Page:Historia Verdadera del Mexico profundo.djvu/220

 purpose and result. Oppress, alienate and exploit the people of the defeated civilization.

''"My fingers are stiff from age. I can no longer write. Humanity will always ignore what happened to this great people. Our civilization has given it such a hard blow that it will never get back and it can be that it will never be known the high intellectual level it had reached ". (Fray Bernardino de Sahagún)''

The ignorance of the indigenous past, the inability to "remember", the shame over the indigenous root, the contempt for our own and the praise of the foreign, the be educated —at home and school— as "uneducated foreigners in our own land", can only be explained through a systematic denial of the past. Because past denial is self-denial. If people do not know their history, do not know themselves. It is alien to their destiny. Because as a person, family, and people...we are what we remember.

''"The first effect of the conquest on indigenous memory was the destruction of the state system of control over the past. The second was repression of any attempt of the defeated to express and articulate its memory. As of the conquest the transmission of the indigenous past took place in a field of tension created by the mere conquerors presence, in a climate of general repression that drowned forms of remembrance of the past other than those imposed by the victor. To this is owed that the greater part of the systems developed by indigenous peoples to preserve and transmit their past were hidden, often disguised under christian clothes, or was conducted in secret practices." (Enrique Florescano. 1987)''

What is not said in mexican society at all cost, is that it is conformed by a small group of victors and a huge majority of defeated. The truth is hidden and is disguised as "romantic encounter" of two cultures. Money holders, neo-colonizer creoles do not like for the defeated—colonized to remind them of the past. And much less, the dehumanized fashion in which they have tried to destroy the conquered civilization. This is