From the start of the sixteenth century until the start of the nineteenth century we find waves of African and Afrodescendent migrations. Unlike what happened in the Caribbean islands, in Central America different forms of labour control coexisted, such as the repartimiento and encomienda, debt bondage and enslavement. All of these labour regimes affected the indigenous, African and Afrodescendent populations (Cáceres, 2000).  
During the first two centuries, the Africans were brought directly from Africa, Spain and also from intermediate ports like those of Veracruz or Cartagena. Men, women and children were seized from their communities and sent to America. At the beginning, they came from Western Africa, from groups such as the Wolof, Biojo, Biafara, Bran, Bañon, Zape and Mandinga. Around the middle of the sixteenth century, the Castilian and Portuguese crowns united. This resulted in changes to the geographic origin of the enslaved people, which came primarily from the Congo-Angola region (Cáceres, 2002; Lohse, 2014). Lokken (2013) has found that between 1610 and 1628, at least fifteen transatlantic merchants did business in the capital of Central America, bringing people from western Central Africa on boats that arrived 'accidentally' to the Caribbean coast. As David Wheat (2016) has pointed out, this made the region an extension of the African Atlantic. In the following century, the British networks in the Caribbean used the islands as distribution waypoints for the Africans taken from their colonies in West Africa (O'Malley, 2016).