# African origins: ethnonyms, ethnicities and regional proveniences  
This was the scenario that faced the thousands of enslaved people arriving from different regions of Africa, who reproduced among themselves or formed mixed relationships with indigenous peoples or, to a lesser extent, with white people. Judging by certain demographic data, the majority remained within their own Afrodescendant community. Vanín, one of the great Afrodescendant poets of the Pacific, paints the process from its beginnings in a poetic and illustrative way:
[...] and then they brought negros who would irrigate themselves like purslane on a beach [...] along the silent riverbanks, maroons or free men, but free anyway, to found  
races and cultures, with everything against them, penniless and without means, but with the great flourishing riverbank to themselves and their future relatives, with the great richness of the countryside, of trees, and of creatures to fish and hunt (Vanín, 1998, p. 265).