The site of several advanced Amerindian civilizations – including the Olmec, Toltec, Teotihuacan, Zapotec, Maya, and Aztec – Mexico was conquered and colonized by Spain in the early 16th century. Administered as the Viceroyalty of New Spain for three centuries, it achieved independence early in the 19th century. Elections held in 2000 marked the first time since the 1910 Mexican Revolution that an opposition candidate – Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN) – defeated the party in government, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). He was succeeded in 2006 by another PAN candidate Felipe Calderon, but Enrique Pena Nieto regained the presidency for the PRI in 2012. Left-leaning anti-establishment politician and former mayor of Mexico City (2000-05) Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, from the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), became president in December 2018.
Economy
Mexico is currently the second-largest (after Canada) goods trading partner of the US with nearly $780 billion in two-way goods trade in 2022. Mexico’s GDP contracted by 8.2% in 2020 due to pandemic-induced closures, its lowest level since the Great Depression. Mexico’s economy is rebounding; it grew by 4.8% in 2021, driven largely by increased remittances, despite supply chain and pandemic-related challenges, and grew by 3% in 2022.
The US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA, or T-MEC by its Spanish acronym) entered into force on July 1, 2020 and replaced its predecessor, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Mexico amended its constitution on May 1, 2019 to facilitate the implementation of the labor components of USMCA.
Ongoing economic and social concerns include low real wages, high underemployment, inequitable income distribution, and few advancement opportunities, particularly for the largely indigenous population in the impoverished southern states. Since 2007, Mexico’s powerful transnational criminal organizations have engaged in a struggle to control criminal markets, resulting in tens of thousands of drug-related homicides and forced disappearances.
One of the world’s largest economies; USMCA buttresses its manufacturing sector; has underperformed growth targets for three decades; COVID-19 disrupted export-based economy; corruption and cartel-based violence undermine economic stability.
Population
The population is 129,875,529 (2023 est.) which consists of Mestizo (Amerindian-Spanish) 62%, predominantly Amerindian 21%, Amerindian 7%, other 10% (mostly European) (2012 est.).
note: Mexico does not collect census data on ethnicity.
Afro-Mexicans also known as Black Mexicans are Mexicans who have heritage from sub-Saharan Africa and identify as such. As a single population, Afro-Mexicans include individuals descended from both free and enslaved Africans who arrived in Mexico during the colonial era, as well as post-independence migrants. The latter include Afro-descended people from neighboring English, French, and Spanish-speaking countries of the Caribbean and Central America, descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped to Mexico 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 the populations of the Oaxaca, Huetamo, Lázaro Cárdenas, Guerrero, and Veracruz states.
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 The Atlantic Slave Trade 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 twentieth century Mexican scholars were advocating for black visibility. It wasn’t until 1992, 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.
Enslaved Africans were brought to Mexico specially by Portuguese and British slave traders.
Afro-Mexicans engaged in a variety of economic activities as slaves and as 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.
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. The vast majority had their roots in Africa, not all slaves made the trip directly to New Spain, some came from other Spanish territories, particularly the Caribbean. Nueva España or New Spain which is now Mexico, there were slaves who were transported through ships from 1521 to 1810. Those from Africa belonged mainly to groups coming from Western Sudan, Congo and ethnic Bantu.
The origin of the slaves is known through various documents such as transcripts of sales. Originally the slaves came from Cape Verde and Guinea. Later slaves were also taken from Angola.
To decide the sex of the slaves that would be sent to the New World, calculations that included physical performance and reproduction were performed. At first half of the slaves imported were women and the other half men, but it was later realized that men could work longer without fatigue and that they yielded similar results throughout the month, while women suffered from pains and diseases more easily. Later on, only one third of the total slaves were women.
From the African continent dark skinned slaves were taken; “the first true blacks were extracted from Arguin.” Later in the sixteenth century, black slaves came from Bran, biafadas and Gelofe (in Cape Verde). Black slaves were classified into several types, depending on their ethnic group and origin, but mostly from physical characteristics. There were two main groups. The first, called Retintos, also called swarthy, came from Sudan and the Guinean Coast. The second type were amulatados or amembrillados of lighter skin color, when compared with other blacks and were distinguishable by their yellow skin tones.
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 the Spanish before they were sent to other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean.
According to the genetic testing company 23andMe, the predominant Sub-Saharan ancestry in Mexico is from the Senegambia and Guinea region. This contrasts with the predominant Nigerian ancestry in the United States and parts of the Caribbean.
