Afro-Mexicans (), also known as Black Mexicans (), are Mexicans of total or predominantly African ancestry. As a single population, Afro-Mexicans include individuals descended from both free and enslaved Africans who arrived to Mexico during the colonial era, 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 and those from the Deep South during Slavery in the United States, and to a lesser extent recent migrants directly from Africa. Today, there are localized communities in Mexico with significant although not predominant African ancestry. These are mostly concentrated in specific communities, including populations in the states of Oaxaca, Michoacán, Guerrero, and Veracruz.
Throughout the century following the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire of 1519, a significant number of African slaves were brought to the Veracruz. According to Philip D. Curtin's The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, an estimated 200,000 enslaved Africans were kidnapped and brought to New Spain, which later became modern Mexico.
The creation of a national Mexican identity, especially after the Mexican Revolution, emphasized Mexico's indigenous Amerindians and Spanish European heritage, excluding African history and contributions from Mexico's national consciousness. Although Mexico had a significant number of enslaved Africans during the colonial era, much of the African-descended population became absorbed into surrounding Mestizo (mixed European/Amerindian), Mulatto (mixed European/African), and Indigenous populations through unions among the groups. By the mid-20th century, Mexican scholars were advocating for Black visibility. It was not until 1992 that the Mexican government officially recognized African culture as being one of the three major influences on the culture of Mexico, the others being Spanish and Indigenous.
The genetic legacy of Mexico's once significant number of colonial-era enslaved Africans is evidenced in non-Black Mexicans as trace amounts of sub-Saharan African DNA found in the average Mexican. In the 2015 census, 64.9% (896,829) of Afro-Mexicans also identified as indigenous Amerindian Mexicans. It was also reported that 9.3% of Afro-Mexicans speak an indigenous Mexican language.
About 2.4-3% of Mexico's population has significantly large African ancestry, with 2.5 million self-recognized during the 2020 Inter-census Estimate. However, some sources put the official number at around 5% of the total population. While other sources imply that due to the systemic erasure of Black people from Mexican society, and the tendency of Afro Mexican people to identify with other ethnic groups other than Afro Mexicans, the percentage of Afro-Mexicans is most likely actually much higher than what the official number says. In the 21st century, some people who identify as Afro-Mexicans are the children and grandchildren of naturalized Black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. The 2015 Inter-census Estimate was the first time in which Afro-Mexicans could identify themselves as such and was a preliminary effort to include the identity before the 2020 census which now shows the country's population is 2.04%. The question asked on the survey was "Based on your culture, history, and traditions, do you consider yourself Black, meaning Afro-Mexican or Afro-descendant?" and came about following various complaints made by civil rights groups and government officials.
Some of their activists, like Benigno Gallardo, do feel their communities lack "recognition and differentiation", by what he calls "mainstream Mexican culture".
History Most Africans were brought to Mexico by Portuguese and British slave traders in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The Afro-Mexican population expanded through intermarriage and interracial relationships so that by the end of the eighteenth century, there were more than 370,000 persons of African descent in Mexico, about 10% of the whole population.
Afro-Mexicans engaged in a variety of economic activities as enslaved and free persons. 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. At conquest, central Mexico had a large, hierarchically organized Indian population that provided largely coerced labor. Mexico's economy utilized African slave labor during the colonial period, particularly in Spanish cities as domestic workers, artisans, and laborers in textile workshops (obrajes).
Although Mexico has celebrated its mixed indigenous and European roots mestizaje, Africans' presence and contributions until recently were not part of the national discourse. Increasingly, the historical record has been revised to take account of Afro-Mexicans' long presence in Mexico.
Geographical origins and the Atlantic slave trade
Although Spanish subjects were not allowed to partake in the Atlantic slave trade, the asiento de negros (a monopoly contract issued by the Spanish Crown to other European nations to supply enslaved Africans to Spain's colonies in the Americas) ensured a significant Black presence in Spanish America, including Mexico. Over 100,000 Africa captives had been brought between 1521 and 1646, during the era of the Portuguese asiento, and smaller but significant numbers arrived under the Grillo and Lomelín monopoly. The British South Sea Company trafficked at least 75,000 additional African captives to Mexico between 1714 and 1739.
