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[^0]:    5 Meza Herrera (Malinali), Foreword to Cállate, burrita prieta: poética afromestiza, Chilpancingo, Mexico: Dirección General de Culturas Populares, 1992, vii, (English translation by Bradna McLaren).  
by post-colonialist Stephen Slemon's view of creative revisionism (1998), which involves the subversion or displacement of dominant discourses. In other words, African-Mexican oral poems may also be seen as a way of providing their own mode of expression which simultaneously conveys the cultural distinctiveness of their society.  
The cultural forms, folktales, corridos, dances and oral and lyric poems are clear indications that Afro-Mexican communities form a cohesive group of persons who understand their belonging to a specific place with cultural connections to a wider global black diasporic community. Their preservation of these forms and their continued support of the work of Mexico Negro suggest an inherent understanding of self, identity and place that is uniquely Afro-Mexican. The lyric poems in particular show a generation of black-conscious African-Mexicans, who craft poems of self-assertion, self-authoring and self-definition. Among their collections are lyric poems that defy the ways in which they have been devalued and homogenized; poems that express pride in the beauty of the black skin, and poems that reject the denigration of blacks.