Page:Historia Verdadera del Mexico profundo.djvu/253

 "...traditional peasants no longer recognize themselves as indians, although they live a predominantly indian culture; alternate urban groups are not culturally homogenous: some maintain as cultural reference their original communities, indian or peasant; others, have formed a urban popular culture of indian characteristics..."

''"Because what we here call advanced, modern and urban, is not the spearhead of an own internal development, but the result of the western civilization introduction from the top; and what we call backward, traditional and rural, is not the starting point of that effort, but the indian result of mesoamerican civilization." (Guillermo Bonfil Batalla. 1987)''

Mexicans despite everything, of our ignorance and orphanhood of ourselves, are the sons of the sons of the old grandparents, who patiently wait the time of luminous consciousness and the potential re-encounter. We are a mestizo people; we must strive to be worthy heirs of Miguel de Cervantes and at the same time of Netzahualcoyotl. We need to know the two parts that make us up. We cannot and we must not, belittle any one of the civilizations that make us up.

Mexicans are: indigenous inside (in the spiritual, mystical and ontological) with western features outside; but we will never be western inside, with indigenous features on the outside. That everyone wants to hide.

''An Own Face and a True Heart. ''

Ever since 1521 when Hernán Cortés ordered the stone by stone destruction of the great Tenochtitlan; a metropolis that was far ahead of any European city of the time. The entire inheritance of seven and a half thousand years of civilization of the old grandparents was denied and condemned for being, according to the conquerors, primitive and diabolical. Nothing having to do with the wisdom of the old grandparents could be part of the european civilizing project, to create "The New Spain" in the conquered lands.