In kindness to the Mexicans, let us assume that they did not initiate a draconian program to root out and slaughter persons of African descent. Yet, if one looks at the population figures of Mexico in the present day, persons of African origin will be conspicuously absent. The answer to the riddle is simple: Africans were absorbed into the population. Moreover, miscegenation never assumed the negative connotations it does in the United States. In addition, Latin Americans have always developed a variety of elastic and non-binding (not to mention subjective) nomenclatures for an assortment of mixed ancestries. Thus a modern Mexican possessing "non-black" features of straight or non-kinky hair and/or olive skin is likely to have an African ancestor going back generations before. The emphasis here is that this ancestry is part of a larger whole. Caribbean Latinos have even more direct experiences with African ancestry. It is not uncommon for a Dominican family, for example, to have members which range over a variety of phenotypes, which could include the "black" one which sets off the red flag to North American eyes -- and which would also include the "Ricky Ricardo" phenotype associated with Latinos.

Most Latino immigrants, be they U.S.-affiliated Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican or South American, quickly learn about One Drop -- especially if they learn English.

If any Latino has straight or non-kinky hair, he has a pretty good shot at basing his or her brown-skinned complexion on "Indian" ancestry (since he knows that neither the "white" racists nor the "black" inclusionists can rigidly put him in a "box"). Although Indians have certainly been oppressed in the New World, their ancestry has not been as rigidly treated as African ancestry.

The above will not, of course, galvanize legions of Latinos to "step forward" and admit to African ancestry. Most entrants to the U.S. have already doped out that African ancestry is something which precludes being part of the "American Dream".

North Americans will eventually have to get to the point where they can conceptualize African ancestry as simply a representative of a point of origin (Just like European, Asian, Indian or any other ancestry) -- nothing more and nothing less.

So it really becomes who has the loudest and most powerful megaphone: and the mainstream media, as well as conventional education and culture, is committed to "black"/"white"/One Drop (regardless of any alternative documentation).

Yet, this is the Interracial Voice -- and I am assuming that the readers here pay more attention to "racial" facts than the mainstream media. In that spirit, I am passing along some documentation of:
"African ancestry in Latinos":
Selected (non-alphabetical) Bibliography:

Esteva-Fabregat, Claudio.
MESTIZAJE IN IBERO-AMERICA
translated by John Wheat.
Tucsun: University of Arizona Press, 1995.

Morner, Magnus.
RACE MIXTURE IN THE HISTORY OF LATIN AMERICA.
Boston: Little-Brown, 1967.

Conniff, Michael & Davis, Thomas J.
AFRICANS IN THE AMERICAS.
New York: St. Martins Press, 1994.

Palmer, Colin A.
SLAVES OF THE WHITE GOD: BLACKS IN MEXICO,
1570-1650. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976.

Klein, Herbert S.
AFRICAN SLAVERY IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Curtin, Philip D.
THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE: A CENSUS.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.

Rout, Leslie B.
THE AFRICAN EXPERIENCE IN SPANISH AMERICA 1502 TO THE PRESENT DAY.
London: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

van den Berghe, Pierre.
RACE AND RACISM.
New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967

This VERY SHORT list is taken from my article:
Nelson, William Javier. "Africans in Mexico: the Colonial Period."
SOUTH EASTERN LATIN AMERICANIST 39, no.. 2 (Fall 1995):35-44.

The one difference between me and the people who put together documentation listed above, is that the above scholars have usually confined their activities to the restricted environs of classrooms filled with comparative sociology and history students (a very limited audience) and I, on the other hand, am not above disclosing these "secrets" to the general public.

As I indicated before, North Americans associate non-kinky hair with an absence of African ancestry (thus, by inference, "Indian" ancestral presence) in Latinos. It does not matter if the point of origin for the Latino is a "mulatto" country like Cuba or the Dominican Republic (where the African presence is more immediate and numerous) or a "mestizo" country like Mexico (where the Africans have generally been absorbed generations before). I have seen the absolute hypocrisy of Cubans, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans explaining to North Americans the African-based richness of salsa and merengue music (with their polyrhythms and call-response) while simultaneously asserting that they are of "Indian" blood.