While the term “Underground Railroad” is probably most associated with enslaved people fleeing to free northern states and Canada in the 19th century, there was actually a less formal southern-bound route and destination centuries earlier.
The first documented instances of enslaved individuals seeking freedom by escaping British plantations and making their way south to Spanish-controlled territory date back to the 1500s, and in 1693, King Charles II of Spain issued a royal decree promising freedom to any enslaved person fleeing British territories, if they met conditions including: Converting to Catholicism, pledging allegiance to the Spanish Crown, and for men serving in the colonial militia.
We learn about this overlooked aspect of North American history with a woman who gives talks through the Florida Humanities Speakers Bureau. She'll be giving a talk on this topic on Thursday, June 18 in Fort Lauderdale. Click here for more information.
Guest:
Magdalena Lamarre is a retired Full Professor of History and Sociology at Miami Dade College, and since retiring in 2016 Ms. Lamarre has conducted lectures that focus on Florida history, genocide, and American popular culture, while exploring themes of culture, diversity, history, and social justice.
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Transcript
Mike Kiniry
This is Gulf Coast Life. I'm Mike Kiniry, thanks for joining us. While the term underground railroad is probably most associated with enslaved people fleeing to free northern states in Canada in the 19th century, there was actually a southern bound route more than a century earlier. The first documented instances of enslaved individuals seeking freedom by escaping British plantations and making their way south to Spanish controlled territories date back to the 17th century. In 1693, King Charles II of Spain issued a royal decree promising freedom to any enslaved person fleeing British territories if they met some conditions. including converting to Catholicism, pledging allegiance to the Spanish crown, and for men serving in the colonial militia. To learn more about this probably overlooked by many of us aspect of our North American history, I'm joined by Magdalena Lamarre. She's a retired full professor of history and sociology at Miami-Dade College. Since retiring in 2016, Ms. Lamarre has conducted lectures that focus on Florida, history, genocide, and the American popular culture through the lens of comic books, I guess, in some cases, which we'll talk about, while exploring themes of culture, diversity, history, and social justice. Welcome to the show, Ms. Lamarre.
Magdalena Lamarre
Thank you very much for inviting me to participate in this program.
Mike Kiniry
So for starters, just tell us a little bit about your background and what drew you to history originally.
Magdalena Lamarre
I was born and raised in New York City. I'm the product of that great migration from Puerto Rico after World War II. So I was at first generation born in the United States and raised in a total American system. And I grew up in this dual society, being told that I was a New Yorker, that I was American, but then also being told I was Puerto Rican. But I didn't know anything about that. I just knew, you know, I grew up in Brooklyn, you know, from New York. And when I went to visit for the first time the island, I got this shock because my family members in the island, I was like 14, 15, told me I'm not Puerto Rican. I said, what? In a way, they're right. I don't know this history. didn't really focus. I was 14, 15. But then when I went to college, I majored in history, and I decided that I was going to learn my history. I was going to learn that history of the Caribbean and that history of the Americas. So it was a search for that identity that some individuals who grow up like that in two societies at some point start to do. They start to really examine who they are and what's their complete background. I wasn't marginalized. I was fully integrated into American society. But I still had these two identities that I was not sure which one I really was. And I discovered them both. I'm an American of Puerto Rican ancestry.
Mike Kiniry
How long did you teach at Miami-Dade College before retiring in 2016? And what was the scope of the kinds of courses you taught?
Magdalena Lamarre
25 years. Right before that, I taught in New York City. I taught in the high school and the college system there in New York City Community College. I taught American history basically and world history. American history one was my favorite and world history one, that was my greatest interest. Because of low enrollment and because I had a background also in sociology, I also got certified to teach sociology. I was in a new campus at Miami-Dade at that time. It was small by Miami-Dade terms, but it still had like about 2,000 students. But we didn't have enough enrollment for history. So what I did was I started teaching sociology and eventually where I am is it's called a social historian. Whether I teach history or sociology, each has aspects of both. So those are the courses I ended up teaching. Originally history and then sociology courses.
Mike Kiniry
Your bio says that you're a social historian whose research and lectures focus on Florida history, genocide and American popular culture through the lens of comic books. Explain briefly what you mean by that.
