The hacienda San José de los laureles stood like a fortress of stone and lime in the hot lands of Veracruz, surrounded by reed beds that stretched as far as the eye could see under the relentless sun of the tropics. It was the year 1738 and Don Rodrigo de Mendoza y Salazar reigned over those lands with an iron fist.

A corpulent 53-year-old man, whose sun-tanned face reflected the hardness of someone who had built his fortune on the sweat of others. The hacienda prospered thanks to the work of more than 80 African slaves who ground the cane, boiled the guarapo and produced the sugar that filled the coffers of the acendado. Men and women locked up every night in the real.

that set of fenced huts where he spent his entire existence. Within those walls of the main house also lived the secret shame of Don Rodrigo, his daughter Beatriz, a young woman of 23 years old, whose body had grown disproportionately since childhood, reaching a weight that colonial society considered monstrous.

Beatriz had been confined to the back rooms of the house since she was 15 years old, when her father understood that no Spaniard of lineage would agree to marry her, and that her presence at the social gatherings of Shalapa or Veracruz only provoked murmurs and looks of pity. The girl spent her days in a large but suffocating room, attended only by two mulatto slaves who brought her endless trays of food, because Don Rodrigo had decided that if his daughter would not

She could be beautiful according to the canons of the time, at least she would not go hungry

Tomás, a 31-year-old slave, born in the sugar mill, the son of an African from the coast of Guinea and a Creole mulatto, worked in the hacienda’s sugar mill. He was a tall man, with a strong build, forged by years of carrying sacks of sugar and feeding the fire in the boilers, with a silent intelligence that he had learned to hide behind a mask of obedience.

Thomas could read and write forbidden skills that had been taught to him in secret by the former chaplain of the hacienda before he died. A compassionate Jesuit who believed that all men had souls regardless of the color of their skin. That clandestine education had made him someone different among the slaves.

A man who dreamed of freedom, but who knew all too well the price of rebellion in those lands where the maroons were mercilessly persecuted. One afternoon in July, when the heat turned the air into a dense and sticky mass, Don Rodrigo sent for Tomás to the main house.

The slave climbed the stone stairs with his heart racing, because being summoned inside the house rarely brought anything good. In the office full of mahogany furniture and maps of the lands, the ascended man watched him with those calculating eyes that evaluated men as if they were cattle or tools.

Tomás said in a harsh voice, “I have made a decision that will change your life and that of my daughter Beatriz. You will be her husband.” The words fell on the slave like a bucket of ice water. Because in that society where marriages between slaves and indigenous people were already causing scandal, the idea of marrying a black slave to the daughter of a Spanish landowner was something unheard of, a transgression that defied all the social codes of New Spain.

Don Rodrigo explained his plan with the coldness of someone solving a logistical problem. Beatriz needed a husband, someone to take care of her and give her company, but no Spaniard would accept her. Thomas was intelligent, strong, and above all he was not in a position to refuse. The marriage would be celebrated in the chapel of the hacienda, in a private ceremony without guests and in exchange Tomás would receive his freedom and a small plot of land when Don Rodrigo died, as long as he fulfilled his marital duties and kept Beatriz happy. If you mistreat her or

you try to flee,” warned the promoted man with a smile that did not reach his eyes, “I will have you whipped until the skin falls off your body and then I will sell you to the mines of Zacatecas, where you will die in six months.” Thomas nodded silently because he knew he had no choice, that it was simply another form of slavery disguised as marriage, but also because a spark of hope ignited in his chest.

Freedom, however distant and conditional, was more than most slaves could dream of. The marriage was celebrated a week later at dawn, when the fog still covered the cane fields and the slaves were just beginning their day. Father Ignacio, the new chaplain who had replaced the Jesuit, officiated the ceremony with obvious discomfort, stuttering the Latin words of the sacrament.

While Don Rodrigo watched from the first pew of the chapel, Beatriz appeared dressed in a white dress that had belonged to her dead mother, the fabric stretched over her voluminous body, her face hidden behind a veil that could not hide the tears. that ran down his cheeks. Thomas looked at her for the first time with real attention and saw not the daughter of the ascended man, but another prisoner, someone as caught up as he was in the cruel decisions of others.

