Forgotten culture: Ignored by society, black Mexicans deny their history
By RACHEL GRAVES from the Houston Chronicle
EL CIRUELO, Mexico — They call each other negro and sing and joke about living in an all-black community. But ask the villagers here about their African ancestry, and they respond with blank stares.
They are not, they insist, the descendants of African slaves. There was never slavery here, even in ancient times.
They have undeniably African features — black skin, tightly curled hair, broad noses. And though the fact has been largely ignored in Mexicos history books, historians know that the back-breaking labor of Mexico, as in much of the Americas, was once done by African slaves.
A handful of historians and anthropologists have studied the tens of thousands of negros living in remote enclaves of Mexico — no one knows exactly how many — in villages founded as early as the 1500s by fugitive slaves.
Mexico’s blacks have been forgotten by time and ignored by the government and much of society.