The city is its people, Ortiz Monasterio's images seem to be telling us. Of course, he doesn't ignore the milieu within which these twenty million or more human beings live out their lives. He records, for example, the television antennas that connect our megavillage to the global village and exhibit mirages of consumption to those who cannot reach them. Above all, today Mexico City is a city of the poor; it is the poor who at the close of the twentieth century, are its natural inhabitants. The rest of us, though we may have been born here and we live here, have become foreigners.

Their misery impoverishes us and shames us. As the saying goes, we're all in the same boat, this shipwreck of a city that floats upon the mud of its dead lake, upon its fault lines, and upon its unresolved social problems in this era of rich against poor. The thought of its demise is painfully comforting, and for a moment absolves us of any attempt at solution. We ask ourselves: Why try? There is nothing to be done; sooner rather than later the city will self-destruct.

But Ortiz Monasterio rejects resignation without becoming preachy: he shows. Life goes on and he, through the act of portraying it, places himself on life's side. In spite of all the disasters and suffering, he defends life and praises it.