When Father commanded them to hold hands, Thomas felt Beatrice’s cold, trembling fingers, and something inside him softened, a compassion he didn’t expect to feel. Married life began in the same back room where Beatrice had spent the last 8 years of her life.

Don Rodrigo had ordered an extra cot to be set up, but the first night Tomás sat on the floor leaning against the wall, watching his new wife weeping silently on the bed. I’m not going to touch you,” he finally said, breaking the oppressive silence. “Not that way, no, if you don’t want to.

Beatrice looked up in surprise, because she had assumed that her father had given her a slave, who would use her as slaves were used in the royals, without consideration or tenderness. Why? He asked in a hoarse voice from crying so much. Because we are both prisoners here,” Thomas replied, “and the prisoners must take care of each other.

The days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, while in the back room of the hacienda a strange and illogical relationship developed. Tomás continued to work in the sugar mill during the day, returning every night with his body sore and covered in ollín. But instead of sinking into sleep, he spent hours talking to Beatriz.

He discovered that the young woman had a sharp mind that she had read the few books that her father kept in the library, that she longed to know the world beyond the walls of the hacienda. he taught him the letters that the Jesuit had taught him, tracing words on sheets of paper that he had stolen from Don Rodrigo’s office. And she taught him about accounts and numbers, about how to keep records of sugar production.

Gradually the distrust gave way to something deeper, an intimacy built on late-night conversations and shared laughter, on the mutual understanding of two people the world had decided were worthless. One night in November, when the rains hit the roofs of Texas in La Cazona, Beatriz took Tomás’ hand and placed it on her cheek.

Thank you for treating me like a person,” she whispered. “No one had done it before.” Thomas felt something break inside him, all the barriers he had built to survive in slavery and for the first time in his adult life he cried. That night they became husband and wife in the truest sense, not out of obligation or strategy, but because of a genuine connection that had grown in the darkness of that room.

Beatriz discovered that she could be desired, that her body was not only an object of shame, but a territory of pleasure and tenderness. While Tomás found in her not only a companion, but an accomplice in his dreams of freedom, the following months brought subtle, but significant, changes to the dynamics of the hacienda. Don Rodrigo, satisfied that his daughter seemed happier and that Tomás fulfilled his obligations without causing problems, loosened the restrictions a little.

He allowed Beatriz to occasionally go out into the inner courtyard, always accompanied by Tomás. And the slave took advantage of these outings to carefully observe the routine of the butlers and foremen. There was something about the way Don Rodrigo had been coughing lately, about how his face had become paler and his hands trembled as he held the glass of wine, which told Tomás that the acendado would not live many more years.

He shared these observations with Beatriz and together they began to make plans, to dream of the day when she would inherit the hacienda and he would obtain his promised freedom. But dreams have a cruel way of crashing against the reality of the new Spain of the seventeenth century. In February 1739, Don Rodrigo suffered a violent attack that left him bedridden with half his body paralyzed and his tongue tied.

The doctors of Veracruz were summoned, but they could do nothing more than bleed the man and pray for his soul. For three weeks he agonized while in the corridors of the cazona, distant relatives began to appear like vultures, nephews and cousins who had never shown interest in Don Rodrigo, but who now smelled the inheritance.

The most prominent was Don Alfonso de Mendoza, a second cousin of the landowner who lived in Mexico City and who arrived with a retinue of lawyers and notaries. dusty documents that supposedly proved that he was the rightful heir to the lands.

When Don Rodrigo finally died in the early hours of a March morning, his lungs filled with fluid and his face contorted with grief, Beatriz suddenly found herself vulnerable as never before. Don Alfonso immediately installed himself in the main house and summoned all the servants and slaves to the courtyard to announce the new arrangements. His gaze fell on Beatriz with barely concealed contempt.

And when she mentioned her father’s will, the agreement on Tomás’s freedom, Don Alfonso let out a harsh laugh. “What testament?” he asked with a fox. My cousin was senile and that grotesque marriage is proof of that. A slave married to a Spanish woman is an abomination that I will annul immediately.

He ordered the foremen to separate the couple, to return Tomás to the royal with the other slaves, and to lock Beatrice in her rooms for her own good. Last night, while the guards dragged Tomás back to the royal and Beatriz screamed from her window in desperation, something broke definitively in the slave’s heart. For months he had believed that there might be a path to freedom that did not involve violence, that his intelligence and patience would be rewarded, but now he saw the naked truth.

