In the urban centres, male and female neighbours organized collective strategies to challenge the law of the womb that stipulated that a child of an enslaved mother would also be born enslaved. This was the central concept that sustained the slave system. Many of the enslaved women remained anonymous in the urban world. This was the case with Cayetana, enslaved by Alfonso Ulloa. She had three children: Francisca, Manuel and Tomasa. To free them from enslavement, she secretly used her midwife as intermediary to give her children to other people to be raised as free. Francisca was raised by Paula Coto, a neighbour to the Puebla de los Pardos, Manuel was cared for by Josefa Bonilla who lived in Los Arrabales, and Tomasa was given to María Candelaria Álvarez who lived in the neighbourhood of Churuca (Acuña León, 2005, p. 11).  
Many important Central America traditions can be traced to these first generations of Africans. They include the marimba - an essential part of the region's folkloric music tradition - Coyol wine and words like: cachimba (smoking pipe), angú (plantain purée), candanga (devil), mandinga, morongo (blood sausage), timba (belly), etc. (Duncan and Meléndez, 2005).  
At the same time, other generations of free Afrodescendants had settled throughout the area. In the colonial archives, they were called negros criollos (black creoles) to note that they were born in the region, or mulattos and pardos - Afro-mestizos - to note the admixture of Africans with other ethnic groups.