Malinali Meza Herrera (1992) has said of the African-Mexican oral poems that:
Thousands of Africans were forced from their homeland to be carried away as slaves to plantations, mines and farms in the Americas. Coming from different ethnicities, they suddenly saw themselves without their cultural references, without their land, their gods and languages [...] they had to reinvent new forms of expression, copy others and adapt others. Speech communication thus became an urgent tool for survival. [...] Verbal expression has ever since then accompanied important acts of community life. [...] men and women, children and adults create and recreate this ancestral heritage. ${ }^{5}$  
The coplas and décimas suggest that there has been a communal space in which African-Mexicans have preserved an Afro-Mexican identity. The oral poems in general often reveal an interactive form or a poetry of exchange, which functions both to establish an independent collective identity and an assertion of individual selfhood. Although intended to entertain an audience through humour and mockery, they simultaneously reveal an aspect of a community's way of life and provide an indication of how in a marginalized context, people attempt to redefine themselves.  
The literary production also includes more contemporary lyric poems that help to link African-Mexican communities to an African past and a global African diaspora and reveal an increasing level of consciousness among them as they respond to efforts to educate them about themselves as people of an Afroderived heritage. These lyric poems seem both 'overtly and covertly' to construct an Afro-Mexican identity, as seen in the work of emerging writers such as Zárate Arango and Álvaro Carrillo. A study of many of the lyric verses written by these new poets from the Costa Chica, who are obviously concerned about self-fashioning, reveals this tendency quite clearly. Their work may be explained  
[^0]