In that society, a black man was nothing, not even when he was married to the daughter of the ascended man. The other slaves in the royal received him with a mixture of compassion and resignation, because they had all seen variations of the same story, broken promises, and crushed hopes.

But in Thomas’s eyes there was now something new, something that had not been there before, a cold, calculating determination, the realization that if freedom could not be won by obedience, it would have to be torn away with one’s own hands. Don Alfonso turned out to be an even more cruel master than Don Rodrigo. He increased the production quotas of the sugar mill, reduced the food rations that were distributed to slaves every Sunday, and established brutal punishments for the slightest infractions.

A slave named Gabriel was whipped unconscious for being 10 minutes late for work and a pregnant woman was forced to work in the cane fields in the sun until she collapsed. The atmosphere on the hacienda became tense and oppressive. The air itself seemed charged with dangerous electricity.

The slaves whispered in the darkness of the royal about escapes and rebellions, about the maroon palenques that existed in the mountains, about the possibility of burning everything to the ground. Tomás listened to these conversations, but he did not participate openly because he knew that informants were common and that Don Alfonso would not hesitate to make an example with anyone who smelled of rebellion.

Instead, he began planning quietly, using the intelligence he had cultivated over the years. He observed the routines of the guards, noticed when shifts changed, identified weaknesses in night watch, and, above all, found ways to communicate with Beatrice, messages written on pieces of paper that he hid in the food baskets that the slaves brought to the main house.

Coded words that only she could understand. Beatriz, meanwhile, lived her own hell in the house. Don Alfonso had decided that the best solution to the problem she represented was to send her to a convent in Puebla, where the nuns could take care of her away from public view.

Preparations for the trip were underway and the young woman knew that once she walked through the doors of that convent, she would never leave again, that she would spend the rest of her days locked up in cells even smaller than her current room. Desperation led her to a radical decision.

If he was going to lose everything anyway, he preferred to risk freedom or die trying. When he received the message from Tomás proposing an escape plan, he did not hesitate for a second to accept. The plan was risky to the point of madness. Tomás had made contact through a careful network of slaves who worked on different haciendas in the region with a group of maroons who operated in the mountains near Orizaba.

They were willing to accept fugitives, but the journey there was dangerous, traversing territory where slave hunters were constantly patrolling. They would need provisions, weapons, if possible, and, above all, a moment of distraction large enough to escape without being immediately detected.

Tomás proposed something that made several of the slaves who were in the secret cross themselves with horror, to set fire to the sugar mill during the night, to create enough chaos so that he and Beatriz could flee in the confusion. The night chosen was the last Saturday of April, when Don Alfonso had organized a dinner with other ascended people from the region to celebrate his inauguration of San José de los Laureles.

The main house was full of guests. The wine glasses flowed freely and the vigilance had been relaxed because all the foremen were busy serving the Spaniards. Tomás waited until after midnight, when even the night guards had begun to nod off at their posts.

Then, with the help of three trusted slaves, he sprayed lamp oil all over the mill, soaked the dry wooden beams, and set fire to the structure. The flames rose rapidly, devouring the old, parched wood with frightful voracity. The screams of fire resounded throughout the hacienda and in a matter of minutes chaos had taken over the place.

Don Alfonso’s guests staggered out of the main house, half drunk and terrified, while the slaves ran in all directions, some trying to put out the fire, others taking advantage of the confusion to flee into the fields. In the midst of this pandemonium, Tomás slipped into the main house through the service entrance, avoiding the guards who had abandoned their posts to fight the flames.

He found Beatriz waiting for him in his room, dressed in dark clothes that he had secretly made over the past few weeks. The face pale but determined. Are you sure?, Tomás asked, giving him one last chance to retract, because he knew that what they were about to do would change their lives forever. She took his hand tightly and nodded.

Together they descended the service stairs, crossed the kitchen where the pots were still steaming with the remains of dinner, and went out into the backyard, just as one of the walls of the sugar mill collapsed with a deafening roar, sending sparks into the night sky.

