(Interview with Paulette Ramsay, Port of Spain, Trinidad, 15 April 2014)
Despite this significant Afrodescendent population, the majority of Mexicans neither know of these communities nor realize that the myth of the complete disappearance of blacks in Mexico has long been refuted. Indeed, such is the level of ignorance about Mexico's racial heterogeneity that exists at different levels of Mexican society that African Mexicans are often treated as foreigners and even illegal immigrants. Quite often they report that while travelling outside of their communities they are routinely stopped by the police and accused of being undocumented aliens from Cuba or Central America. They often endure long stares and even touching of their hair by curious fellow Mexicans. That unfamiliarity comes in part because Mexico's black population, often to escape persecution and discrimination, historically never moved in large numbers to big cities and have kept largely to themselves in scattered communities in three southern states - Oaxaca and Guerrero, the two mentioned above, and Veracruz (Archibold, 2014).
"They say we are ugly and have donkey skin", I was told by a young girl on one of my visits, as she tried to explain her reluctance to leave and socialize outside of her small village of Tapextla, showing how painfully aware she is of her outsider position in her own country. Clarence Page wrote in 2005 of a distressed cattle farmer, who complained that "people ask us where we are from" (Page, 2005).