De eso que llaman antropología mexicana a half century later María Eugenia D’Aubeterre Buznego 1 & María Leticia Rivermar Pérez 1 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017 De eso que llaman antropología mexicana, first published in 1970, opened a crack in a disciplinary field that was thought until then to be homogeneous. But as we will see below, the real break with nationalist indigenism that the authors of this book claimed came years later when their sharp criticism of the Mexican State was materialized in a handful of mostly neoliberal reforms. The predictions of rupture of indigenist anthropology in Mexico were the end of a social state that could not deliver on its promises. During the 1920s, anthropology in Mexico played a major role in the design and applica- tion of public policies concerning indigenous populations, advocating various degrees of integration into the national project according to its liberal, populist, and socialist drift (Hewitt 1988, 38). Induced acculturation was the key means of achieving the integration of these populations into the Mexican nation. Only during the Cardenist regime (1934–1940), however, was the full tutelage of anthropology by the Mexican State consummated through the creation of an institutional framework that determined its professional practice. A strong expansion of indigenism occurred as the result of the establishment of an B[…] institutional basis for the development of anthropology in the country^ (Krotz 2009, 127) through the Autonomous Department of Indigenous Affairs (Departamento Autónomo de Asuntos Indígenas, DAAI), created in 1935, and the National Institute of Anthropology and History (Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, INAH), established in 1938. The DAAI was charged with Bpractical and immediate diagnosis and solutions of concrete problems,^ whereas INAH was to reign over anthropological research (Sámano n.d., 146). In reality, indigenist policies in Mexico were built around a vision shared by representatives of diverse Latin American countries that participated in a congress inaugurated by General Cardenas in April 1940 and hosted by the Interamerican Indigenous Institute. On this occasion, the president declared: BOur Indian problem is neither to conserve the ‘Indian’ in the Indian, Dialect Anthropol DOI 10.1007/s10624-017-9462-9 * María Eugenia D’Aubeterre Buznego eugeniadaubeterre@gmail.com 1 MASC-ICSyH-BUAP, Calle 4 Sur 104, Centro Histórico, Heróica Puebla de Zaragoza, 72000 Puebla, Mexico