This chapter reviews the main theoretical and empirical contributions that frame the study of African migration in Mexico. It situates the analysis within four key bodies of scholarship: migration regimes and urban spaces, smuggling and informal networks, gendered perspectives on migration, and border studies. Migration regime theory provides tools to examine how mobility is governed across multiple scales, while concepts such as “internal bordering” highlight how control extends into everyday spaces and bureaucracies. Literature on smuggling and migration industries challenges state-centric portrayals of facilitation as purely criminal, instead emphasizing its ambivalent roles as both exploitation and survival strategy. Gender scholarship deepens this analysis by exposing how race and gender shape vulnerabilities, resilience, and strategies of mobility, while critical debates on vulnerability caution against its institutionalization as a paternalistic category. Together, these interdisciplinary perspectives underscore the contested, racialized, and gendered dimensions of migration in Mexico, while also exposing gaps in existing research on African trajectories in the region.