## Introduction  
The last three decades have witnessed a quiet and slow rewriting and re-versioning of Mexican historiography, mainly by scholars from the Caribbean, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. This has been less evident within Mexico itself, where only a few anthropologists and historians have begun to revisit Mexican historical discourse, which has been largely silent  
about African-Mexican communities for a long time. Historians such as George Reid Andrews and Patrick J. Carroll have asserted that as a result of Mexico's undeniable participation in the trade in African people and the plantation enterprise, a significant number of descendants of Africans may be found in Mexico, despite their extreme marginalization and invisibility and Mexico's silence about their existence. Indeed,
many Mexicans have embraced notions of national identity originally defended by Mexican educator and politician José Vasconcelos Calderón, along with Mexico's elites, which posit that the Mexican nation is mestizo because descendants of blacks have completely disappeared due to racial mixing (Ramsay, 2016, p. 28).  
This chapter outlines a history of the contradictory nature of the African presence in Mexico: its submersion and visibility; the half-hearted and selfdefeating efforts of successive governments to respond to it while balancing international pressure with internal political interests; and above all, the ways in which African-Mexicans and Afro-Mexican culture have impressed themselves on the political and cultural landscape, both through acts of political resistance and self-fashioning and through the preservation of African culture in Mexico.