Mexico is a land of masks, mirrors and illusions, as its storytellers and poets so love to remind us. As a country - and a vast, epic, extraordinary country - it defies all definitions, expectations, generalizations and stereotypes. What might be true of parts is seldom true of the whole; such is the intoxicating diversity of Mexico.
This place of shadows, opposites and contradictions has 31 states that make up the Estados Unidos de Mexicanos. These states envelop desert and rainforest, smoking-gun volcanoes and trembling earth, jungle canopies and deep-fissure canyons, agricultural tablelands and smoking geysers, striking coastlines to the east and west and great mountain ranges sweeping into the skies. "It isn't one country", writes Carlos Fuentes, Mexico's greatest contemporary novelist, in "The Death of Artemio Cruz", "Its a thousand countries with a single name."
In landscape and cityscape, the scale and drama of Mexico can be overpowering. In our imagination it might sometimes be overtaken by its endless neighbour to the north, yet we should not forget that Mexico is four times the size of France and the second-largest country in Latin America. This is a place of great, invigorating journeys holding countless revelations. It is startling to think that this country was once twice the size, before New Mexico, California, Arizona, Texas and other territories were ceded to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century.
No wonder that Mexico has often been bound up with ideas of Utopia. For the Spanish conquistadores who arrived in force in 1519 under Hernan Cortes. "New Spain" as they called it was often described as a paradise - although, as they soon realized, this was an unforgiving paradise peppered with dangers and temptations. For Cortes and his followers, Mexico was a place where they might realize the dreams of power and wealth that had brought them from the Old World. For some who traced the footsteps of Cortes, like the brutal Nuno Guzman, the hunt for gold and power was an obsession, centered on the hunt for the mythical El Dorado.
Формат: 24 см x 28 см.
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