The Bonfil Batalla’s multicultural project

Abstract

This paper is an exegesis of the project of a multicultural society which Guillermo Bonfil Batalla designed for Mexico. Without doubt, the existence of particular cultures inside one nation is a very frequent historical fact. But in societies with the legacy of colonial domination —as the Mexican society— this fact is systematically denied by the cultural politics of the government. Bonfil proposes the opposite, a national project built on the acknowledgement of the multicultural reality, the persistence of the Mesoamerican civilization and the effective forms of cultural resistance of many Indian communities. Bonfil describes the structure and the conditions of possibility of multicultural society. Doing so, he contributes to the understanding of an alternative for the monoculture of the state’s nationalism and the globalization of the cultural emptiness. It seems that the only solution to the conflicts (which characterizes Mexico and the world in this century that begins) are the acceptance, reactivation and articulation of the cultural differences -which constitute the plot of the Bonfilian project.