Black Americans feel welcome in Mexico

Some might mistakenly think Roderick Callaway is another American tourist walking down Juarez Avenue just blocks from the international bridge linking this Mexican border city with El Paso.

“This is home,” said Callaway, a Juarez resident.

The Dallas native known as “Roc” lives here and commutes across the border to teach sociology at the University of Texas in El Paso.

“I’m here because I want to be here,” Callaway explained. “I’m there because Mexico has opened its arms to me and welcomed me in.”

He plans to build a life in Mexico and marry his partner, a man from Veracruz.

“I look at borders as a way to cross them… to challenge the stereotypes and assumptions.”

Callaway is following in the footsteps of generations of African-Americans who chose to move to Mexico.

“The people in Mexico have the biggest hearts I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Jimmy Young, 65, a Vietnam veteran. He discovered Juarez when he was a teenager stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso.

“I said, ‘Oh, yeah, when I get out of the military, that’s where I’m going to be,'” Young recalled.

He made the decision to move to Mexico 49 years ago.

“I consider myself a ‘Blaxican.’ I’m into the culture. I’m into people. I read Spanish. I write Spanish,” Young said.

He met and married his wife in Mexico, and became part of a large extended family – like other African-Americans who migrated south.

“Many had families in Mexico, were married to Mexican women, and essentially, they had embraced Mexico,” said Howard Campbell, an anthropologist at the University of Texas.

Campbell has spent decades researching the migration trend. Some of his findings will appear in a paper “Escaping Identity” that will be published by the Royal Anthropological Institute this summer.

“There were certainly a lot of people who moved to Mexico just because it was cheaper,” he said. “But the main impetus: They moved to Juarez because they loved Mexico; they loved Mexican culture.”

And many chose to live on the border because they could straddle two worlds.

“In the last 50 to 60 years, many African-Americans have decided to live in Mexican border towns because they could appreciate and enjoy Mexican life, but still have one foot in the United States,” Campbell said.

But in recent years, drug violence in parts of Mexico – including border cities like Juarez – has scared many Americans away. Once there were hundreds of African-Americans in Ciudad Juarez, but now, as older generations die, there’s concern this little-known chapter of history will be lost.

Some blacks crossed the border to escape segregation in the 1960s. “The Mexicans weren’t racists in the traditional sense,” Young said, adding that African-Americans were once harassed by Mexican police if they were on “front streets” that were popular with white American tourists. But they were left alone on side streets.

“We had all-black clubs,” Young remembered. “We had the 77 Club over there. We had the Nopal. I could go through dozens and dozens and that’s where all the black guys hang.”

These days, Don Felix (named for Felix the Cat), is one of the few historic black bars still standing.

It has a new whitewashed exterior, like other buildings on Juarez Avenue. The strip near an international bridge is in the midst of a major renovation designed to attract tourists again.

Young has since moved to El Paso so his wife can qualify for legal residency and U.S. citizenship, a process that could take years. But he’s eager to return to Mexico.

“In a heartbeat. Once my wife gets her citizenship, we’re going back,” he said.