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Transcription: [00:11:27]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
Well that seems like a, you know, as appropriate a place that we could possibly hope to wind up on.
[00:11:31]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
I want to thank you all for joining us, and uhhh again, stop in next door you can talk with Romi some more about low-riding, and then right here on the other side are the muralists from Ciudad Juarez and El Paso and thank you very much.
[00:11:46]
{clapping and low background chatter}
[00:11:50]
{silence}
[00:12:01]
{SPEAKER name="Presenter 1"}
To the very last session of the festival, at least for us. Like many of the other sessions, this is a bilingual one, and there are two presenters.
[00:12:13]
{SPEAKER name="Presenter 1"}
Mrs. Gonzalez will present along with me, I'm doing it in English and she'll do it in Spanish. And --
[00:12:24]
{SPEAKER name="Luis De La Garza"}
Luis De La Garza --
[00:12:26]
{SPEAKER name="Presenter 1"}
Mr. La Garza will translate into English.
[00:12:29]
{SPEAKER name="Unidentified"}
And our guest is --
[00:12:31]
{SPEAKER name="Presenter 1"}
I'm going to leave the introductions to you and I will say a little bit about Mr. Warrior and then they will speak,
[00:12:42]
{SPEAKER name="Presenter 1"}
and I'd like to leave a little time at the end if y'all have questions, and I know you will have questions.
[00:12:46]
{SPEAKER name="Presenter 1"}
The theme of this session is border history.
[00:12:51]
{SPEAKER name="Presenter 1"}
Mr. William Warrior is probably the leading representative of the Black Seminole population, which is mainly situated now in Brackettville, Texas.
[00:13:04]
{SPEAKER name="Presenter 1"}
But has arrived there via a very circuitous historical route.
[00:13:12]
{SPEAKER name="Presenter 1"}
Starting um, well we can take it all the way back to Africa if we want to but the Seminoles, the Black Seminoles, came from Florida,
[00:13:24]
{SPEAKER name="Presenter 1"}
and I need to say very briefly for those of you who haven't visited our booth here a little bit about what the Black Seminoles are doing in Texas and Mexico, it's a long way from Florida,
[00:13:38]
{SPEAKER name="Presenter 1"}
We're, Seminole means fugitive, its from Spanish, semarron,
[00:13:45]
{SPEAKER name="Presenter 1"}
and there were Indian fugitives from slavery and there were African fugitives from slavery, and they went into Spanish Florida and remained two distinct populations,
[00:13:57]
{SPEAKER name="Presenter 1"}
but the African Seminoles, or Black Seminoles, left about 150 years ago
[00:14:04]
{SPEAKER name="Presenter 1"}
for a number of reasons but mainly because of slave raids into Florida,
[00:14:09]
{SPEAKER name="Presenter 1"}
leaving the Indian Seminoles still there. This is why you associate Florida with Indians, Seminole Indians in Florida and not with the Black population.
[00:14:20]
{SPEAKER name="Presenter 1"}
That's because they moved West. Some went to the Bahamas as well and they'll be here next year at the Folk Life Festival,
[00:14:28]
{SPEAKER name="Presenter 1"}
there'll be a Bohemian presentation and the Seminoles will be here from the Bahamas these are people we've never met.
[00:14:33]
{SPEAKER name="Presenter 1"}
Anyway they went to Oklahoma and then following that, they went to Mexico in 1870
[00:14:41]
{SPEAKER name="Presenter 1"}
they came up to serve as scouts in Texas and this is the reason why the population is scattered and that very hurriedly is a little history of the Black Seminole community,
[00:14:54]
{SPEAKER name="Presenter 1"}
and Mr. Warrior is from Brackettville, lives in Del Rio, and he'll be telling you more about himself in due course
[00:15:03]
{SPEAKER name="Presenter 1"}
and now I will turn the mic over to you and you can introduce our other speaker.