They ran towards the cane fields, entering the dark vegetation, while behind them the hacienda burned and the screams of confusion mixed with the crackle of the flames. Tomás knew every path in those lands. He had worked in these fields all his life and guided Beatriz with confidence, even in the most absolute blackness. She was panting from the effort.

Her body wasn’t used to that kind of physical activity, but it refused to stop, driven by a mixture of terror and hope. Behind them they could already hear the barking of the dogs that Don Alfonso had released, the voices of the foremen organizing search parties.

They walked all night, going deeper and deeper into the wild territory that separated the haciendas from the mountains. At dawn, exhausted and with their feet bleeding, they arrived at a stream where Tomás made them walk in the water for hours to confuse the dogs. Beatrice stumbled several times, falling on her knees on the stony bed, but each time Thomas lifted her tenderly, whispering words of encouragement to her.

“We’re almost there,” she lied, because in reality they still had days to go, but she needed that hope to move forward. On the third day of hearing, when they had exhausted the few provisions they had and Beatriz could barely walk, they found the first signs of the maroon palenque.

They were subtle markings, branches broken in a certain way, stones stacked in specific patterns that indicated they were being observed. That night, when they camped in a small cave, they were surrounded by silent shadows. Black and mulatto men armed with machetes and spears, faces weathered by years of living in the mountains.

The leader of the group, a man named Esteban, who had escaped from a mine a decade ago, looked at the couple with suspicion. “Are you bringing a Spanish woman to our shelter?” he asked Tomás in a hard voice. “Are you crazy?” Tomás told his story while Beatriz remained silent, aware that her life depended on her husband’s words.

He spoke of forced marriage, of broken promise, of love that had grown in the darkness of the back room, of fire and flight. The maroons listened with impassive faces and for long minutes after Tomás finished, no one said anything. Finally, an older woman named Josefa, who was a healer at the palenque, approached Beatriz and examined her with piercing eyes. She suffers, he said simply.

I can see the weight of his pain. Let them stay, but if they betray us, they will die. Life in the palenque was hard in ways Beatriz had never imagined. There were no rooms with stone walls or soft beds, only huts built with branches and leaves, dirt floors that turned to mud when it rained.

Food was scarce, mainly roots, wild fruits, and meat from animals hunted in the forest. But there was something there that Beatriz had never experienced on the hacienda, dignity. The Maroons lived by their own rules, with no masters to whip or sell them. And that freedom, although precarious and constantly threatened, was worth all the sacrifices.

Tomás quickly adapted to the life of the palenque. His strength and knowledge of agricultural techniques made him a valued member of the community. It helped expand the hidden corn and bean crops they maintained. He taught some of the younger ones to read and write, passing on the gift that the Jesuit had given him years before.

Beatriz, on the other hand, found her place working with Josefa, learning about the medicinal plants that grew in the mountains, about how to treat fevers and wounds. His body, which had always been the object of shame, became simply another body, neither better nor worse than that of anyone else in the palenque.

Months passed and the couple began to heal from the wounds that colonial society had inflicted on them. Beatriz lost weight due to the austere diet and constant physical work, but more important than that, her spirit flourished. He learned to laugh without shame, to walk with his head held high, to participate in the community decisions of the palenque, where his opinion was as valid as anyone else’s.

Thomas, finally freed from the physical and mental chains of slavery, became a different man, more serene, but also fiercer in his defense of freedom. But the peace of the palenque was always fragile. Don Alfonso, furious at the loss of his sugar mill and obsessed with recovering Beatriz as a matter of family honor, had hired professional slave hunters to track down the fugitives.

For more than a year, search parties combed the mountains, getting closer and closer to the palenque. The Maroons had to move three times, abandoning carefully constructed crops and shelters, always one step ahead of their pursuers. The final confrontation came on an October morning in 1740, when a party of hunters finally found the palenque.

They were 15 men armed with muskets and swords, led by a bloodthirsty mestizo named Vargas, who had made a name for himself hunting maroons. The Maroons, alerted by their sentries, had barely enough time to prepare a defense. A brutal battle broke out in the clearing where the palenque stood, the air filling with gunpowder smoke and the screams of the wounded.

Tomás fought like a possessed man, brandishing a machete that he had forged himself, protecting Beatriz, who had taken refuge with other non-combatants in a nearby cave. He saw Esteban fall with a shot to the chest. He saw Josefa being dragged by two hunters and something primordial awoke in him. All the rage accumulated during years of humiliation and slavery.

