# Colonial Mexico: stereotypes, African-Mexicans and the shaping of the Mexican nation  
The European population made it clear that they held very negative views of Africans and their descendants who were taken to work for them in Mexico. Several terms were coined to characterize blacks and convey this negative perception of them. Among these disparaging phrases were: gente sin razón (senseless people), gente de mala sangre (mongrels, people with bad blood) and mala raza (evil race). In other words, blacks in Mexico did not escape the longstanding assertions made about blacks in the slave-holding European world to justify the enterprise of slavery (Sanders, 1969, p. 522). Obviously, this suspicion of blacks and their perceived natural propensity to evil influenced the decision to deny them religious freedom, or any freedom to practise their African customs and traditions, all of which were categorized and rejected as witchcraft and sorcery. Blacks were not allowed to express their feelings or opinions about the treatment they received or their lack of any right to live as they wished. The extremely harsh punishments that were meted out to any enslaved African who attempted to protest, even verbally, against his or her masters, have been well documented (Martínez Montiel, 1992, p. 452).  
The brutality of the system of forced labour resulted in repeated efforts by blacks to defy the oppressive system in the mines and on the sugar plantations. Escape, or marronage, was an endemic strategy of defiance. In 1609, a Maroon warrior named Gaspar Yanga, or Nyanga, who led other slaves in flight from the plantations, established the first palenque or Maroon community in Mexico and the Americas. Yanga and his fellow Maroons led a determined opposition,