Abstract

Although the problems of the Indian communities of Mexico are not identical with those of other Latin American countries, they are nevertheless similar, and I am sure that the solutions that have been tried in Mexico can also be used in other countries on that continent.The present territory of the Republic of Mexico was divided, in the period prior to the Spanish conquest, into two great cultural provinces: There was on the one hand the Northern region which was generally inhabited by nomadic tribes—hunters and gatherers whom the Mexicans used to call by the name of chichimecas—and on the other hand the central region of the country which extended towards the North-West as far as Sinaloa along the Western Sierra Madre and towards the North-East as far as Soto la Marina along the Eastern Sierra—a province which is now called Mesoamerica—and which then comprised various native peoples with a plurality of languages and characteristic cultural features, whose manner of life was based essentially on the cultivation of corn, beans and other edible plants and who lived without exception in cities organized already according to a political system which was essentially monarchical and theocratic.