Page:Historia Verdadera del Mexico profundo.djvu/225

 diseases brought from Europe, 20 million human beings. Mexico did not get this population back, until the 1940s.

''"These Indians, chastened by the sufferings experienced, came to collect great hatred against whites, also including priests in a common malevolence. They concluded that gold was the only motive of the first; and thus, they resolved to fill their hands of riches, outwardly keeping all christian formalities and to continue in private their old practices." (José Antonio Gay. 1881) ''

However, the old grandparents, despite everything, and in a prodigious and heroic resistance struggle, managed to keep alive their ancient culture, in the variegated and complex cultural syncretism; not only in the indigenous and peasant communities of the present, but in the mestizo society itself. We can assume that in the 16th century, instead of having a "discovery" there was a "cover-up". That the Spanish structured with a strong colonial system, to extract the wealth of Mexico and very seldom, to develop and improve its original inhabitants and its ancient civilization. However, despite the adversity, old grandparents started a massive and intelligent system of cultural resistance, by submitting the laws, authorities and institutions to corruption. Indeed, the project of creating the New Spain, from the Anahuac remains, never was fully complied, because of the corruption in which they lived.

"This is how the corrupt manner in which the colonial order was implemented, both among the spaniards as against the indians, allowed the permanent non-consolidation of the new civilization project. The spaniards themselves corrupted law, institutions and authority; this somehow allowed the survival of indigenous culture, whom implemented an elaborate and complex resistance strategy, which had two major aspects. The first was to try to preserve "disguised or camouflaged", the most important values of their ancestral culture in the new colonial order; and the second was corrupting as much as they could laws, institutions ____________________