"Black" Central America

Like I was saying to someone who asked, maybe Stacy although I don't remember, there really are almost no black people in El Salvador, at least not when I lived there that I recall, not that I would know a whole lot about that. It is not like I ever studied that in depth, but although some people there have frizzy black hair rather than straight black hair, most of the people there are of the mestizo race, which means a blend of Spanish and Indian. There could well be a little bit of African mixed in but it is not very noticeable or predominant on the Pacific Coast. Of course, the Atlantic coast of Central America is a very different story. There are some black people groups that settled in Atlantic/Caribbean coastal areas of Honduras and Nicaragua and Panama, but over hundreds of years there was not very much migration of black people across the hilly border areas into El Salvador, which was originally inhabited by Indian tribes, the Pipil and the Lenca and possibly others. Much has been said in history books about the Pipil but very little about the Lenca and other tribes all striving for dominance there, the Lencas pushing out the Pipils or something like that. Anyway, the racial designation of "mestizo" is a useful device that blurs these original tribal distinctions, both Spanish and Indian, and possibly even African. If you scratched the surface, you might find more distinctions than are readily apparent to an uninformed white person such as myself, but actually they probably know who they are.