From Independence to the Revolution

""the colony, like the metropolis itself, was now only a form" (117)

"terrible inertia of the dying person who raises his hand and claws at the air"(118)

"finally receded after collapsing into a thousand fragments" (119)

"ideas disguise reality instead of clarifying or expressing it" (120)

"the newness of the new Spanish American nations is deceptive; in reality they were decadent or static societies, fragments and survivals of a shattered whole" (121)

"triple negation: of our Spanish inheritance, of our indigenous past, and of Catholicism" (126)

"The Reform movement founded Mexico and denied the past. It rejected tradition and sought to justify itself in the future" (126)

"Mother Nature...I was born without hope and fear, I return to you without hope and fear" (126)

"the Indians with their own theocracy destroyed, their gods dead or exiled, and without lands to develop other regions to which they could emigrate, embraced the Christian religion as a mother. She was a womb, a resting place, a return to origins, like all mothers, but at the same time she was a devouring mouth, a woman who punished and mutilated them, a terrifying mother" (127) reminds me of la llorona....

"geometry (form?) cannot take the place of myth" (127) what is form?

"in breaking ties with the past, it also broke its ties with Mexican realities" (128)

"if the history of Mexico is that of a people seeking a form that will express them, the history of the individual Mexican is that of a man aspiring to communion. The fecundity of colonial Catholicism resided in the fact that above all, it was participation...Communion is festivity and ceremony"(134)

"this will to return, the consequence of solitude and desperation, is one of the phases of that dialectic of solitude and communion, reunion and separation, which seems to rule our whole history" (147).