Benito Juarez

Before he was president, Juárez rolled cigars in New Orleans. After Santa Anna's last dictatorship returned, he was held at the fortress of San Juan de Ulúa, then released into exile, going first to Havana and then to this city. He made cigars in a factory while his wife and children stayed in Mexico and sent him money. Here he met fellow Liberal exiles Melchor Ocampo and Pedro Santacilia, a Cuban separatist who later married his eldest daughter. When the Plan of Ayutla set off revolt in March 1855 he set out for home, reaching Acapulco that summer.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — steps away
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• Congo Square — 0.3 mi
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 0.4 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.
• The Cabildo — 0.5 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.

More markers nearby

• Déterrer Storyville — steps away
• Marie Laveau — steps away
• Homer Adolph Plessy — steps away
• Bernard de Marigny — steps away