...Mexico is not a mestizo country. Rather, it is a country whose majority population continues to be rooted in Mesoamerican civilization and whose way of life reflects cultural patterns and values with thousands of years of history.
p vii

The recent history of Mexico, that of the last five hundred years, is the story of permanent confrontation between those attempting to direct the country toward the path of Western civilization and those, rooted in Mesoamerican ways of life, who resist. The first plan arrived with the European invaders but was not abandoned with independence. The new groups in power, first the creoles and later the mestizos, never renounced the Westernization plan. They still have not renounced it.
p xv

To the sector that represents and gives impetus to our country's dominant civilizational program, I have given the name "the imaginary Mexico."
p xvi

Imaginary Mexico's westernization plan has been exclusionary and has denied the validity of Mesoamerican civilization.
p xv

The colonial origin of Mexican society has meant that the dominant groups and classes are also those who foment the project of westernization, the creators of the imaginary Mexico. At the base of the social pyramid are the peoples resisting, those who embody Mesoamerican civilization, who sustain the Mexico profundo. Power and Western civilization coincide, on one pole, and subjugation and Mesoamerican on the other.
p xvi

A basic characteristic of every colonial society is that invading group, with a different culture from the dominated, ideologically affirms its immanent superiority on all areas of life and denies and excludes the culture of those colonized.
p xvi

The decolonization of Mexico was incomplete. Independence from Spain was achieved, but the internal colonial structure was not eliminated. The groups that have held power since 1821 have never abandoned the civilizational project of the West and have never overcome the distorted view of the country that is the essence of the colonizers' vieiwoint. Thus, the diverse national visions used to organize Mexican society during different periods since independence have all been created within a Western framework.
pp xvi-xvii

We cannot continue to ignore and deny the potential represented by the living presence of Mesoamerican civilization. We should not continue wasting energy and resources in an effort to substitute another reality for that which the majority of the population experiences.
xvii

...Mesoamerican civilization in modern Mexico. Its presence is undeniable in the countryside and in the names and the faces of the people throughout the length and breadth of the country. Much of what we have, and that will be indispensable in building the future, has behind it thousands of years of history.
p xviii

The Mexico profundo is formed by a great diversity of peoples, communities, and social sectors that constitute the majority of the population the country. What unifies them and distinguishes them from the rest of Mexican society is that they are bearers of ways of understanding the world and of organizing human life that have their origins in Mesoamerican civilization and that have been forged here in Mexico through a long and complicated historical process...The contemporary civilization of Mesoamerica has been denied but it is essential to recognize its continuing presence.
p 1

..."mestizo" handicrafts of traditional communities are not much different from those founds in Indian communities.
p 44

The Indian presence as depicted in murals, museums, sculptures, and archaeological sites, all open to the public, is treated essentially as a dead world.
p 55

A colonized mentality, based on a scheme of domination from which they benefit, has kept the ruling groups from considering any cultural alternative. They rigidly promote Western schemes, through inability, for convenience's sake, through submission, or, most probably, through simple blindness to reality itself.
p 64

What has been proposed as national culture at different moments Mexican history may be understood as a permanent aspiration to stop being what we are. It has always been a cultural project that denies the historical reality of Mexican social origins.
p65

"To civilize" is a key expression. In Mexico, civilizing has always meant de-Indianizing, imposing the ways of the West.
p 105

Mestizo, imaginary Mexico, even though it distanced itself from Spain, never broke with the West, or even tried to do so.
p 107

Those who assumed themselves to be mestizos did not,want to be creoles, much less indians. They attempted to be something new, something whose contents were never satisfactorily defined.
p 111

Revolutionary Mexico tried to appropriate all the symbols of the Mexico profundo [Indigenous Mexico] that could be used to construct an image of a mestizo Country [pro-European].
p 114

The media, above all, consolidate a vision of a Mexico that does not exist [that Mexico is more European than Indigenous]. They incite those imagining to believe, contrary to all evidence, in the reality of the world presented, in the solidity and viability of the project.
p 124