# Literary production  
As has been the case with the communities themselves and the people in them, the small body of Afro-Mexican literary production has not been given much attention by mainstream Mexico. A large part of this production is oral. African-Mexicans have preserved oral verses such as coplas, décimas and verseform folktales. These oral verses were recorded under a special project by the Mexican National Council for Culture and Arts in 1992. The main participants were Mexican anthropologists Francisca Aparicio Prudente and Maria Cristina Diaz Pérez. The folktales were collected through a project of the Guerrero Regional Unit for Popular Culture and were compiled by two members of the Afro-Mexican community, Augustín Torres Diaz and Israel Larrea. This oral literature reveals that Afro-Mexicans share a past with Africans in other parts of the world such as the Caribbean.  
Both projects had as their motivation the concern that these critical aspects of African-Mexican culture and constructions of cultural identity were threatened and needed to be recorded for posterity. Furthermore, the Guerrero Institute for Popular Culture, an organization founded and run by enthusiastic community members, had an interest in raising awareness about the presence of African-Mexicans and their unique cultural forms, and so the project was undertaken to commemorate five hundred years of European contact with the Americas. Afro-Mexicans themselves were invited to narrate the folktales that had been preserved through different generations. The oral poems were collected in a similar manner and provide an understanding of the values and general beliefs of their communities.  
Malinali Meza Herrera (1992) has said of the African-Mexican oral poems that: