The “Day of the Indian” was established in 1940, under President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40), during a global congress called to find ways to preserve and support indigenous communities in the Americas. This poster was created in Chiapas, the southernmost and historically the poorest of Mexico’s thirty-one states, which to this day has a larger percentage of its people self-identifying as “pure Indian” than any other state, and where a majority speak one of the indigenous languages derived from the ancient Mayan. The term Mexicanidad, “Mexicanness,” is frequently used to describe those with mixed Indian and European ancestry—often referred to as meztijos—but it applies even more strongly to those with a more purely Indian ancestry.