Background:

The site of advanced Amerindian civilizations, Mexico came under Spanish rule for three centuries before achieving independence early in the 19th century. A devaluation of the peso in late 1994 threw Mexico into economic turmoil, triggering the worst recession in over half a century. The nation continues to make an impressive recovery. Ongoing economic and social concerns include low real wages, underemployment for a large segment of the population, inequitable income distribution, and few advancement opportunities for the largely Amerindian population in the impoverished southern states.

Nationality:	noun: Mexican(s) adjective: Mexican
Ethnic groups:	mestizo (Amerindian-Spanish) 60%, Amerindian or predominantly Amerindian 30%, white 9%, other 1%
Religions:	nominally Roman Catholic 89%, Protestant 6%, other 5%
Languages:	Spanish, various Mayan, Nahuatl, and other regional indigenous languages Independence: 16 September 1810 (from Spain)

Because a majority of its inhabitants are Indians, Guatemala is also one of the saddest countries in the world.  Officially these small, brown, peaceful, resigned, and often drunk men make up 53 percent of the population.  But they make up more than 70 percent if we take into account all those who, on leaving their mountains, call themselves 'ladinos', mestizos, and live in the cities.  Despite their name not a single drop of Spanish blood runs in their veins and they have lost their tribal structures and their community-owned lands. 

Taken from:

guerrillas

Read:

MODERN WARFARE: A French View of Counterinsurgency

By the early 20th century, when Edward Curtis began the work on what came to be the twenty-volume publication featured on this website, American Indian nations and people were largely viewed by scholars, government officials and the public at large as a vanishing race. This belief was buttressed by two scholarly theories: 1) the view that America's continental "Manifest Destiny" was successfully completed in geographic terms, that the "frontier" had been closed by Euro-American expansion into every part of this nation; and 2) Social Darwinism, which posited that cultures battled with each other in an evolutionary contest in which one was destined to triumph and the other to fade into extinction. This theory dovetailed both with demographic evidence, embodied in a precipitous drop in Native populations, and with the federal policy of forced assimilation, which even most supporters of Indian people believed to be the only hope for Indian survival in the new century. In popular terms, these views were reinforced in wild west shows, world fairs, art, literature and a variety of other venues, all of which helped lay the foundations for the American public's long-standing misinterpretation of American Indians.

Vanishing race - Navaho By Curtis's time American Indians had endured a highly destructive, centuries-long assault on their homelands, their societies, and their cultures in physical, spiritual, and emotional terms. Under the guise first of religion and then science, Euro-American invaders had stripped the indigenous communities of this continent of nearly all of their land and resources, and carried forth an all-out attack on their languages, religions, educational systems, family structures, and systems of governance. For centuries missionaries, soldiers and government officials led this assault. By Curtis's time, humanitarian reformers, social and physical scientists, and artists lent their authority to these efforts as well. Rapid population decline followed, and sometimes preceded, Euro-American invaders, caused not only by warfare and capture for slavery, but by diseases which Europeans had brought to this continent. The combination of violence and disease caused some tribal communities to lose as much as ninety percent of their member populations. As wave after wave of disease hit at times of early contact, communities might lose a quarter to a third of their populations time and again. This type of population loss continued well into the nineteenth century, as western tribes had first contact with Euro-Americans, and as eastern tribes were forced one after another to remove from their homelands to west of the Mississippi, with conditions weakening old and young alike, making them more susceptible to starvation and disease. All in all, a land that may well have held seven to ten million American Indians at the time of Columbus's arrival contained approximately a quarter of a million by 1900.                                                .... Myth of "The Vanishing Race" Endures This imagery had long been a part of popular culture, but the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 and the end of the Plains Indian wars, Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 announcement that the American Frontier had closed, and the federal attempts to forcefully eradicate Indian culture and assimilate Indians into American society all converged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to firmly cement that imagery as a myth of a vanishing race, with the notion that Indians are historical features of an American landscape, not functioning members in a modern society. Ironically the federal policy of forced assimilation was in itself a recognition that Indians had not disappeared from America, and the official reversal of that policy in the 1930s, however effective or ineffective that reversal may be judged to be, was also an acknowledgement that Indians had not vanished as either a people or as political communities. Indian cultures, though badly damaged by all of this, managed to survive in reality, but not in the mythology of the larger culture. It was within the context of this mythology that Curtis took these photos, and his doing so contributed in no small way to the continued pervasive presence of the myth of the vanishing race in American society even into the present time.

You Can Read the article in its entirity by clicking: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/ienhtml/essay1.html