By 1571, Mexico City houses the largest African population in the Americas. There are 8000 slaves of black/African descent there and 8000 Spanish residents. The disparity increases over the course of the 17th century. By 1646, 70% of the population is criollos of black and mixed-race descent. 40% of the country's population of African descent (63,000 of 152,000) lives in or near Mexico City. 104,000 new enslaved Africans ae introduced to the colony of New Spain, 1600-50; the free black population surpasses it in the second half of the century. In the colony as a whole in 1646, there are 13,830 Europeans, 35,000 Africans, 1.27 million Indians, 169,000 Euro-Mestizos, and 116,000 Afro-Mestizos.

According to historian Herman Bennett, in Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico, Africans used the tools available to them to create their own social networks inside structures of domination like slavery: in Bennett's words, they "channeled African ethnicity through Christianity." Self-identifying as "Angolans," they built and created kinship ties, built cultures and relationships, witnessed each other's marriages (he notes that, of 1200 marriages listed between 1595-1650, in 87% of the cases the witnesses had known those getting married for 6 years or more), and forged "vibrant and enduring ties." 72% of those who married in Mexico City married fellow Angolans, and 91% of those enslaved married others who were enslaved, suggesting that, "despite the restrictions slavery imposed, persons of African descent used their juridical rights as Christians...to stake claims on their identities as Angolans. By establishing the foundations of their lives in the act of marriage, Angolans ensured that their ethnic identities and the Angolan community were mutually reinforcing....Africans utilized their Christian personae to...exhibit social selves beyond the categories of labor and property."

Slave traders and masters used the term "Angolan" to refer to specific areas in West Africa near the port of Luanda (home of present-day Angola), but historian Paul Lovejoy suggests that we instead think of the word as "a spontaneously-generated cultural creation within slavery and aboard slave ships."

These identities have historically been erased. Bennett notes that "the rich spectrum of color, status, race, and ethnicity in which African-descended people lived and moved was invisible, or even worse, inconsequetial to Spanish colonizers." Mexico recognized their existence officially only in 2015, and "black" will first appear as a category in the 2020 census.