In the late 1970s, he was a visiting professor at the graduate program in Social Anthropology and the National Museum at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Bonfil Batalla worked with other intellectuals such as Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Lourdes Arizpe, Néstor García Canclini and Carlos Monsiváis, in an attempt to promote pluri-ethnic, pluricultural, and popular cultural politics in the Mexican government.
This exclusion and suppression of indigeneity in the country led Bonfil Batalla to observe that there were political mobilizations that called for increased democracy and cultural plurality.
[1] As an extension of the desire to recreate national cultural institutions, during his time as the director of the INAH Bonfil Batalla promoted the renovation of the museum system by encouraging direct participation with rural and urban communities.
In this book, he explores the permanence and resilience of non-colonial cultures which colonialism sought to eradicate in Mexico as well as the concept and effects of detribalization, which he refers to as "de-Indianization."
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 expressions of that civilization are quite diverse: from those indigenous peoples who have been able to conserve an internally cohesive culture of their own, to a multitude of isolated traits distributed in different ways in urban populations.
According to Bonfil Batalla, the mestizo is the embodiment of the Imaginary Mexico, as Indigenous cultures are experienced in his everyday life from the philosophical, to the ontological, and fundamentally the spiritual realms of his being yet he assumes a non-Indigenous identity.
Bonfil Batalla asserted that this resistance can be attributed to the fact that "certain social groups have illegitimately held political, economic, and ideological power from the European invasion to the present."
The illegitimate domination of these social groups emerged from "the stratified order of colonial society" and has expressed itself in the centuries since through upholding "an ideology that conceives of the future only in terms of development, progress, advancement, and the Revolution itself, all concepts within the mainstream of Western civilization."
As such, México Profundo and the "Imaginary Mexico" are not merely two different alternatives "within the framework of a common civilization," but rather are two entirely different paradigms "which are built on different ways of conceiving the world, nature, society, and humankind."
Any attempt at "unification" of these two opposing frameworks has only been historically characterized by the pursuit to erase México Profundo and its inherent connections to Mesoamerican civilization while disseminating ideologies upholding the "Imaginary Mexico" and Westernization.
This was historically carried about by various genocidal means, such as the complete obliteration of entire groups of Indigenous people as well as, "where the labor force of the Indians was required," their social and cultural segregation.