Their lives and ways of understanding the world continue to be rooted in Mesoamerican civilization. An ancient agricultural complex provides their food supply, and work is understood as a way of maintaining a harmonious relationship with the natural world.
Health is related to human conduct, and community service is often part of each individual's life obligation. Time is circular, and humans fulfill their own cycle in relation to other cycles of the universe. It is imaginary not because it does not exist, but because it denies the cultural reality lived daily by most Mexicans. To face the future successfully, argues Bonfil, Mexico must build on these strengths of Mesoamerican civilization, "one of the few original civilizations that humanity has created throughout all its history.
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Independence from Spain was achieved, but the internal colonial structure was not eliminated. The groups that have held power since have never abandoned the civilizational project of the West and have never overcome the distorted view of the country that is the essence of the colonizers' viewpoint. Thus, the diverse national visions used to organize Mexican society during different periods since independence have all been created within a Western framework. Instead, it has been viewed only as a symbol of backwardness and an obstacle to be overcome.
It is not a passive, static world, but, rather, one that lives in permanent tension. They take foreign cultural elements and put them at their service; they cyclically perform the collective acts that are a way of expressing and renewing their own identity. They remain silent or they rebel, according to strategies refined by centuries of resistance.
At present, when the plans of the imaginary Mexico are falling apart, we must rethink our country and its trajectory. It would be irresponsible and suicidal to pretend to find solutions to the crisis without taking into account what we really are and what resources we really have to move ahead.
We cannot continue to ignore and deny the potential represented by the living presence of Mesoamerican civilization. We should not continue wasting energy and resources in an effort to substitute another reality for that which the majority of the population experiences. Instead, we should create conditions in which the existing reality can be transformed using its own potential.
Its creative force has been unable to extend itself in other areas because colonial domination has denied it and forced it to take refuge in resistance in order to survive. When we discuss the dilemma of civilization in Mexico, we are really considering the necessity of formulating a new vision or plan for the country in which all the patrimony that we Mexicans have inherited can be incorporated as active capital.
This includes not only natural resources, but also various ways of understanding and making use of them through knowledge and technology that are inherited from the diverse peoples composing the nation. We refer not only to the Western knowledge that with so much effort has been accumulated more than developed in Mexico, but also to the rich gamut of knowledge that is the product of millenarian experience.
Thus, what is needed is to find the ways in which the enormous cultural potential that has been negated in Mexico can flourish. It is with that civilization, and not in opposition to it, that we can construct our own, authentic plans for the country and displace forever the imaginary Mexico, the proof of whose invalidity is now being shown. This book is divided into three parts. In the first part, I try to present a general picture of Mesoamerican civilization in modern Mexico.
Its presence is undeniable in the countryside and in the names and the faces of the people throughout the length and breadth of the country. In order to give that presence its true historical depth, I briefly trace the origin and development of Mesoamerican civilization up to the moment of the European invasion.
Much of what we have, and that will be indispensable in building the future, has behind it thousands of years of history. Next, our attention will be centered on a brief and synthetic description of Mesoamerican civilization as it is lived in Indian communities today.
My design is to draw a single picture, in spite of the particularities that express the individual character of each cultural group. I try to show the internal coherence of the cultures of Mesoamerican origin, a coherence explained by the worldview they conserve. Implicit in this worldview are the deepest values of Mesoamerican civilization, values that form the matrix that gives meaning to all its acts.
In the first part I also explore the presence of Mesoamerican civilization in other groups within Mexican society that do not recognize themselves as Indian.
Here we find evidence of de-Indianization, that is, the loss of these groups' original collective identity as a result of the process of colonial domination. Nevertheless, the change of identity does not necessarily imply the loss of Indian culture.