Magdalena Lamarre
Okay, so the history part would be Florida history. And when I talk about or teach or research the history, I'm also looking for the social, cultural, historical aspects of the history and the sociology that are linked to that. It's not just like the dates and the people and events. It's like how all of these things together basically created that society of that time, how each one impacted the other. And when I teach sociology, I always go back to the history. going into the origins of many of these ideas, especially in the culture, is not just to say this is a culture of this society, this is what this cultural practice means. What is the history of it? Where did this come from? Where did these original, what we call now natural part of a culture, what are its origins? Because they do have these, you know, this long trajectory of development. It doesn't just happen overnight. And very often they're connected to many other histories and other societies. So that's basically what I do. In terms of the comic books, what I used in the comic book study was I was in a small campus. I had a large population of young African-American young men, which were actually the highest dropout and low success rate. And I always said, how do I entice my students to be interested in sociology? You know, when they have so many other issues in this poor community. I was teaching at that time in Homestead, Florida. And this was also right around the time of Hurricane Andrew. So that community was devastated on top of being already a poorer community. I decided, let me use comic books and let me show them that there were black superheroes. But not just black superheroes, because what I did was I did, how do comic books display diversity? And it was a way to entice them to get interested, So they were reading comic books and they thought it was cool, but what they were doing was learning about society because the comic books do mirror society of the time they're written by the individuals. I call them primary and secondary sources. Of course, they didn't know that. And they just, they would just say, oh yes, that's a teacher that uses comic books in the classroom, which was, kind of a reputation, which was good because I knew they were talking about what was happening in my classroom.
Mike Kiniry
I love it. So you're registered with the Florida Humanities Speakers Bureau through which you give lectures on the Spanish period of Florida history, including the one we're going to talk about in just a little bit, I promise. But we were talking a little bit on the phone before we started the recording. You know, the Spanish aspects of North American history, it seems to me, are maybe starting to get some more attention in recent years. I mean, does that ring true with you too? Can you kind of dig into that a little bit?
Magdalena Lamarre
I think it is. And I think it has to do with, there's more information everywhere, on the internet, very easy. You can acquire and you're exposed to. Sometimes without really looking for it, you're exposed to information. I think that that's been an Ave. where people have come across information that they've said, oh wow, I didn't know this. And some people will follow up on it. There's also been a lot of attention in Florida. The reality is that Florida has always been this big melting pot. It is also part of the South. We have to remember that. So when we have this state that the further north you go, the more you get into the South, but the further south you go, the more you have these northern influence and impact. And migration of all of these people, a lot of them were Hispanic, which is something that really took off after the 60s, after the end of Jim Crow and segregation in the South, because many of the Hispanic people that would have come here, like my family, would not have come here before the 60s, because they would have been subjected to Jim Crow laws. They would have fallen in those segregated areas. So you had basically American history the focus, not the Spanish period. But as you have these populations coming with their history and culture, then you had more awareness coming out. And that population is here and it's growing, not just through immigration, but just through birth rates, you know, how many generations. I was born, I'm first generation, but my family itself is now in its fourth generation of birth, you know, a born of Puerto Rican ancestry born in the And that's what happens within a period of, what, 70-something years, which is my age group.
Mike Kiniry
A couple years ago, I had a guy on the show named Dr. Kevin Kokomor, I think it was. He teaches history at Coastal Carolina University. He wrote a book called La Florita, Catholics, Conquistadors, and Other American Origin Stories. that talks about how so much of early colonial life in the United States, now what we call it today, was driven by Spanish influence and not English influence. And so much of what I read in that book was stuff that I didn't even know about. Does that align with the kind of the stuff that you've learned and taught over the years?
Magdalena Lamarre
Yes, definitely. What the research that I started when I was in college, my interest in the Caribbean and this connection of the United States to the Caribbean, but also the connection history to the Spanish period. that America, we weren't being influenced, for example, in New York City, influenced by Hispanic culture, because we had, in that case, my generation, the late, the early 50s, because of the migration from Puerto Rico and later from the Dominican Republic and other Hispanic and also the Black Caribbean. This started much earlier. And I didn't, I learned this when I, you know, started my major in history. My major was American history, actually. and world history, but American history. And then my master's was on the Caribbean. But then I realized that the Caribbean was the start of American history because Florida was first, the first attempt to settle it was the Spanish settlement. Ponce de Leon. So Florida was a Spanish and it never, you always hear Florida. And then I started saying, wait a minute, that's Florida. That's like, even I didn't make these Spanish connections because I was living in New York City and an English dominant and I am bilingual and I'm pretty much English dominant. But then when I came to Florida and I saw, because I came to Florida in 1986, everywhere you turn, all these Spanish names, right? Bonce de Leon, Coronado, Desoto, you hear all of these names in all of these towns throughout the state, not just Miami. And I've learned this as I travel for the Florida humanities, all of these corners of Florida that I go to in Pensacola. I mean, I've done lectures. That's something about the humanities. I've been to the Four Corners, literally the Four Corners, because I've been to Pensacola. I went to Media Island. I was at Key West, and I went all the way down to Fort Myers and Naples. So everywhere you go, there's these Spanish names and I never made, almost didn't make the connection. Like why? And it's because again, the history starts way before the, in Florida, 1821. It starts in 1513. It actually starts earlier, but that's like the official, you know, claim of Florida for Spain as recognized as being different, not being part of the other territory they had explored. So it's, you know, it's a connection that that I made that I want others to make too now. And they're making it. Like you said, this lecture, these lectures that I do, I get invited by a lot of people that want to hear this. And they'll say what you said. I didn't know this. I didn't know this. I didn't learn this in school. In Florida, I didn't learn this in school. Even when I taught the textbook that I did teach Florida history, it was more like an independent study, the textbook that I used basically had like a paragraph about Spanish period. That's it. So even the textbooks, even when you teach Florida history, the textbooks that were at that time, there was one by Damas Debow, very little. It was there, but very little, not to the degree of the impact. historically, it really had. And the length of time, you mentioned the legal Underground Railroad with 1693, but it really, the Underground Railroad really started probably, we know officially 1526, because that's when the first Maroons, the first escaped, enslaved persons fled. But if Polse de Leon landed here in 1513 and every expedition had enslaved and free black people, I can imagine that there must have been some enslaved persons of African ancestry that were part of Ponce de Leon's expedition that disappeared into the wilderness, because that was the pattern from the beginning with all of the Spanish expeditions, all of them.
