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[^0]:    1 Hernán Cortés was the main Mexican conquistador; he arrived in 1519 and took the city of Tenochtitlán in 1521.  
from areas of East Africa or New Guinea. From different ports on the Pacific or Atlantic they were taken to Mexico City to be distributed among different places in the centre, north and south of the country: Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas, Puebla, Morelos, Colima, Hidalgo, Monterrey, Sinaloa, Chiapas, Tabasco, Yucatán and practically all the modern-day states of Mexico took in African men and women during the period of the viceroyalty, particularly between the years 1580-1650. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the slave trade ceased to have the importance it had had in previous centuries, given that the indigenous and mestizo populations had increased and therefore slavery was no longer as profitable as it had been in previous eras in New Spain (Gonzalbo, 1998).  
Over time, many people of African descent succeeded in gaining their freedom and along with this, a better standard of living. Freedom was attained in several ways; it could be granted by their masters, by means of testaments or letters of freedom, and enslaved people could also buy their freedom in the event that they had been able to save money by doing extra work on the side or through financial help from family and friends.  
It is important to state that interracial group marriages were not forbidden by the Church, and that many unions took place outside of wedlock, which fostered interbreeding between indigenous peoples and Africans. By the eighteenth century, Mexico had a significant Afrodescendent population throughout its entire territory; some of them had managed to acquire certain economic resources by means of military service, commerce or holding offices, whereas others continued to suffer poverty and marginalization like many other groups in society, especially indigenous ones (Gonzalbo, 1998 and Velázquez, 2006).