Today in parts of Spanish America, zambo refers to all people with significant or visible amounts of both African and Amerindian ancestry.

From the beginning the early sixteenth century, when African slaves were first imported to Hispaniola, unions between them and indigenous peoples, and Spanish colonists, began to take place.

In the eighteenth century, the Spanish began making formal racial classifications, and defined zambo in what became its final, official meaning.

In the unconquered regions of Esmeraldes, in what would become Ecuador, for example, a small group of shipwrecked former slaves gained control of some indigenous communities, eventually representing them before Spanish authorities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Their alliance and protection of English-speaking merchants and settlers in the area helped Great Britain found the colony of British Honduras (present day Belize).

A small, but noticeable number of zambos, resulting from recent unions of Amerindian men to Afro-Ecuadorian women, and they are common in major coastal cities of Ecuador and in Imbabura province.

Greater concentrations can be found only in communities scattered around the southern coastal states, including Michoacán, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Campeche, Quintana Roo, Yucatán, and Veracruz, where many of the country's Afro-Mexicans reside.

Such acculturation also took place in Bolivia, where the Afro-Bolivian community absorbed and retained many aspects of Amerindian cultural influences, such as dress and the use of the Aymara language.