He pounced on the men who were holding the healer’s machete, cutting through the air with deadly precision. The battle lasted less than an hour, but by the time it was over the ground was soaked in blood. The Maroons, outnumbered and outgunned, had lost, but they had sold their lives dearly. Eight of the 15 hunters lay dead or dying, including Vargas who had been hit in the neck with a machete.

The seven survivors, terrified by the ferocity of the resistance, fled back to the haciendas, dragging the few maroons they had managed to capture. Domás survived the battle with multiple wounds, the most serious being a stab in the side that had punctured his lung.

Beatriz came out of hiding and found him leaning against a tree, coughing up blood, but his eyes still filled with that fierce determination. He carried him with a strength he didn’t know he possessed, dragging him into the cave where the few survivors of the palenque had regrouped.

For three days, Tomás fought death while Beatriz applied everything she had learned from Josefa, cleaning his wounds with herbal teas, forcing him to drink water when fever consumed him. The other surviving Maroons had fled deeper into the mountains, leaving the pair alone in a hidden cave.

Beatriz did not sleep during those three nights, staying awake with sheer force of will, talking to Tomás even when he could not respond, reminding him of all the moments they had shared, all the reasons to keep fighting. In the early morning of the fourth day, Thomas finally opened his eyes clearly.

The fever had subsided and although he was weak, the wound in his side had begun to heal. He looked at Beatrice, who had fallen asleep sitting next to him, her face marked by exhaustion and worry, and felt a wave of love so intense that it hurt more than any physical wound. Beatriz whispered and she immediately woke up tears welling up in her eyes when she saw that he was conscious. The following months were a test of pure survival.

The couple had to leave the cave and go even deeper into the mountains into territories where even slave hunters did not dare to go. They survived on roots, insects and occasionally small animals that Beatriz learned to hunt with rudimentary traps.

Thomas’ body slowly healed, leaving deep scars that would be a permanent reminder of the battle. One afternoon in February 1741, while exploring a remote valley for water, they found something unexpected. The ruins of a Franciscan mission abandoned decades ago. The adobe walls were partially collapsed, but the roof of some structures was still standing. It was the most solid refuge they had had since the palenque and they decided to settle there.

Using the skills Tomás had learned on the ranch and Beatriz’s determination, they began to rebuild parts of the mission, creating a true home for the first time in their lives. They worked from dawn till dusk, clearing debris, repairing roofs, and planting seeds they had gathered in the forest.

It was a hard and lonely life, but there was a peace in it that neither of them had known before. There were no masters to serve, no cruel relatives to please, no society to judge their love as grotesque or inappropriate. They were simply Thomas and Beatrice, two souls who had found solace in each other amidst a brutal world.

In the months that followed, the abandoned mission transformed into a small oasis of normalcy. Beatriz cultivated a vegetable and medicinal herb garden, while Tomás built corrals and managed to tame some of the wild goats that grazed in the valley. At night, under stars that shone with an impossible clarity in the lowlands, they sat together on the porch of the old chapel and talked about their dreams for the future.

It was during one of those nights that Beatriz announced she was pregnant. The news filled Tomás with a mixture of joy and terror, because bringing a life into that wild world seemed both a miracle and an act of irresponsibility. But when he saw the light in Beatriz’s eyes, when he felt her hand guide his to her womb, where a new life was growing, he knew that this child would be the ultimate proof that their love was real, that they were not just two victims of circumstance, but architects of their own destiny. The months of

Beatriz’s pregnancies were difficult because she had no access to experienced midwives or the medical care that existed even on the haciendas. Tomás did his best, applying the fragmented knowledge they had learned from Josefa, preparing herbal teas, and making sure Beatriz got enough rest.

There were moments of panic when she suffered pains that seemed abnormal or when the baby wouldn’t move for hours, and Tomás found himself praying to a god he wasn’t sure he believed in, begging him to protect his family. The birth came on a stormy night in August 1741, when lightning illuminated the valley and thunder shook the rebuilt walls of the mission.

Beatriz labored for 18 hours, her body struggling to bring new life into the world, while Tomás held her hand and spoke words of love and strength to her. When the baby finally emerged, a boy with brown skin and powerful lungs, Beatriz wept with relief and joy.

