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Intended as a means of accelerating the process of racial mixing ( mestizaje) that had supposedly been taking place since the Conquest, Mexican Indigenism ( indigenismo) set itself the successive goals of promoting “racial fusion” among the population, followed by the “acculturation” of indigenous minorities. Developed from the 1930s, the first Indigenist policies, whether implemented by the Autonomous Department of Indigenous Affairs, the Ministry of Public Education, or the National Indigenist Institute, broadly aimed to “incorporate the Indian into civilization.” Resulting from a vision that was simultaneously occidental, progressive, and paternalist, they thereby transformed the “indigenous” racial category into a legitimate political one, set within an inter-American frame of reference. A number of young Mexicans, having benefited from the first “Indian boarding schools” that spread in the 1930s, could henceforth consider themselves “Indians” or “Aborigines,” reverse the stigma from which they had suffered, and use their alterity strategically as a political tool. This article retraces the history of this generation which, in the 1940s and 1950s, mobilized its “racial brothers” in a series of organizations that sprang up around the National Confederation of Indigenous Youth. These organizations formed a massive national Indian movement, with tens of thousands of members, which sought to articulate socioeconomic, educational, and health claims and to integrate into the Institutional Revolutionary Party as an official “sector” defined along racial lines.