For decades, Mexican school textbooks gave little space to the country’s African past, even though Afro-descendant communities had helped shape Mexico for centuries. In Cuajinicuilapa, a town on Guerrero’s Costa Chica, a small museum began addressing that absence two decades before Mexico formally recognized Afro-Mexican peoples. The Museo de las Culturas Afromestizas Vicente Guerrero Saldaña opened in 1999, two decades before Mexico amended its Constitution to recognize Afro-Mexican peoples in 2019.
According to Mexico’s National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI), the 2020 Population and Housing Census was the first national census to ask whether residents considered themselves Afro-Mexican, Black, or Afro-descendant. The census counted 2,576,213 people who identified that way nationwide, including 79.8 percent of residents in Cuajinicuilapa.
Inside Cuajinicuilapa’s Afro-Mexican Museum
The museum grew from Mexico’s Programa Nacional Nuestra Tercera Raíz, created in 1989 to study and recognize the African presence in the country. Its collection brings that history together through maps, photographs, documents, masks, musical instruments, and dioramas.
Some displays confront slavery directly, including dioramas of enslaved Africans brought to colonial Mexico and images of Black laborers in mines and plantations. Others connect more directly to the Costa Chica’s present through murals of Afro-Mexican cowboys and masks associated with the Dance of the Devils. Vicente Guerrero gives the museum a direct link to Mexico’s political history. He was the country’s second president and is now officially recognized as its first Afro-Mexican president. During his presidency, he issued the decree abolishing slavery across Mexico on September 15, 1829.
Cuajinicuilapa received international recognition in 2024, when UNESCO added it to its Network of Places of History and Memory linked to Enslavement and the Slave Trade. UNESCO identifies the area as one of the first palenques in New Spain, formed by Africans and Afro-descendants who escaped slavery. The organization also highlights Cuajinicuilapa as home to Mexico’s first museum dedicated to Afro-descendant memory.
The institution has relied heavily on co-founder Angélica Sorrosa Alvarado, who by 2024 was its only remaining staff member. She had spent 15 years working there without a museum salary, handling curation, tours, administration, maintenance, and cleaning while supporting herself as a physiotherapist.
The Dance Of The Devils Keeps History Moving
Beyond the museum walls, the Costa Chica’s music and dance carry Afro-Mexican history into public life. During Día de Muertos, communities across Guerrero and Oaxaca perform the Danza de los Diablos, or Dance of the Devils, one of the region’s best-known traditions. Accounts of the dance’s origins vary, although Mexico’s Culture Ministry traces it to the colonial period and a ritual associated with an African deity called Ruja.
Through cultural exchange, the ceremony acquired Catholic influences and became part of Indigenous traditions across the Costa Chica, where it is performed especially on November 1 and 2. Dancers wear masks with beards and horsehair fringe, while the Tenango, or Diablo Mayor, leads the group alongside the Minga. The music can include harmonica, violin, the friction drum known as the bote, and the charrasca, traditionally made from a donkey or horse jawbone.
Chilena, a distinct genre of traditional Mexican folk music influenced by Chilean immigrants in the 19th century, has another history of movement, with roots in South American musical traditions that took hold in the Costa Chica. Once rooted in Guerrero and Oaxaca, the form developed through local Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and mestizo influences. In the fandango de artesa, dancers perform on a carved wooden platform that also becomes part of the percussion. Researchers at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) have studied these traditions as part of the region’s Afro-descendant musical culture.
Why Cuajinicuilapa Still Needs This Museum
Sorrosa has placed younger generations at the center of her argument for keeping the museum open. She told The Guardian that some local children resisted identifying as Black and described the museum as a place where they could understand their origins and take pride in that identity.
For visitors, the connection between gallery and street makes Cuajinicuilapa’s Afro-Mexican history easier to follow. A devil mask means more once you know the story behind the dance, while regional music reveals the African, Indigenous, and Pacific influences woven through it. The museum supplies the history, and the town shows how those traditions continue in daily life.
