Guillermo Bonfil Batalla (Mexico City, Wsch. 1935 - 19 July 1991) was a Mexican anthropologist.
Bonfil Batalla studied ethnology at the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH), and became Director of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). Bonfil Batalla was one of the most important theorists of indigenousism.
Bonfil opposed the anthropology that studied only individual indigenous communities or regions at most, without considering a structural analysis of world society, according to Bonfil, the colonial exploitation of the indigenous population was essential for the colonial economies and system whose place was later occupied by international capitalism. Usually, this does not create either isolation or autonomy but subjugation where dominant society drives up the indigenous cultures, takes their territories and causes the disappearance of indigenous peoples. According to Bonfil, the category of 'indigenous ethnicities' ignores and does not mention anything in substance about the peoples referred to, but is native to a condition caused by (neo-) colonial subjection. Instead of an indigenous person who wants to "save the Indian himself," Bonfil etnadesarollo proposes "ethno development" as an alternative, in which indigenous communities should not refrain or isolate the rest of the world, but seek to become autonomous economically and culturally while remaining part of the global economy.
Batalla's most famous book was El México Profundo, una civilización negada, in which he denounces the existence of a "denied civilization", a civilization that already regarded colonialism as extinct. According to Batalla, there are symbolic two Mexicans, a "deep" (profundo), which has its roots in civilizations of thousands of years that are anchored in the heart of the population and not wiped out, and an imaginary (imaginario) which Bonfil does not really exist but whose fiction of the existence of that culture, which has its roots on another continent and is still fundamentally strange to Mexico, has had a great influence on thinking about Mexico. The history of Mexico since the Spanish conquest, according to Batalla, has been a continuous struggle between both Mexicans.
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