For a few terrifying minutes as she stared down the barrel of a pistol on Aug. 20, 1850, Mathilde Hennes feared she was about to be kidnapped from her home in northeast Mexico and returned to Louisiana and the man who had enslaved her.
But Hennes kept her wits about her and screamed for help. Her employer, Manuel Luis del Fierro, drew his own revolver, confronted the two men and demanded they release Hennes, according to the historian and author Alice Baumgartner.
One man got away. But the second man was captured. Though William Cheney cited U.S. law as proof that he owned Hennes, he spent a month in jail and returned to Louisiana without the young woman he’d attempted to seize.
Hennes’ story is just one of the many tales of formerly enslaved people who followed the Underground Railroad not north but south, into Mexico. Their stories shaped “Mexodus,” a new musical that combines hip-hop with history and opened Thursday night at Baltimore Center Stage.
Though Hennes does not make an appearance in the musical, creators Nygel Robinson and Brian Quijada have distilled her experience and that of dozens of other real-life escapees into a fictional story about the dangerous journey to Mexico during the decades before the Civil War — and the unexpected allies the fugitives found in the Spanish-speaking population south of the border.
“Before I started working on this project, I had no idea there was an underground railroad running south to Mexico,” said Quijada, who is of Salvadoran descent.
“My parents crossed that very same border in the 1970s,” he said. “They were undocumented, so it was an epic journey, and it was dangerous. They made a lot of sacrifices so I could grow up in America and write plays.”
Not only did Robinson and Quijada write the script for “Mexodus” and compose the show’s score, they perform in it. Robinson, 30, portrays Henry, who must flee from his home after he kills a white man in self-defense. Quijada, 35, plays Carlos, who pulls the drowning Henry out of the Mexican side of the Rio Grande River and hides the injured man in his barn.
The musical is live-looped, which means the actors build their own music from scratch by using guitars, keyboards and other instruments scattered across the stage.
After leaving Baltimore following the final performance April 7, “Mexodus” will run May 16 to June 16 at Washington’s Mosaic Theatre, which co-sponsored the production.
Robinson sees “Mexodus” as an antidote to social forces that attempt to pit not just Black people against white, but marginalized groups against one another as they compete for limited opportunities and resources.
“That period was a precursor in some ways to what is going on now, when Black people and brown people are establishing connections and finding moments of solidarity,” Robinson said. “The power structures tell us that we need to be separated from these other people who we actually have a lot in common with. Together, we are stronger than we are apart.”
The pair began working on “Mexodus” four years ago during the coronavirus pandemic. Because of the COVID-19 quarantines, they used technology to communicate while crafting the musical from separate cities: Robinson’s home in Chicago and Quijada’s apartment in New York.
They hit upon a scheme of recording and releasing one new song online each month. After a year, they not only had the complete score for “Mexodus” but also had created buzz in the theater industry about their project, which sheds light on a relatively unknown part of American history.
If the Mexican “branch” of the Underground Railroad is less well known than the northern routes, that’s partly because it was used much more sparsely — and primarily by freedom seekers living in the states bordering Mexico. Baumgartner estimates that between 4,000 and 6,000 enslaved people found refuge in Mexico between 1829 and 1865 — a fraction of the approximately 30,000 to 100,000 runaways thought to have fled north.
In addition, Baumgartner said, the southern underground railroad was less well-organized than the flight paths north. There were no conductors like Harriet Tubman in Oklahoma, Louisiana or Texas, or established safe houses. Those who sought refuge in Mexico generally found their own way south.
And it was a journey every bit as dangerous as the trip north, according to Baumgartner, an assistant history professor at the University of Southern California and author of the 2020 book, “South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War.”
To get to the Rio Grande, runaways had to cross the 150-mile Nueces Strip, a desert landscape of blazing heat, little running water and less shade. What’s worse, it was rife with bounty hunters.
“All the Underground Railroad stations were in the northern free states,” Baumgartner said. “People escaping to Mexico had to get through Texas first, which was a slave state. There weren’t a lot of free Black people in Texas, so white people paid attention to Black people traveling by themselves without a pass.”
But once the escapees crossed the Rio Grande — on ferries operated by white sympathizers, on the backs of stolen horses, or, perhaps apocryphally, by floating across on “rafts” made from bales of cotton — the fugitives had real advantages denied to their northern counterparts.
Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, even slaves living in free states were subject to being recaptured by the federal government and returned to their former owners. But Mexico’s Congress abolished slavery in 1837, and not just because Vincente Guerrero, a popular former president, was of Black and indigenous descent.
At the time, tensions were running high between the U.S. and Mexico, Baumgartner said. Texas won its independence from Mexico in 1836, and the Mexican government feared — correctly — that the large nation to the north had plans to annex it.
“There’s an old saying, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Baumgartner said.
But she added that it would be inaccurate to describe 19th century Mexico as a paradise. Slavery might have been abolished south of the border, Baumgartner said, but racism had not.
“The majority of Mexico’s population is of African or indigenous descent,” she said. “Though there was a greater tolerance for the racial mixture than there was in the United States, there was a growing sentiment in the 19th century and continuing into the 20th that it was better to look white.”
Nonetheless, when bounty hunters ventured south of the border, it wasn’t uncommon for Mexican landowners to come to their new neighbors’ aid.
And the escapees returned the favor; a group of formerly enslaved fighters became known as “Black Seminoles” who joined Native peoples and patrolled border communities — a historic development mirrored in “Mexodus.”
Though the events in “Mexodus” occurred roughly 175 years ago, the creators think the story is more relevant than ever during a time when the immigration crisis dominates headlines.
“I find this country’s politics about immigration to be incredibly frustrating and hypocritical,” Quijada said. “Don’t we have an entire statue in New York Harbor dedicated to letting in the tired and the poor?”
If you go
“Mexodus” runs through April 7 at Baltimore Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert St. Tickets cost $49-$74, or $20 for students. For details, call 410-332-0033 or visit centerstage.org.