page_title: Afro-Mexicans
section_title: Legal status in the colonial era
hierarchical_section_title: Afro-Mexicans / History / Legal status in the colonial era
caption_attribution_description: English: From Spanish and Black, Mulatto
context_page_description: Afro-Mexicans, also known as Black Mexicans, are Mexicans who have a predominant heritage from Sub-Saharan Africa and identify as such. As a single population, Afro-Mexicans includes individuals descended from black slaves brought to Mexico during the colonial era in the transatlantic African slave trade, as well as others of more recent immigrant African descent, including Afro-descended persons from neighboring English, French, and Spanish-speaking countries of the Caribbean and Central America, descendants of fugitive slaves who escaped to Mexico from the Southern United States, and to a lesser extent recent immigrants directly from Africa. Afro-Mexicans are most concentrated in specific, largely isolated communities, including the populations of the Costa Chica of Oaxaca and Guerrero, Veracruz and in some cities in northern Mexico.
  According to recent DNA studies, most Mexicans have a small amount of African DNA mixed into the predominant Mexican heritage gene pool, averaging to about 5% African DNA, although most if it is North African and was brought to Mexico as part of the diluted African DNA in Spanish settlers.
context_section_description: Blacks classified as part of the "Republic of Spaniards" (República de Españoles), that is the Hispanic sector of Europeans, Africans, and mixed-race castas, while the indigenous were members of the "Republic of Indians" (República de Indios), and under the protection of the Spanish crown. Although there was coming to be an association between blackness and enslavement, there were Africans who achieved the formal status of vecino (resident, citizen), a designation of great importance in colonial society. In Puebla de los Angeles, a newly founded settlement for Spaniards, a small number black men achieved this status. One free black, the town crier Juan de Montalvo, was well established and in Puebla, with connections to the local Spanish elites.  Others were known to hold land and engage in the local real estate market.
  Free blacks and mulattoes (descendants of Europeans and Africans) were subject to the payment of tribute to the crown, as were Indians, but in contrast to Indians, free blacks and mulattoes were subject to the jurisdiction of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Legal freedom could be achieved by manumission, with liberty purchased by the enslaved person. A 1585 deed of emancipation (Carta de libertad) in Mexico City shows that the formerly enslaved woman, Juana, (a negra criolla, i.e., born in Mexico), paid her owner for her freedom with the help of Juana's husband Andrés Moreno. The price of liberty was the large sum of 200 gold pesos. Her former owner, Doña Inéz de León, declared that "it is my will that [Juana] shall be free now and for all time and not subject to servitude. And as such person she may and shall go in whatever parts and places she desires; and may appear in judgment and collect and receive her property and manage and administer her estate; and may make wills and codicils and name heirs and executors; and may act and dispose of her person in whatsoever a free person, born of free parents may and must do."
caption: Casta painting of a Spaniard, a Negra and a Mulatto José de Alcíbar. 18th c.
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