[3][2] As a single population, Afro-Mexicans include individuals descended from both free and enslaved Africans who arrived to Mexico during the colonial era,[3] as well as post-independence migrants.

This population includes Afro-descended people from neighboring English, French, and Spanish-speaking countries of the Caribbean and Central America, descendants of enslaved Africans in Mexico[4] and those from the Deep South during Slavery in the United States, and to a lesser extent recent migrants directly from Africa.

Mexico never became a society based on slavery, as happened in the Anglo-American southern colonies or Caribbean islands, where plantations utilized large numbers of field slaves.

Although Mexico has celebrated its mixed indigenous and European roots mestizaje, Africans' presence and contributions until recently were not part of the national discourse.

Notable among them was Juan Garrido, a free Black soldier born in Africa, Christianized in Portugal, who participated in the conquest of Tenochtitlan and Western Mexico.

Although there was coming to be an association between Blackness and enslavement, there were Africans who achieved the formal status of vecino (resident, citizen), a designation of great importance in colonial society.

In Puebla de los Ángeles, a newly founded settlement for Spaniards, a small number of Black men achieved this status.

Runaway slaves were called cimarrones, who mostly fled to the highlands between Veracruz and Puebla, with a number making their way to the Costa Chica region in what are now Guerrero and Oaxaca.

In the chapter titled "The slave trade in the Caribbean and Latin America" they mention that Spain's biggest goal was to explore "newly discovered tropical territories" in order to help them gain resources and generate wealth and power.

Scholar Herman L. Bennet states that "the demands of a previous political movement should no longer sanction the ideological practices that historically excluded the Black past and presently confines it to the margins of history," likening this erasure to an act of "ethnic cleansing.

These organized groups of lay men and women, were sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church, gave their activities legitimacy in Spanish colonial society.

This fervor culminated in acts of flagellation, especially around the time of holy week, as a sign of great humility and willing suffering, which in turn, brought an individual closer to Jesus.

This practice would eventually diminish and face criticism from Bishops due to the fact that often the anonymity and violent nature of this public act of piety could lead, and may have led, to indiscriminate violence.

This was a way for the Black community to show off their material wealth that had been acquired through the confraternity, usually in the form of saint statues, candles, carved lambs with silver diadems, and other various valuable religious artifacts.

Hidalgo did not articulate a coherent program for independence, but in an early proclamation condemned slavery and the slave trade, and called for the abolition of tributes, which were paid by Indians, blacks, mulattoes and castas.

He gained the trust of Guerrero and the Plan de Iguala, named for the city in the hot country where it was proclaimed, laid out the aims of the insurgency, calling for independence, the primacy of Catholicism, and monarchy, with point 12 mandating "All inhabitants of the Empire, without any distinction other than merit and virtue, are citizens fit for whatever employment they choose."

After the ignominious defeat by the US, Mexican President José Joaquín de Herrera sent a bill to congress to create the state of Guerrero, named after the mixed-race hero of independence, from parts of Michoacán, Puebla, and Mexico, in the hot country where the insurgent leader held territory.

[57] Proponents of this theory, like politician José Vasconcelos, would go on to characterize mestizaje, or race mixing, to be between indigenous and white populations; this virtually excluded African descended peoples from the Mexican narrative.

[57] Mexican scholars like anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán or caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias helped begin the process of recognizing Mexico's African cultural influences as well as making the populations more visible and relevant.

He wrote the book, Mexico South: The Isthmus of Tehuantepec, condemning policies that would relegate people of color to a kind of second class citizenship and perpetuate fascist ideologies.

He wrote the book La Población Negra de Mexico, which helped form the foundations for the study of Afro-Mexicans during the colonial period and their post-revolutionary cultural impacts.

In the 1940s, the Mexican census began to reflect the rejection of strict racial classes in Mexico as it replaced categorization based on biological race with categories pertaining to identification with certain cultural practices like what kinds of shoes one wore or bread one ate.

While this was an attempt to diminish racial tensions and categorization, it was condemned by Aguirre Beltrán because it still failed to recognize Afro-Mexicans and encouraged them to declare themselves as either white or indigenous because many had assimilated into these cultural practices.

[59][60][65][66] Like the Costa Chica, the state of Veracruz has a number of pueblos negros, notably the African named towns of Mandinga, Matamba, Mozambique, and Mozomboa as well as Chacalapa, Coyolillo, Yanga, and Tamiahua.

[62][69] This intermarriage means that while Veracruz remains "blackest" in Mexico's popular imagination, those with dark brown skin are mistaken for those from the Caribbean and/or not "truly Mexican".

[15] The phenomena of runaways and slave rebellions began early in Veracruz with many escaping to the mountainous areas in the west of the state, near Orizaba and the Puebla border.

An article by Pew Research Center focusing on different areas of Latin America utilized polls and concluded United States Latinos of Caribbean descent are more likely to identify as Afro-Latinos than others who have roots somewhere else.

In this article, they also mentioned that when Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador went to visit the region of Costa Chica, he complained about the roads and the resources available to people who lived there.

[83] The first documented visually recording of the presence in what would be Mexico by Africans was in indigenous artist-scribes, while in these writings these figures would come secondary to the main narrative there is clear depictions of them as active individuals in their own agencies.

The comic character Memín Pinguín, whose magazine has been available in Latin America, the Philippines, and the United States newsstands for more than 60 years, is a Mexican of Afro-Cuban descent.