ABSTRACT
The concept can be understood from two different angles, First as an ethnologist can demonstrate that there is a culture which emulates from the offices of the government, and which impregnates the exercise of authority. It concerns an old and well known topic of art history, but in Mexico it has once again been made functional since mid–century by the frantic search for "Mexican–ness" that accompanied the modernization boom of the post–war period. The laudatory words it is not possible to create a continuity which is broken by Conquest and colonization. The spectacle that this cultural simulation offers permits to signal the importance of another level, that of catharsis, in the connection between the dimension of the real and that of the imaginary. The idea of the dividing line, the wound or the border is an important ingredient in the configuration of national identity.
