Mexico’s hidden people

*Thanks to Taquista Ito Romo for this. I spent part of my elementary school years and all of middle school in Mexico, and I never heard of this. VL

By Abby Reimer, CNN

(CNN) – An estimated 200,000 Africans were brought to Mexico under slavery, which ended in the country in 1829. Yet [tweet_dis]Afro-Mexicans remain a marginalized and often forgotten part of Mexico’s identity.[/tweet_dis] [pullquote]”I didn’t know there was that much African culture in Mexico, they didn’t teach me that in school.”[/pullquote]

Photographer Mara Sanchez Renero first learned about Afro-Mexicans as a teenager, when she traveled to the Costa Chica region in southern Mexico. The black community there told her they were descendants of Africans shipwrecked off the Pacific coast in 1900.

But it wasn’t until she traveled back last year that she realized what little she knew. There, traditions and customs rooted in Africa — such as “La Danza del Diablos,” or the dance of the devils — have survived.

“I didn’t know there was that much African culture in Mexico,” Sanchez Renero said. “They didn’t teach me that in school.”

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