This is indicated by the cultural reality of the traditional rural communities that identify themselves as mestizo. Even in the cities, old bastions of colonial power, it is possible to find the presence of Indian culture manifested in various forms. Some, such as Indian barrios, result from historical processes, and others result from more recent social processes, such as emigration from the countryside to the city. The first part concludes with a rapid look at what happens in other sectors of Mexican society, those that embody the imaginary Mexico, the proponent of the Western civilizational program.
My emphasis is really on exposing the hidden face of the great mass of the population whose lives are organized around a Mesoamerican cultural matrix.
The image of Mexico that is derived from this schematic x-ray view is of a plural and heterogeneous country with a variety of cultures that do not form a continuous sequence. That is, we do not have societies with different levels of development on a common scale. Far from it. What is clearly profiled is a division into cultural forms belonging to two different civilizations that have never fused, although they interpenetrate.
The ties between these two cultural universes are those that correspond to a situation of colonial domination in which the imaginary Mexico tries to subordinate the rest of the population to its plans. This is the dilemma of Mexican culture that introduces Part II. In the second part we try to understand how our current situation came about. We look at important parts of the historical process that have led Mexican society to deny its substance and repeatedly to undertake a program of substitution instead of development.
I do not attempt a detailed summary of the history of the last five centuries. I try only to highlight general tendencies and key moments that help explain the persistence of an external, colonial program brought up to the present without substantial change since the Spanish creoles began imagining independence.
This selective account also allows us to understand the diverse ways in which the peoples of Mesoamerican origin and their culture have been attacked in an age-old effort to deny them and subject them to the cultural order proposed by successive dominant groups. The forms of resistance have varied, from armed defense and rebellion to the apparently conservative attachment to traditional practices.
I attempt to demonstrate that all these forms of resistance are really facets of the same permanent, tenacious struggle. Each community and all of them in conjunction have fought to continue being themselves, not to give up being the protagonists of their own history. Part III, based on the previous chapters, reflects on the current and future situation of Mexico. My intent is to present the country we have inherited on two planes.
One is the collapse of the development model that has been promulgated, with its disastrous consequences and the dangers implied in trying to promote it once again.
The other is the resources we actually have, and with which we should construct our own authentic future. Based on these considerations I suggest possible options for constructing a new national program, which should be framed in a civilizational project that makes explicit our reality instead of hiding it. I consider these ideas as notes for an inescapable and urgent debate in which the question of democracy must take first place.
This is not the formal, docile, and awkwardly traced democracy of the West, but a real democracy derived from our history and responding to the rich and varied composition of Mexican society. This too is a civilizational problem.
During the first year my time was devoted to building an analytical model that would allow me to approach the main theme with clarity and that would serve as a unifying guide for a work that touches so many and such varied aspects of the historical and present reality of Mexico. The contributions and criticisms of the participants were taken into account in producing the final version of that essay.
The reader will encounter references to a theory of cultural control in various sections of the book. I included only such references as were necessary to clarify the meaning of important terms employed. Such terms include our own culture and foreign culture, cultural control, resistance processes, appropriation, innovation, imposition, alienation, and suppression, as well as the meanings I give to ethnic group and ethnic identity.
Apart from those clarifying paragraphs, I opted not to expound the theory of cultural control, although it is implicit in the general focus of the book. I made that decision while thinking of the general reader of the book, for whom a theoretical and methodological discussion might be confusing. Neither would its exposition contribute anything substantial to my purpose in writing the book.
For the same reason I eliminated from the text the footnotes and exact bibliographic references that we tend to assume demonstrate seriousness and rigor in an academic work. The reader interested in pursuing in depth any of the themes discussed here will encounter in the Bibliographic Appendix some suggestions for further reading. The Appendix also gives credit to the principal sources from which I have taken the data upon which this vision of Mexico is based.
I list only the principal sources and perhaps those most recently consulted, because a work like this represents, in the final analysis, an attempt to synthesize many things learned from many sources over the years. It would have been inappropriate and even useless to try to specify in detail the source of the data for making this or that statement or generalization. Specialists will easily be able to find specific ways in which my global analysis is inexact.
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