Right" rally.
• Christopher Rey Monzon, a Cuban American man and member of the neo-Confederate group League of the South, was arrested in 2017 for attempting to assault anti-racist protesters in Hollywood, Fla. He later resigned from the group and said he regretted using slurs for Black and Jewish people.

Context: At the conference in Orlando, which made headlines because U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) accepted an invitation to speak, Fuentes drew attention for comments of his own:

• "And now they’re going on about Russia and Vladimir Putin is Hitler — they say that’s not a good thing..." He then laughed and said, "I shouldn't have said that."
• Fuentes has questioned the Holocaust, criticized interracial marriage and defended Jim Crow-era segregation. The ADL describes him as "a white supremacist leader and podcaster who seeks to forge a white nationalist alternative to the mainstream GOP."

Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio wears a shirt supporting Derek Chauvin, the police officer convicted of killing George Floyd. Photo: Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images

• Tarrio, 38, has previously faced charges: He was sentenced to five months in jail for setting fire to a Black Lives Matter banner stolen from a historic Black church in Washington, D.C.

• 
  

• • "I'm pretty brown, I'm Cuban. There's nothing white supremacist about me," Tarrio told Insider in 2020.
  • But Tarrio was suspended from Twitter in 2019 for posting anti-immigrant threats, has denigrated transgender people and has used racist language to describe a Black actor.

  But, but, but: There are limits to how accepted some far-right Latino activists can become in white supremacist and neo-Nazi circles, Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the ADL's Center on Extremism, told Axios.

  • Some extremists on 4chan and 8chan say Fuentes' Latino heritage disqualifies him from speaking on white supremacy, Pitcavage said. Meanwhile, some white supremacist elements of the Proud Boys dismiss Tarrio as a leader but so far he has withstood the criticism, said Pitcavage, who monitors the chats.

  Tarrio's lawyer, Lucas Dansie, did not respond to emails seeking comment. Fuentes' American First Foundation also did not respond to requests for comment.

  What we're watching: U.S. Latinos identifying as multiracial soared during the last decade, while those identifying as solely white dropped significantly, according to the latest census.”

  Subscribe to Axios Latino and get more news that matters about Latinos and Latin America, delivered right to your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

  Editor's note: This story first published on March 10.