Mike Kiniry
So it dates back much further than the 1693 that I referred to.
Magdalena Lamarre
At that point, it was a legal code that was established that they would be free versus Florida becoming a sanctuary.
Mike Kiniry
Understood. So was there, when we think of the Northern Underground Railroad in the 1800s, there were people who were facilitating. This Southern one that preceded it, was there any kind of formal facilitation or was it just a safer place to flee to?
Magdalena Lamarre
It was informal compared to the North. It didn't have the structure, it didn't have the codes, it didn't have like the quilt system that supposedly exists. It didn't have the conductors in the sense that there were people that actually dangerously dedicated their lives to helping enslaved people because in the South, you could be in prison, you could be executed, you could be killed for harboring, for stealing what was in effect property. It was very informal. It was the environment. Think of Florida. this vast open territory that up until 1821 had maybe 3 settlements, Pensacola, St. Mark's and Alachua, and St. Augustine, and little settlements. So you have this big, vast open area, which is mangrove, right, and forests and water and Everglades, perfect environment to hide. So once they crossed the border, they could find that kind of sanctuary, which is what some of them chose to do. There were different choices that they made in terms of where in the Underground Railroad. If we're going to have any conductors, the Spanish church would accept them. There were Spanish, any Spanish merchants and people who went into when they traded with, say, for example, Georgia, South Carolina, they probably passed the word around, especially if they had black people who were free on their ships, which they did. would say, hey, Florida, they knew how, did they know? How did they know to take that chance and flee from South Carolina where it started in Georgia and Alabama into Florida? How did they get the message, these enslaved people? Yet they knew that if they could find a way to get across that border, they would do it. Jay Landers called it the slave telegraph, right? They knew somehow. And they would come here. And so there were some Spanish people, but I would say the greatest unofficial conductor were the Native Americans. because the Native Americans were also being enslaved by the Spanish during this early period. Even when the Spanish crown prohibited the enslavement of the native population because they were the children of the queen, plus they were baptized, the idea of slavery was very different. You could be baptized into the Catholic religion and still be enslaved, but there were ways to earn your freedom and slavery wasn't automatic for your children. But it was a different system, but it was still enslavement. We're not going to say it wasn't. But the conductors would be the native population because they experienced enslavement. And then later, with the coming of the Seminoles, the people we call the Seminoles today, who themselves fled from the areas of Alabama and Georgia in particular, located in the northern area of Florida, Ocala, Gainesville, that region, They started taking in the runaway, we call them runaway slaves or escaping, fleeing enslaved persons. They took them in and these individuals helped them, protected them, would guide them. They needed to have some guidance to cross the border, you know, to go through the areas that were safe, like how to avoid where there were Spanish or there were British. So I would say that the Native Americans would have been probably the conductors in that sense, and they took them in. A lot of them joined them, stayed with them, became part of them. We know some of these individuals today as black Seminoles or black Indians in Florida, but you find Native American and black intermarriage and interracial mixtures in many parts of the United States, not just Florida.
Mike Kiniry
And then at some point though, King Charles II, I did get that right. At some point it became more formalized And there was somewhat more, I guess, at least of a guarantee if they came that they knew they would be able to live. Is that all accurate?