During the 16th century, the vast majority of African captives in New Spain likely originated from West Africa in the regions of modern day Senegal, The Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau, where the Spanish Empire managed to establish trading with Mande-speaking Muslim communities. According to the genetic testing company 23andMe, the predominant Sub-Saharan ancestry in Mexico is from the Senegambia and Guinea region. In the 17th century, the majority of enslaved peoples likely came from West-Central Africa, primarily from the regions of modern-day Angola.
The demand for slaves came in the early colonial period, especially between 1580 and 1640, when the indigenous population declined due to new infectious diseases. Carlos V began to issue an increasing number of contracts (asientos) between the Spanish Crown and private slavers specifically to bring Africans to Spanish colonies. These slavers made deals with the Portuguese, who controlled the African slave market. Mexico had important slave ports in the New World, sometimes holding slaves brought by Spanish before they were sent to other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Conquest and early colonial eras
Africans were brought to Mexico by Spanish conquistadors and were auxiliaries in the conquest. One is shown in Codex Azcatitlan as part of the entourage of conqueror Hernán Cortés. In the account of the conquest of the Aztec Empire compiled by Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún, Nahua informants noted the presence of Africans with kinky, curly hair in contrast to the straight "yellow" and black hair of the Spaniards.Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book XII. Charles Dibble and Arthur J.O. Anderson, translators. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press 1975:19, 21. Mexican anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán counted six Blacks who took part in the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. 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. The slave of another conquistador, Pánfilo de Narváez, has been blamed for the transmission of smallpox to Nahuas in 1520. Early slaves were likely personal servants or concubines of their Spanish masters, who had been brought to Spain first and came with the conquistadors.
While a number of indigenous people were enslaved during the conquest period, indigenous slavery as an institution was forbidden by the crown except in the cases of rebellion. Indigenous labor was coerced in the early period, mobilized by the encomienda, private grants to individual Spaniards, was the initial workforce, with black overseers often supervising indigenous laborers. Franciscan Toribio de Benavente Motolinia (1482–1568), who arrived in Mexico in 1524 to evangelize the Nahuas, considered Blacks the "Fourth Plague" (in the manner of Biblical plagues) on Mexican Natives. He wrote "In the first years these Black overseers were so absolute in their maltreatment of the Indians, over-loading them, sending them far from their land and giving them many other tasks that many Indians died because of them and at their hands, which is the worst feature of the situation."Toribio de Benavente Motolinia. History of the Indians of New Spain. Translated by Elizabeth Andros Foster. Westport: Greenwood Press 1973:40-41. In Yucatán, there were regulations attempting to prevent Blacks presence in indigenous communities.Yucatan Before and After the Conquest by Friar Diego de Landa. Translated by William Gates Dover Publications 1978, pp. 158, 159. In Puebla, 1536 municipal regulations attempted to prevent Blacks from going into the open-air market tianguis and harming indigenous women there, mandating fines and fifty lashes in the plaza.Sierra Silva, Urban slavery, pp.27-28. In Mexico City in 1537, a number of blacks were accused of rebellion. They were executed in the main plaza (zócalo) by hanging, an event recorded in an indigenous pictorial and alphabetic manuscript.Codex Telleriano-Remensis, translated and edited by Eloise Quiñones Keber. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992:275.
Once the military phase of conquest was completed in central Mexico, Spanish colonists in Puebla de los Ángeles, which was the second largest Spanish settlement in Mexico, sought enslaved African women for domestic work, such as cooks and laundresses. Ownership of domestic slaves was a status symbol for Spaniards and the dowries of wealthy Spanish women included enslaved Africans.Sierra Silva, Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico, p.42-44.
Legal status in the colonial era
Blacks classified as part of the "Republic of Spaniards" (República de Españoles), that is the Hispanic sector of Europeans, Africans, and mixed-race castas, while the indigenous were members of the "Republic of Indians" (República de Indios), and under the protection of the Spanish crown. 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. One free Black, the town crier Juan de Montalvo, was well established and in Puebla, with connections to the local Spanish elites. Others were known to hold land and engage in the local real estate market.Sierra Silva, Urban Slavery, pp. 30-31.