Cultural dependency scholarship validates and informs Mexican and transnational museum exhibitions, state-sponsored patrimonial activities, and market practices that routinely disavow and exclude commercial indigenous art and artists as “inauthentic.” In Michoacan and elsewhere, some of these repudiated artists are mask-makers who carve masks for pastorelas (Shepherds' Plays) and other danzas (masquerades), which are performed during annual village fiestas. Idols—and masks of idols—from mass culture are adeptly impressed to serve moral, didactic purposes in these entertaining religious dramas. However, dominant ethnological-patrimonial discourses in Mexico and elsewhere insist that mass culture and capitalism can only undermine and corrupt these artists' and their communities' life-ways, customs, and creative practices. The masquerade dramas subvert these elite objectifications and the cultural hierarchies with which they are associated by, for example, incorporating idols and ideals from commercial mass culture and high politics as comic foils or parodic elements into the local religious dramas. The standard “reception” critique of cultural dependency scholarship has not noted that this scholarship underpins exclusionary, elitist identity/cultural politics and patrimonial practices in Mexico and elsewhere. Rethinking what qualifies as critical scholarship, my dissertation seeks to overcome this limitation. Weaving together transnational multi-site ethnographic work, interviews with artists and elites, and documentary evidence, the dissertation depicts pastorelas and mask-carving practices in Tocuaro, a town in central Michoacan where numerous commercial mask artists reside. The research also describes the opportunities—and the barriers—that these materially strapped artists face as they try to make a living as petty capitalists—as “traditional” commercial artists in an exclusionary, stratified transnational art market and patrimonial field. The dissertation explains how institutionalized cultural dependency and affiliated scholarship informs, validates, and reproduces the exclusionary, elitist patrimonial-cum-market systems in which these rural artists work. In sum, my dissertation describes how—notwithstanding active and effective popular appropriations—privileged transnational cultural discourses and practices continue to justify and perpetuate rural, indigenous poverty and marginalization in Mexico.