Page:Para leer a Carlos Castaneda.djvu/11

 of the indigenous Maya of Chiapas in 1994, the dominant society began to discover the existence not only of the "profound Mexico", discussed by Dr. Guillermo Bonfil, but has begun to acknowledge that part of his face is indigenous. A face refused and denigrated by colonization. An unknown face, an own face of ours.

The Indian peoples of Mexico are so strange and foreign to us, as long as we remain "uneducated foreigners in our own land". A Zapotec Indian, Javier Castellanos said "being indigenous is not a choice, it is a disgrace" and we add "but not being indigenous, is a real tragedy". The Mexican society of the late 20th century is facing a dilemma, we are debating an identity conflict five hundred years old. Who are we Mexicans really? Indigenous in the ontological, philosophical and spiritual, with Western features. Or people with a Western thought and indigenous features, that we all want to vanish.

Within this individual and social debate, "the don Juan teachings" presents the “other reality". They reveal a complex and difficult to understand philosophical thinking. Talks to us of an ancient life and world conception that somehow lives in our everyday life and that in the Western view is interpreted as "magical or surreal" and pejoratively defined as folkloric.

This essay was written in 1991 and from that date to present day, our country has changed a lot. The indigenous issue is in the national debate and it seems that today more than ever we need to know how Mexican indigenous people think and perceive the world and life. The don Juan teachings appeared in United States in the late 1960s. A huge number of American young people took these texts as a passport to the world of drugs. The works of Castaneda, were translated into several languages and apparently have printed 30 million copies. In Mexico, thanks to the worldwide success, the books began to be read in the 1970s by very skeptical intellectuals, and despite the large printings, the Castaneda work is really unknown. The don Juan teachings may open our perception capacity to understand not only the "other reality", but basically the "others", the ignored indigenous.

Thus far, the don Juan teachings are assumed as "esoteric" or shamanism. Its audience in general is composed of young people in search of new paths in the midst of the chaos and failure offered by modernity and neoliberalism. Many people play in individual fantasies of "becoming warriors or entering the terrifying and mysterious world of the nahual" and become "fans" of the Castaneda female warriors and attend expensive seminars to learn about Tensegrity, though few have undertaken Toltequity from a philosophical and cultural point of view.

The don Juan teachings, also contain a rich and large body of philosophical knowledge which is alive and present not only in popular culture, but which are surprisingly represented in physical evidence of the ancient cultures of Mexico. And the Academy has interesting research such as that of Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, Laurette Séjourné, Alfredo Lopez Austin and Miguel Leon Portilla that address the Toltecáyotl at the Academy from the philosophical aspect.

The work of Castaneda can also be a valuable reference point for understanding "the other", the indigenous, to the other side of ourselves that we have stubbornly denied these last five hundred years. The wisdom of the teachings of Don Juan bequeathed Castaneda, can guide us to understand and interpret other ways of understanding life and the world, close forms that live within indigenous and