M Xico Profundo

This translation of a major work in Mexican anthropology argues that Mesoamerican civilization is an ongoing and undeniable force in contemporary Mexican life. For Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, the remaining Indian communities, the "de-Indianized" rural mestizo communities, and vast sectors of the poor urban population constitute the México profundo. 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. Since the Conquest, Bonfil argues, the peoples of the México profundo have been dominated by an "imaginary México" imposed by the West. It is imaginary not because it does not exist, but because it denies the cultural reality lived daily by most Mexicans. Within the México profundo there exists an enormous body of accumulated knowledge, as well as successful patterns for living together and adapting to the natural world. 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."

Photographs document the contemporary followers of the famed Mexican folk healer who died in 1938 and the pilgrimages that continue in his name.

A sweeping look at the complicated concept and history of Indigeneity in Mexico--Provided by publisher.

México profundo. Una civilización negada es un recorrido histórico-etnológico del pensamiento mexicano que, mediante la revalorización de la cultura indígena nacional, pretende unificar un país que el autor considera como dividido.

The photographs resonate with movement and reverence as they capture the swaying, stomping bodies of 'Nuevo Mexico' Indo-Hispanos performing sacred rituals and dances rooted in the syncretism of garb and gods of the Old and New Spains.

The &“technocratic revolution&” that ushered in the age of neoliberalism in Mexico under the presidency of Carlos Salinas (1988&–1994) helped create the conditions for, and the constraints on, a resurgence of activism among the indigenous communities of Mexico. This resurgence was given further impetus by the protests in 1992 against the official celebration of the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus&’s landing in America and by the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas in 1994. Local, regional, and national indigenous organizations formed to pursue a variety of causes&—cultural, economic, legal, political, and social&—to benefit Indian peoples in all regions of the country. Folkloric Poverty analyzes the crisis these indigenous political groups faced in Mexico at the turn of the twenty-first century. It tells the story of an indigenous peoples&’ movement in the state of Guerrero, the Consejo Guerrerense 500 A&ños de Resistencia Ind&ígena, that gained unprecedented national and international prominence in the 1990s and yet was defunct by 2002. The fate of the Consejo points to the ways that Mexican multiculturalism&‚ indigenismo, combined with neoliberal reforms to keep Indians in a political quarantine, effectively limiting their actions and safely isolating their demands on the state.

In 1905 Rev. Francis Clement Kelley founded the Catholic Church Extension Society of the United States of America. Drawing attention to the common link of religion, Kelley proclaimed the Extension Society’s duty to be that of preventing American Protestant missionaries, public school teachers, and others from separating people from their natural faith, Catholicism. Though domestic evangelization was its founding purpose, the Extension Society eventually expanded beyond the national border into Mexico in an attempt to solidify a hemispheric Catholic identity. Exploring international, racial, and religious implications, Anne M. Martínez’s Catholic Borderlands examines Kelley’s life and actions, including events at the beginning of the twentieth century that prompted four exiled Mexican archbishops to seek refuge with the Archdiocese of Chicago and befriend Kelley. This relationship inspired Kelley to solidify a commitment to expanding Catholicism in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in response to the national plan of Protestantization, which was indiscreetly being labeled as “Americanization.” Kelley’s cause intensified as the violence of the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero Rebellion reverberated across national borders. Kelley’s work with the U.S. Catholic Church to intervene in Mexico helped transfer cultural ownership of Mexico from Spain to the United States, thus signaling that Catholics were considered not foreigners but heirs to the land of their Catholic forefathers.

When Emilio López made his way to Atlanta, Georgia from México’s third most populated city, where he had grown up, worked, married and had two daughters, he was in pain. He had hurt his back in a work-related accident and was still recovering. “Es algo que no se lo deseo a nadie” [It’s something I don’t wish upon anyone], he began. Eventually he would come to talk about another kind of pain that previously had been too raw to share, one provoked by having to leave his school-aged daughters, wife, and country in search of a job ‘para ver por mi familia’ [to look after my family]. Emilio, and others in this study, father at a distance from their children once they cross the México-U.S. border. They tell a story about globalization and neoliberalism that reveals the dystopias families traverse when parents cross borders as a way to ‘look after their family.’ The narratives challenge policies, laws and economic arrangements that separate families. The fathers also remind us that while Mexican immigrants support the Mexican economy to the tune of 24 billion dollars a year through remittances, and help fuel the U.S. economy through their underpaid labor, the fathers see themselves as much more than workers and providers. Their identities are informed by an expansive definition of fathering. Although the fathers’ sense of disillusionment grows as they experience only modest gains for their families and live in precarious circumstances themselves, they nonetheless create radical and bold models of affection, care, love and fathering that help them overcome borders and the failures of the state to stay connected as a family.