# Contribution of African-Mexicans to Mexico's multicultural society  
Mexican historiography remained silent for a long time, almost until the end of the twentieth century, about the cultural contributions of Africans to Mexican cultural dynamism. It must be conceded that, as part of its attempt to satisfy the provisions of the United Nations International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD, 1965) so that people of African descent the world over should be accorded recognition, status and specific opportunities for educational and human development, the Mexican Government developed and launched a project in 1989 through its Ministry of Foreign Affairs called Nuestra Tercera Raiz (Our Third Root), which was placed under the auspices of the National Council for Culture and the Arts. The main achievements of the programme include studies on slavery in the Americas, and research into the musical traditions, religious practices and general belief systems of people of African descent. That this programme was unsatisfactory is clear not only from the fact that today, eleven years later, the majority of Mexicans still have no knowledge of either the location or existence of African-Mexican communities, but also from the fact that even though the cultural projects lasted more than five years, they left no completed statistics  
or records of existing Afro-Mexican communities and their way of life. As late as 2010, the National Institute of Statistics and Geography was still uncertain about including persons of African descent in Mexico as a distinct category.  
Despite these challenges, Afro-Mexicans have made themselves an undeniable part of the Afro-Costa Chican cultural landscape. The strongest evidence of how this group of Afrodescendants have survived marginalization and exclusion is evident in their cultural expressions. Father Glyn Jemmott Nelson states that: