Page:Historia Verdadera del Mexico profundo.djvu/252

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

are a way of expressing and renew their own identity; keep quiet or rebel, according to a strategy tuned by centuries of resistance." (Guillermo Bonfil Batalla. 1987)

It is necessary to recognize the denied part of our being and assume us as first class Mexicans and not, as third world gringos or as second class spaniards. Appropriating all technologies and all the world modern ideas, but using them for our own project and civilizing development. It is not a matter of living in a "museum", nor in the past; on the contrary, the challenge is to remain traditional and faithful to our identity, but at the same time, spearhead modernity and progress, as does Japan or England. Build the future with the foundations of the past. There is no future possibility, without the full awareness of the past.

The de-indianized indians.[1]

Without the prodigious mother language, only with limited "dialects". Without historical memory, only with confusing dubious myths and legends. Without the millennial knowledge, in the midst of ignorance, only with the perverse witchcraft and sordid backwardness. Without physical, social and sacred, spaces; only criminal deserts, desolated mountains or pauper belts of misery. Without an artistic language, only with negligible crafts. Without the ancient religion, in the midst of a confused religious syncretism managed by the dominator. Without an "own face and a true heart", only as "uneducated foreigners in their own land". Despising the own and exalting the foreign. Without the glorious memory of our ancestors, wanting to be "a colonized colonizer", just a western hybrid of the third world, a third class gringo. Insecure, violent and fearful.

"The presence of the indian culture is, in some aspects, so daily and omnipresent, that rarely its deep meaning is considered and in the long historical process which made its presence possible in social sectors that today assume a non-indian identity."

____________________

  1. Concept used by Dr. Guillermo Bonfil, in his book "Mexico profundo", to refer to the indigenous peoples who have voluntarily lost their Mother culture, traditions, uses and customs.
252