Thomas cut the umbilical cord with trembling hands, and when he held his son for the first time, he felt that all the horrors they had endured, all the physical and emotional scars, had been worth it to reach that moment. They named the child Matthew after the evangelist, whose name meant gift of God, although neither of them was particularly religious.

Caring for the baby in such primitive conditions was a constant challenge, but it also gave their lives a new purpose. Beatriz breastfed him in the morning sun, singing songs her own mother had sung to her before she died, while Tomás expanded the garden and the animal pens, determined to create a stable home for his family.

The years passed with a stillness neither of them had expected. Mateo grew up in the valley, a wild and free child, who learned to walk in the mission fields and to speak with the goats before he could speak with humans. Tomás taught him to read and write using sticks in the ground, passing on the Jesuit’s legacy to a third generation.

While Beatriz taught him about plants and how to heal wounds, the boy never knew slavery, never truly understood why his parents lived hidden from the world, because for him that valley was the entire universe he needed. But the outside world had not completely forgotten them. In 1745, when Mateo was four years old, a group of Otomi natives living in the mountains discovered the mission.

Tomás was prepared to defend himself, expecting hostility or betrayal, but the Otomi turned out to be peaceful people who were simply curious about the strangers who had rebuilt the ruins. Through gestures and the few words in Nahuatl that Tomás had learned from other slaves on the plantation, they managed to communicate.

The Otomi brought news from the outside world. Don Alfonso de Mendoza had died two years earlier, ravaged by a liver disease that doctors could not cure. The San José de los Laureles hacienda had passed into the hands of a young nephew who had no interest in pursuing fugitives from the past.

He was too busy trying to rebuild the sugar mill that Tomás had burned down. The slave hunters no longer patrolled the mountains with the same intensity because there were more pressing matters in the lowlands. The news should have filled them with relief, but Tomás and Beatriz felt instead a strange melancholy.

They had built their entire lives around hiding, around surviving. And now that the immediate danger had passed, they had to confront a different question. What kind of life did they really want? Beatriz watched her son running among the goats and wondered if it was fair to raise him so isolated, without other children to play with, without formal education or opportunities beyond that valley.

The Otomi, seeing the couple’s internal struggle, made them an offer. They could join their community in the mountains, where several families lived who had distanced themselves from the pressures of colonial life. It wasn’t exactly returning to the outside world, but neither was it the total isolation of the mission.

After weeks of deliberation, Tomás and Beatriz agreed. Integration into the Otomi community was easier than they had expected. The indigenous people had witnessed enough cruelty from the Spanish not to judge a mixed-race couple who had escaped oppression. Mateo thrived surrounded by other children, learning both Spanish and Otomi, becoming a bridge between worlds.

Tomás used his reading and writing skills to help the community in their occasional dealings with colonial authorities, drafting petitions and documents that protected communal lands. Beatriz found her true calling as a healer, combining what she had learned from Josefa with the herbal knowledge of Otomi women.

She traveled among the ranches scattered throughout the mountains, attending births and curing illnesses, earning a respect she had never known in her previous life. Her body, once a source of shame in the salons of Veracruz, became an instrument of healing and compassion. The years passed, bringing new children.

A girl named Clara was born in 1747 and another boy, Diego, in 1750. The family grew up alongside the community, participating in Otomi festivities, collective planting, and communal decisions. Tomás never forgot his time as a slave. The scars on his body were constant reminders, but he managed to build a life that transcended that trauma.

She taught her children about their history, about the injustices of slavery and the importance of freedom, but she also taught them that healing was possible, that love could survive even in the most brutal circumstances. In 1760, when Tomás was 52 and Beatriz 45, they received an unexpected visit. An elderly man arrived at the Otomi settlement asking specifically for them.

It was Father Ignacio, the chaplain who had officiated their forced marriage at the San José de los Laureles ranch more than two decades earlier. The priest had aged dramatically, his hair completely white and his back hunched with age. Father Ignacio brought disturbing news.

An ecclesiastical investigation had begun into the validity of the marriage between Tomás and Beatriz, instigated by distant relatives of the Mendoza family, who wanted to retroactively annul the union to resolve inheritance issues. But the priest had come not as an emissary of the church, but as a man of conscience. He confessed that for years he had carried the guilt of having participated in that forced marriage, believing he had been complicit in a cruelty.