Magdalena Lamarre
Oh yes, totally. Well, the first group came and they asked for asylum. They knew to ask for sanctuary, church asylum. And the governor gave it to them. He refused to give them back. And then when they were given the freedom, they were allowed to stay, I guess again, word got back and they started continuing to flee. These individuals came from South Carolina from what they call the Gullah Corridor, because they came from the Gullah fields, from that area of South Carolina that were rice growers. And we know that because the current day Black Seminole descendants, those who still speak the language of the Seminoles, Black Seminoles, it includes Muscogee, Spanish, English, and the Gullah dialects. So that's how we know that they originally basically, in case of Florida, that their ancestors came from South Carolina historically. So they would come down that corridor. And this is the kind of connections that we make in history. We can trace them back. So if you're from South Carolina here in Florida, you probably are descended in some way from these individuals who fled. The conductors in the case of Florida were unofficial, but they existed. But I think that the biggest factor and most important factor was that Florida was this basically vast, unexplored, undeveloped territory, that they could basically just blend in, hide away, just hide away. Even after it became a territory of the United States, in 1821 and slavery was officially became part of the society because it came in as a slave state, a slave territory and then a slave state, they were still escaping. They were still fleeing into the wilderness, still joining groups like the Seminoles, which led to the Seminole Wars, fleeing to other places. A permanent settlement that still exists today is in the Bahamas in Andrews Island, right? Their descendants are still there. They fled in 1821 after a campaign under the governorship of Andrew Jackson. The campaign basically was established to force the Native Americans to leave the Seminoles with the other tribes to leave for Oklahoma. But also to remember these individuals in Florida were legal, but the North considered them runaways. They were runaway property. So if they could capture them, they would be re-enslaved.
Mike Kiniry
Gotcha. Yeah. Once that 1821 came, they suddenly had to renegotiate reality.
Magdalena Lamarre
Reality for many, and they started fleeing. Those that were free, because the enslaved ones couldn't, but those that were free fled. We had many who fled. Pensacola had a very large, free, affluent black and mulatto society, and they started fleeing because even though the treaty promised them citizenship and protection of their rights, as more and more slave codes kind of systems started to emerge in Florida, these rights were slowly erupting. wrote it and they started leaving. Mexico was one place they went to. If they could go N, Cuba was another place. And again, it's not that there was equality, total equality. It's not that there wasn't racism, but there was a different kind of freedom and a different system. It was like a classism Some race related for more classes. And if you had power, you had money, you had power, you had wealth, you had some independence. They might have lived somewhat in segregated, but sometimes, no, in the big cities, you had a lot of racial integration. This is always part of the Caribbean. You had a large population that was black and a small population that was white. And they may have been in power, but you still had these people living together. And there was a lot of miscegenation, definitely. In the South, it was illegal. And in Florida, it became illegal unless the slave codes of the South came in, the anti- miscegenation laws. But in the Spanish period, it wasn't. You could marry a person, black person, or mulatto could marry a white person, and they were, you know, They were free, or they could be enslaved and marry, and the husband would free them. But there was no law that said in the Spanish system that you could not legally marry someone from a different race. And this is why you do have a lot of miscegenate, a little interracial mixture, historically.
Mike Kiniry
We are almost out of time, but I love the way you've been able to tee this up and something that people can dig further into. I just want to know, how often do you add new topics for your talks? I mean, do you have like a little group of talks that you give and then sometimes you find a new topic that you get learned up on so you can give a talk on it?
Magdalena Lamarre
Every lecture. Every lecture. The first thing that I always do is, because I just mentioned Florida, right, was the sanctuary, right? Florida was a sanctuary. Every time I go to a place, I look to see what their population, how they were linked to the Underground Railroad. I always start with that, with Amelia Island, with Central Florida, with the West Coast, Tampa, with the settlement of Angola, for example. And then recently, I just sent that to, I don't know if you saw the biography, but we produce a group of scholars that work together in Florida, we just produced a book. And myself doing research for my section of the book, I found so much more new information. So it's like every time. The book is produced by the University of Illinois. It's a digital book. And as I started writing it, this thing I got out of control because I kept finding, well, this is interesting. I've got to share it. I don't get to share this in my lecture because the lectures are 40 to 45 minutes. So it's every topic. I would say every lecture has something new that I offer.
Mike Kiniry
I'll have to have you back. We can dig into some of the other aspects, but we are out of time. Magdalena Lamarre is a retired history and sociology professor, now a scholar who conducts lectures on Florida's history, culture, diversity, social justice, and other topics. Thank you so much for your time, Miss Lamarre.
Magdalena Lamarre
Thank you for the invitation. As you can hear, I love sharing this topic.
Transcript created with Copilot. Please forgive any spelling errors or mistranslations.
