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Scene from the Nativity special Raíces from Banco Popular

The history of African influences in Puerto Rican music begins long before 1508, the year in which the Spanish settled the island, and 1492, when Christopher Columbus made Europeans aware of the New World. The African influence in Puerto Rican music began with two earlier human processes that converged on the island that the Tainos called Boriquén. The first was the millennial economic, cultural and human encounters and clashes between the European peninsula and the northern and trans-Saharan regions of Africa in the years prior to 700 AD. The second process was the birth and development of enslavement of western Africans, their insertion into Iberian society and, later, their use as labor in the Americas. The combination of these two processes created the basis for the two main ways that Africans arrived in Puerto Rico: from the Iberian peninsula and from the coastal regions of western Africa.

The human interaction that arose through the trade routes extended from the region that consists of what is now Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo and Benin, crossing to the capitalscapitals: The top part which crowns a column, the design of which is characterized by different architectonic styles. of the Christian kingdoms: the Franco kingdom that is today France, and the Christian kingdoms on the Iberian peninsula, which today are Portugal and Spain. The African presence was consolidated on the Iberian peninsula in the year 711. The Muslim occupation of the peninsula not only opened the European continent to Arab influences, but also, and more importantly, the Mediterranean world to northern Africa. It was through this region that the first influences from western Africa were established on the Iberian peninsula.

Direct contact between the western African kingdoms and the Iberian peninsula during the period between 1415 and 1492 created the conditions that made inhabitants of the region permanent elements of Portuguese and Spanish society. By 1508, the beginning of the occupation of the island of Puerto Rico, free North Africans and slaves from Andalusia (the south of Spain, which was dominated by Muslim North Africans) had spent centuries under the Christian kings of the peninsula, and between 1415 and 1492, their mark on Andalusian society was already permanent. Under the reign of the Catholic king and queen, Fernando and Isabel, the West African population grew in the city of Seville. The Catholic monarchs put this population under their direct supervision, and in 1475, prominent West African Juan de Valladolid, known as "the black count", was named mayor of the black community of Seville and answered directly to the crown.