If, besides reality, anything opposes uniformity, it's the urban chronicles of characters and beliefs. For example, this rise of diversity allows for the coexistence, playful or resigned, contradictory and complementary, of Luis Miguel and Niño Fidencio, of El Santo, the masked man from Plata, and the Metro, of Sting and the collectors of colonial art. The aforementioned, in a so-called positive sense, points to chaos, this time not the alteration of hierarchies but the desire to live as if hierarchies weren't here, above and within oneself. And chaos (in the sense of a tidal surge of chaos and a dream of transcendence) also uses those fixities in the tumult we call rituals. Although it's not perceived, in large cities hierarchies remain rigid, and at the same time, hierarchies lose their place and dissolve in the trap of the senses, in the traffic jam of motoring beings, passions, and circumstances. And while this is happening, it is the rituals, that final stage of permanence, that underscore the fluidity of the national. In the most intense of conceivable transformations, the ceremonies, the subject of these chronicles, provide the ultimate proof of continuity.