Seeing the couple now surrounded by their children and clearly happy had given him a different understanding. “I traveled for weeks to find them,” the elderly priest said, his voice breaking, “because I needed to tell them I was wrong. Their love is more real than most of the marriages I’ve blessed in the churches of Veracruz.”

You are proof that God works in mysterious ways, that even in the darkest circumstances something beautiful can blossom. Father Ignacio stayed with them for a week, getting to know the children, sharing meals at the ranchería, and participating in the community’s daily routines.

Before departing, he formally blessed the family in a small ceremony that brought together the entire Otomi community. He declared that the marriage of Tomás and Beatriz was sacred and indissoluble. He also left them documents he had secretly prepared, testifying to the validity of the original marriage and the whereabouts of certain assets that legally belonged to Beatriz.

As Don Rodrigo’s daughter, this information raised new questions. Should they try to claim any part of Don Rodrigo’s inheritance? His children deserved opportunities they couldn’t get living in the mountains: education, land, a more secure future.

But returning meant exposing themselves once again to a society that had persecuted them, risking that the colonial authorities would question Tomás’s freedom or try to separate them again. After much deliberation, Tomás and Beatriz decided not to claim anything. The true legacy they wanted to leave their children was not land or money, but the freedom they had fought so hard to obtain.

They were taught that a person’s worth lay not in their surname or possessions, but in their character and capacity to love. Mateo, Clara, and Diego grew up without knowing the oppression of slavery or the weight of social shame, free to be who they truly were. Tomás died in 1770 at the age of 62, surrounded by his family in a cabin he had built himself in the Otomi mountains.

His body was marked by the scars of a life of hard work and violence, but his face at the moment of death was serene. Beatriz held him during his last hours, whispering the same words he had said to her on their first night as husband and wife: “Thank you for treating me like a person.”

He was buried in a small plot overlooking the valley, a place where he could finally rest in peace. Beatriz lived another 18 years, becoming a respected matriarch of the community. She continued practicing as a healer until her hands became too shaky to prepare medicines. She watched her children grow up and start their own families.

She watched her grandchildren learn to walk in the same mountains where she and Tomás had found freedom. She never returned to the lowlands, never saw the hacienda where she had spent her early years again. When Beatriz died in 1788, at the age of 72, she was buried next to Tomás under a cypress tree they themselves had planted decades before.

The Otomi community organized a ceremony that blended Catholic and Indigenous elements, honoring a woman who had transcended the barriers of race and class to live a life of service and love. Her children and grandchildren remained in the mountains, carrying with them the story of how two people broken by the cruelty of the colonial system had found healing in each other’s arms.

Decades later, when Mexico finally abolished slavery in 1829, the descendants of Tomás and Beatriz still lived in those mountains. The couple’s story had become a local legend, told around campfires on cold nights—a tale of the power of love to withstand even the most brutal institutions.

Tomás’s great-grandchildren kept a small chest containing the papers Father Ignacio had left behind. Documents that proved their great-grandfather had been a free man, that his marriage to Beatriz had been legitimate, that his family had a right to exist. The San José de los Laureles Hacienda eventually crumbled, abandoned during the wars of independence, the sugarcane fields reclaimed by the jungle, the mill Tomás had burned down never fully rebuilt. Where the royal estate had once stood

The slave quarters, where 80 African men and women lived and died in servitude, were now just overgrown ruins. But in the mountains, in a small ranchería where the descendants of Otomi and Africans lived together, the memory of Tomás and Beatriz remained alive.

A testament to the fact that even in the darkest times of Mexican colonial history, the human spirit could find ways to resist, to love, and ultimately to be free. The story of what Tomás did with Beatriz’s body was neither the act of violence that the gossips of the time imagined, nor the exploitation that Don Rodrigo likely anticipated when he forced the marriage.

What Tomás did was treat her with dignity, see her as a whole human being instead of an object of shame, and build a life with her that defied all the expectations of 17th-century New Spain. He transformed her body, not physically, but symbolically, from an object of social contempt into a temple of love, resistance, and new life. And that act of mutual humanization in a society built on systematic dehumanization was what truly left them all speechless.