Mexico's African Legacy

 Vicente Riva Palacios

 Grandson of Mexico's First President of African heritage

In the late 1860s, more than a half century after Mexico won her independence from Spain, the diligent work of an influential writer, historian, army general, and mayor of Mexico City, Vicente Riva Palacio, retrieved dusty Inquisition archived accounts of the African slave Yanga and his revolutionary valor against the Spanish, establishing a free Black town in Veracruz, Mexico, and brought this story to the public in an anthology in 1870. Riva Palacio, is also the grandson of Mexico's liberator and first Black president (if you count the one-drop rule) Vicente Guerrero who is the son of an African slave mother and a Mestizo father.