Slave resistance
Black slave rebellions occurred in Mexico as in other parts of the Americas, with one in Veracruz in 1537 and another in the Spanish capital of Mexico City. 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. UNESCO wrote a book which spoke about the history of the slave trade and the ways in which Latin America was involved. In the chapter titled “The slave 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. In this chapter, they also mention different reasons as to why the slave trade developed along the coasts. Runaways in Veracruz formed settlements called palenques which would fight off Spanish authorities. The most famous of these was led by Gaspar Yanga. Gaspar Yanga entered Mexico because he was a slave who was working in the sugar plantains in Orizaba during the year of 1540. Yanga was able to escape this plantation in the year of 1579 and he left to hide in the mountains. There Yanga founded a palenque. The only way that slaves who were in the zone could survive was by following each other’s lead. The more slaves that heard about Yanga and his escape, they would create groups and would plan to escape the plantations their Spanish owners created. Their leader was Yanga. Since Yanga and his followers had created a community in the mountains and they knew that the Spaniards only used certain roads to transport goods, they planned to rob them. Yangas followers would often hide and wait until the Spanish men would be passing by certain spots and rob their goods, eventually, the Spaniards became afraid. The Spanish then declared war with Yanga and his followers and they lost, so freedom was granted to Yanga and his army. With Yanga winning this war, he was able to speak and demand land from Spanish authorities, he wanted his people to have a town of their own which was first known as “San Lorenzo de los Negros” but then became the municipality of Yanga, Veracruz, the first community of free blacks in the Americas.
Free Black communities in colonial Mexico
By the 17th century, the free Black population already outnumbered the enslaved population, despite slavery being at its greatest extent in the colony during this time. Creoles and mulattos occupied a legible social presence in Mexico by 1600. Most enslaved Africans were reportedly “from the land of Angola,” who reconfigured African culture in colonial Mexico while complimenting the existing presence of creoles. Scholar Herman L. Bennet records that 17th-century colonial Mexico was “home to the most diverse Black population in the Americas.” Mexico City, built on the ruins of the Mexica capital city of Tenochtitlan became the center for diverse communities, all of which served the wealthy Spaniards as “artisans, domestic servants, day laborers, and slaves.” This population included “impoverished Spaniards, conquered but differentiated Indians, enslaved Africans (ladinos, individuals who were linguistically conversant in Castilian, and bozales, individuals directly from Guinea, or Africa, who were unable to speak Castilian), and the new hybrid populations (mestizos, mulatos, and zambos, persons with both Indian and African heritage).” Catholic Spaniards instituted ecclesiastical raids beginning in 1569 upon these communities in order to maintain order and ensure the gendered and conjugal norms that they, including persons of African descent, “could assume in the Christian commonwealth.”
Since there were no official census records in the 17th century, the exact size of the free Black population in Mexico remains unknown, although Bennet concludes, based on numerous sources of the period, that there was an “extensive free Black presence early in the 17th century.” In the 17th century, because of forced indoctrination instituted by Spanish colonizers, Christian beliefs, rituals, and practices were already becoming normalized by a substantial population of Black creoles in colonial Mexico, similar to the Indigenous and mestizo population – “it sought to distance Indians and Africans from their former collectivities, traditions, and pasts that had sanctioned their former selves. Such distancing was both a stated and implicit objective of masters and colonial authorities.” In 1640, the regular slave trade to colonial Mexico ended..
The Mexican nationalist movement, which fueled the Mexican War of Independence from 1810 to 1821, was predicated on the ideological notion that Mexico possessed a unique cultural tradition – a notion which was denied by European imperial elites who asserted that Mexico lacked any basis for nationhood – and resulted in the purposeful erasure of a Black presence from Mexico’s history. 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.”
Economic activity
Important economic sectors such as sugar production and mining relied heavily on slave labor during that time. After 1640, slave labor became less important but the reasons are not clear. The Spanish Crown cut off contacts with Portuguese slave traders after Portugal gained its independence. Slave labor declined in mining as the high profit margins allowed the recruitment of wage labor. In addition, the indigenous and mestizo population increased, and with them the size of the free labor force. In the later colonial period, most slaves continued to work in sugar production but also in textile mills, which were the two sectors that needed a large, stable workforce. Neither could pay enough to attract free laborers to its arduous work. Slave labor remained important to textile production until the later 18th century when cheaper British textiles were imported.
Although integral to certain sectors of the economy through the mid-18th century, the number of slaves and the prices they fetched fell during the colonial period. Slave prices were highest from 1580 to 1640 at about 400 pesos. It decreased to about 350 pesos around 1650, staying constant until falling to about 175 pesos for an adult male in 1750. In the latter 18th century, mill slaves were phased out and replaced by indigenous, often indebted, labor. Slaves were nearly non-existent in the late colonial census of 1792. While banned shortly after the beginning of the Mexican War of Independence, the practice did not definitively end until 1829.
Afro-Mexicans and race mixture
From early in the colonial period, African and African-descended people had offspring with Europeans or indigenous people. This led to an elaborate set of racial terms for mixtures which appeared during the 18th century. The offspring of mixed-race couples was divided into three general groups: Mestizo for (Spanish) White/indigenous, Mulatto for (Spanish) White/black and Lobo “wolf” or Zambo, sometimes used as a synonym; and Zambaigo for black/indigenous. However, there was overlap in these categories which recognized black mestizos. Black mestizos account for less than 2.5 percent of the Mexican population as of today. In addition, skin tone further divided the mestizo and mulatto categories. This loose hierarchical system of classification is sometimes called the sistema de castas, although its existence has recently been questioned as a 20th-century ideological construct. Las castas paintings were produced during the 18th centuries, commissioned by the King of Spain to reflect Mexican society at that time. They portray the three races, European, indigenous and African and their complicated mixing. They are based on family groups, with parents and children labeled according to their caste. They have 16 squares in a hierarchy.