Rodrigo de la Casa of Durango.
Rodrigo de la Casa was a United Mexican Party member of the Mexican Senate from the state of Durango.
De la Casa had campaigned in the 1920 Mexican elections in support of maintaining Negro slavery in the United States of Mexico, and after winning election was one of the major supporters of slavery in the Mexican Senate. However, when he requested a meeting with Secretary of State Albert Ullman on 29 April 1920, it was not to speak in defense of slavery. Instead, at his meeting with Ullman at noon the next day, de la Casa argued that President Emiliano Calles' call for a Constitutional amendment abolishing slavery would be dangerous. De la Casa warned that Calles should think twice before submitting such a controversial proposal to the will of the people.
Ullman asked de la Casa he how thought Calles should procede, given that the president was determined to eliminate slavery from the U.S.M. De la Casa gave what was clearly a prepared answer: a simple bill, submitted to the Senate and the Assembly and passed by a voice vote, would be far more appealing to the legislators. Ullman recognized that de la Casa believed the measure would pass, showing that the pro-slavery legislators knew they lacked the votes to prevent it.
Sobel makes it clear that de la Casa was acting on orders from Douglas Benedict the President of Kramer Associates, as were other nominally pro-slavery legislators who were prepared to vote to free Mexico's slaves. When Calles submitted his Manumission Act to the Senate on 14 May, Sobel states that de la Casa acted as the voice of Benedict, which presumably meant quietly threatening his fellow U.M.P. members with well-funded primary opponents when their current terms expired if they failed to vote for manumission.
De la Casa's political memoir, Life at Court: An Observer of the Calles Regime was published in Mexico City in 1934.
Sobel's sources for Rodrigo de la Casa's role in the passage of the Manumission Act are de la Casa's Life at Court; and Miguel Callendra's vitavised interview of Ullman on I Remember on 12 October 1929.