ALAMO, TEXAS — Along the winding Rio Grande in South Texas lies a story many have never heard of, of a southern route to freedom for people enslaved on the Underground Railroad to Mexico.
“It’s so close, but yet so far for so many people,” said OJ Trevino, looking across the river to the Mexican side of the border from his family’s property. “Knowing that they just had to get there.”
Trevino, who grew up just 5 miles from the border, was shocked to learn that his fifth-great-grandmother helped transport fugitives across that river to freedom.
“I come from a Mexican family, but to understand, it was once enslaved. They helped other people who were enslaved to freedom,” he said. “It’s a feeling of pride knowing you had a family that did this.”
Nicknamed the “Harriet Tubman of Texas”, her name was Silvia Hector Webber.
Now, new search by María Esther Hammack, assistant professor of African-American history at Ohio State University, is shedding light on how Webber gained freedom and his pivotal role in the Underground Railroad to the southern border. As the country marks Juneteenth — the moment, on June 19, 1865, when the Union Army arrived in Galveston, Texas, to announce that slavery was illegal — Webber’s life is at the center of an exhibit : “Freedom Documents: Evidence of Emancipation,” at the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.
Sofia Bravo, Webber’s sixth-generation great-granddaughter and caretaker of the family’s land in Alamo, Texas, said the family’s history was largely a secret until now. The discrimination that both Latino and black residents faced kept that secret alive, she said.
“You weren’t allowed to know you were part of a black family,” Bravo said. “They barely accepted you as Hispanic; Can you imagine if they found out you were black?
That fear was replaced by pride after researchers discovered Webber’s “liberty papers” from the 1830s. The rare document, on display at the Briscoe Center, offers new insight into Webber and her husband, John, who was white. .
“Silvia Hector Webber was a remarkable person,” said exhibition curator Sarah Sonner. “We know that her home offered a place of refuge on the path to freedom through Mexico for the Underground Railroad. We also know the exorbitant price she and John were forced to pay to achieve the freedom of Silvia and her three children.”
According to the document, Webber’s enslavers requested payment in the form of two children – not Webber’s own – “a three-year-old Negro girl… and a two-year-old Negro boy.”
“By paying this, they would have perpetuated the very system they were trying to escape,” Sonner said.
The Webbers never posted bail and instead forfeited more than 800 acres of land near present-day Austin that they had offered as collateral for the freedom of Webber and his three children.
In the decades that followed, they operated ranches along the Colorado River and Rio Grande, researchers say, building ferry landings and providing safe passage for those moving toward freedom in Mexico.
“It just shows the fight that she had, just the fact that she wasn’t satisfied with seeing the injustice that was happening and saying, ‘OK, we have to do something,’” Trevino said.
Since then, Webber’s descendants have started the Webber Family Preservation Project to protect their legacy and help other descendants of enslaved people discover their history. The family’s uncovered history also gave them a new appreciation for the eleventh month.
“There was much more than just physical damage,” Trevino said. “The emotional damage that was done, the generational damage that was done, to have that understanding and learn the meaning of what Juneteenth is and what it took to get there, for people to get there and have that appreciation.”
“It took on a whole new meaning and concept for me,” he said.
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