known as "Abolition Day" and it is a holiday celebrated by those who live in the island. The Spanish's limited focus on assimilating the black population, and maroon communities established from slave plantations, contributed to the majority African influence in black Puerto Rican culture. High amounts of interracial marriage and reproducing, since the 1500s, is the reason why the majority of Puerto Ricans are mixed-race European, African, Taino, but only a small number are of predominant or full African ancestry. The first black people in the island came alongside European colonists as workers from Spain and Portugal known as Ladinos. During the 1500s, the slaves that Spain imported to Puerto Rico and most of its other colonies, were mainly from the Upper Guinea region. However, in the 1600s and 1700s, Spain imported large numbers of slaves from Lower Guinea and the Congo. According to various DNA studies, majority of the African ancestry among black and mixed-race Puerto Ricans comes from a few tribes such as the Wolof, Mandinka, Dahomey, Yoruba, Igbo, and Congolese, correlating to the modern-day countries of Senegal, Mali, Benin, Nigeria, and Angola. Slaves came from all parts of the western coast of Africa, from Senegal to Angola. The Yoruba and Congolese made the most notable impacts to Puerto Rican culture. There's been evidence of intercolonial migration between Puerto Rico and its neighbors during the 1700s and 1800s, which consisted of migration of free blacks and purchases of slaves from neighboring islands. Language Many African slaves imported to Cuba and Puerto Rico spoke "Bozal" Spanish, a Creole language that was Spanish-based, with Congolese and Portuguese influence. Although Bozal Spanish became extinct in the nineteenth century, the African influence in the Spanish spoken in the island is still evident in the many Kongo words that have become a permanent part of Puerto Rican Spanish. Music Puerto Rican musical instruments such as barriles, drums with stretched animal skin, and Puerto Rican music-dance forms such as Bomba or Plena are likewise rooted in Africa. Bomba represents the strong African influence in Puerto Rico. Bomba is a music, rhythm and dance that was brought by West African slaves to the island. Plena is another form of folkloric music of African origin. Plena was brought to Ponce by blacks who immigrated north from the English-speaking islands south of Puerto Rico. Plena is a rhythm that is clearly African and very similar to Calypso,