Earlier this summer, two women endured an eight day bus ride from their small Mexican village to participate in a United Nations conference on indigenous people and to tell "African Americans" about the family they have in Mexico.

"Brothers and Sisters," Maria Callejas Salinas began in soft tones, "please receive a strong affection from my Black community of Rio Grande, Mexico," she told a WBAI-FM radio audience here in August.

In Spanish, translated for the English speaking audience, the pretty dark skinned woman with dark curly hair issued what became a tearful condemnation of racism in Mexico that ignores her people�s existence "simply because we are Black."

She credited indigenous people in Mexico, like the Maya and the Chatino, with whom her people live for treating them with respect.

Patricia Pena, her friend and traveling companion, came to represent the Chatino people at the conference. Light skinned with silky black hair, Pena told the audience people in her village contributed to the trip, hoping to make the plight of Blacks there known.

"We have all suffered the same oppression from the bearded one (Caucasians). But we recognize that an even bigger crime was committed against Blacks. (The white man) stole their language and history," Pena said.

Their story reminded me of the warm people I met in Mexico�s Costa Chica in 1998 and the largely unknown history of the Black presence and influence on Mexico. Black folks there told me how they had been written out of Mexican history by law.

But some Black scholars have documented that history in English and today some are working to translate such history into Spanish.

"The (Mexican) Olmec kings, like the (Egyptian) pharaohs, wore a dual crown. � Both had the royal flail; the plumed serpent suddenly replaces the royal jaguar; purple is the royal color. The Olmec books, most of which were burned by Europeans, had black and red kings in royal purple," wrote University of Massachusetts Professor Edward Bynum in his book "The African Unconscious."

In fact, the ancient pyramids and cultures that are attributed to the Aztec and Maya sit "on an Olmec base," according to Yale University archeologist Michael Coe, in his book "Mexico."

Most Africans in Mexico live where the Olmecs settled. The great "Negroid colossi," as Professor Ivan Van Sertima described, were found along Mexico�s Gulf Coast in Veracruz. Their mission outposts were where Salinas and Pena call home, the Costa Chica, including 24 African villages. It is a 200-mile long Pacific coastal region that begins four road hours southeast of Acapulco. Africans lived in the region by the hundreds of thousands long before the slave era, according to "The Black Population of Mexico," by the late University of Veracruz Professor Gonzalo Aquirre Beltran.

Slavery was abolished in Mexico at the Independence Plan of Iguala in 1821. But the former slave who negotiated the Faustian Pact agreed to make the discussion of race in Congress illegal. Government and church records were prohibited from identifying people by race, wrote Ted Vincent in a June 12-14 article in The Daily Challenge entitled "Afro-Mexicans Who Fused a National Identity."

The George Washington of the Mexican Revolution, and President of the Republic by popular demand against the plans of the rich, was run back into the mountains from which he had once waged revolution when he began to build schools and give land to the poor. A Black man, he was betrayed, captured and executed after a mock trial in 1829, according to J.A. Rogers, "World�s Great Men of Color, Vol. II."

"Our history is documented in English because Black scholars have traveled the world to seek out and translate documents that tell our story," said Min. Abdullah Muhammad Abdullah, the Latino Representative of the Nation of Islam. "People like J.A. Rogers and Arturo Schomberg went out and brought it back to New York. That�s why we still come here to tell our stories and to hear from others," he said. Min. Muhammad translated Message to the Blackman into Spanish for the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. He is currently working on a Spanish translation of some of the writings of Frederick Douglass.

(Lamont Muhammad, author of "Black Mexico: The Greatest Story Never Told,"can be contacted by email at [email protected].)