Slavery in Mexico developed within colonial New Spain and continued into the first years of the independent republic. Enslaved Africans and their descendants worked in mines, sugar production, ranching, workshops, households, ports, and urban trades. Veracruz connected New Spain to Atlantic trafficking and to intercolonial resale routes.
Slavery existed alongside other coercive labor systems, including Indigenous tribute and draft labor. These systems could overlap in practice, but they did not give workers the same legal status: an enslaved person was legally alienable property, while Indigenous communities were subjected through distinct colonial institutions. Free Black and mixed-status communities, manumission, military service, and legal claims also made the social order more varied than a simple division between enslaved and free people.
Abolition
Antislavery measures appeared during the independence struggle and the 1820s, but abolition was not a single event uniformly enforced throughout the territory. President Vicente Guerrero issued a national abolition decree in 1829. Slaveholders in Texas had resisted and attempted to evade Mexican antislavery restrictions, and Guerrero exempted Texas from the decree within months.[1]
Legal abolition ended recognized slave status, but it did not end every form of coercive labor. Debt peonage and other rural dependencies had different legal foundations and should not be treated as continuations of chattel slavery without qualification.