19
Diversity is our greatest hope and richness. If we were all identical. If we all believed in the same things, we would stop being human. For some time now, some intend to transform each of us, with our variety, in predictable beings and foreseeable market niches: In an homonymic mass. They celebrate our variety, while it is a good business, and they oppose our icons (flags, signs, emblems, etc.) They would love to include us into one and only identity, into one homonymic way to see the world: Without ravings or deviations endangering the project of standardizing us and subjugate us to a model of normality, shared fears, absentmindedness, and silence. The corporations, politicians and publicists obeying those rules would like all of us to be a registered and recorded group with identical needs and desires, one consumption moral and individualism celebrating the same beliefs and obeying unconsciously the same rules. We take comfort in the thought of that project being, besides extremely boring, impossible. This book is an evidence of such an idea.
REPUBLICA MEXICANA
GRÁFICA POLAR RESPECTO A UN DISTRITO FEDERAL
REPUBLICA MEXICANA
No.
N
N
N N
N N
S SO
S SO
Impreso en México
E
E S E
O NO
E
E S E
O NO
No.
DIVISION POLITICA
Impreso en México
How could a subjective atlas map of Mexico be? Well, almost as this book: a sample of some of our attachments and beliefs, the common ones and the most intimate. A catalogue (always unfinished) of our variety and similarity as Mexicans. A short inventory of beauties and commitments of what we believe we are and we want the world to see. A map, among others, that will help the people living abroad understand us. A chapter of the atlas where, seeming like if we were others, we are one more among all of us: Humanity. This book accounts for, with sensitivity and joy, self-criticism and pain, a part of our heritage and imagination. It is about reflexive and emotional exercises about what to us is “the objective” and “the reality”, of all what we love to remember with our collective memory and shared pride, all of what we want to be for the others.