The cautionary tale as borrowed from the colonial literature framework is perhaps more directly intended as a direction of use for the reader. The reader may or may not approach this catalog book with an architectural gaze, the reader may or may not hold pretense over urban aesthetics and modern discernible imagery. Just know, dear reader, that within these pages you will not only find architect-less architecture, but rather the built likeness and expression of necessity.
    There is apalpable urgency for a functional and economic modernity driven by functionalist representation. Please note that this is an index of images and verses that has been curated and compiled by a trained architect, one in search of a guide in unscripted living aesthetics from the country where she was born and raised. The index attempts to recognize and visually reconceptualize the production of a singular aesthetic; one that illustrates the physiognomy del Mexicano y de lo Mexicano [of Mexican physiognomy and of Mexico].⁰²

    What I ask of you, dear reader, is to step away from your traditional trained rational mindset, only if such is guiding your judgment and to consider a reality in which those who can become homeowners do and those who cannot lie outside any housing model and are therefore compelled to forge their own alternatives.⁰³

One must abandon our own personal pretense of aesthetics⁰⁴ and venture into the framework of anonymous collective creations outside the dialogue of the city as we know it.
    Dear reader, I would like to bring to your attention that although the index is structured in reference to contemporary imagery, it collects historical, social and economic references of the Mexican state throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. The intention is primarily to undertake an understanding of the circumstances that defined the characteristics of self-construction in non-urban settings. Through a photo essay with instances of drawing, field notation and material representation the research culminated in one first volume index and database focused solely in the non-urban dwellings of Central and South-East Mexico. Another primary intention of the research has been to search for clarification regarding the political and ideological derivations associated with the category of informality, which according to Anibal Quijano has “been put to so many uses today in Latin America”.⁰⁵ Therefore to understand Mexico and Latin America in its own terms, we must understand its economic marginalization, its colonial and colonial history and its fateful relationship
with progress.

 
^{02 Octavio Paz, “El Ogro Filantrópico”. Joaquín         Mortiz (1979): 7-2}

^{03 Erazo Jaime Espinosa, ” Políticas De Empleo y     Vivienda En Sudamérica”. Quito: FLACSO Ecuador, ,(2012): 13-18}

^{04 Luis Carranza, “Radical) functionalism in Latin America”. Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture. (2014): 7
05 Anibal, Quijano. Paradoxes of modernity in Latin America. Int J Polit Cult Soc 3, (1989): 147–177,}