The Latin American Identity and the African Diaspora: Ethnogenesi ...

dance originally sung by slaves as they worked in Vera Cruz, Mexico during the seventeenth century. Aguirre Beltran has located a territory in the south of Zaire (today's Democratic Republic of the Congo) with a province called Bamba. Its inhabitants were known by the tribal name of Ba-Mbamba, and during the era of captive African labor some were sent to Mexico grouped under the name Bamba (Aguirre Beltran, La población 140). Evidently, there is some currency to the folk history of “La Bamba” as a form of music and dance. David Haro, also a Mexican lyricist and singer, has penned the following verses for a décima(a poetic form) entitled “Mozambique”:

Yet in spite of the affirmation indicated by the lyrics, there is a long history of reluctance in Mexico to embrace the Afromestizo (mixed African and Amerindian) identity. In “Afro-Mexican History: Trends and Directions in Scholarship,” the author found that the black person in early Mexican society was “viewed ambivalently, that is, as being both a part and not a part of the nation; their experiences possessed an added voyeuristic effect” (Vinson 2). Nonetheless, in a pictorial essay that appeared in the April 2007 issue of Inside Mexico, it was noted by the Mexican