The Afro-Mexican population of Yanga, unlike those of several similar Maroon communities in Latin America, has almost completely 'disappeared' due to racial mixing. The town of Yanga today does not have the distinctive features of an Afro-Mexican community that are immediately visible in some of the other Maroon communities such as San Basilio de Palenque in Colombia. Such features include African-derived continuities in language, folklore, festivities, religion and kinship patterns, as noted by Father Glyn Jemmott Nelson (quoted elsewhere in this chapter). Several researchers into this period of Mexican history observe that the extensive racial mixing and the departure from African cultural practices in Yanga are the result of the collaboration with colonial powers on which the community's 'security' was founded. Muhammad is among those researchers who see this factor as the reason Yanga became 'racially and ethnically indistinguishable from other settlements that dotted the area, after a few generations' (Muhammad, 1995, p. 166). In other words, collaboration became a means of destroying the African genealogical line and culture, an effect much broader and more far-reaching than the aim of stemming their flight from the plantations.  
The miscegenation that led to this erasure carries its own irony, as Afro-mestizo inadvertently points to the African presence in Mexico's roots and national genealogy. Whether one sees the Yanga strategy as collusion or the success of the Spaniards' divide-and-rule strategy, it is clear that this negotiation of survival space produced results that were at best ambivalent, both for the Yanga community and for mainstream Mexico's narrative of national identity throughout most of the country's history.  
Despite the success of the Spanish in convincing the blacks of Yanga to collude in their agenda, blacks in other parts of Mexico did not relent in rejecting and rebelling