I. Two Ways of Remembering
The Explorer understands that memory is not neutral.
It is not a dead archive. It is not a set of objective facts waiting to be consulted.
Memory is a political act.
To remember in a certain way is to build a certain future.
Mexico is trapped between two ways of remembering. On one side, memory as justification: the skeptical reading represented by Juan Miguel Zunzunegui, which dismantles national myths and leaves the individual alone before history. On the other, memory as liberation: the current embodied by Enrique Dussel and Lorenzo Meyer, which remembers in order to recover dignity, structure, and the capacity to act.
The Explorer does not want to repeat either position as doctrine. He wants to map them, understand what each one reveals, and use memory strategically.
Because designing an identity, a brand, a narrative, or a country is also an act of memory.
The way an organization, a project, or a nation remembers determines what it can become.
II. Zunzunegui: Memory as Individualist Demystification
Zunzunegui represents a current deeply suspicious of collective narratives.
His method is effective: take a national hero—Cuauhtémoc, Hidalgo, Villa—show the person’s contradictions, errors, and political uses, and conclude that no one should be believed too much.
Or compare Mexica civilization with European architecture, emphasize that Mexica domination lasted barely a century, and conclude that Mexico was not as great as its mythology claims.
The usefulness of this operation is clear. It frees the individual from collective mythology. It encourages independent thought. It prevents politicians from using patriotic history as an instrument of control.
The Explorer recognizes its value:
- Demystify.
- Question.
- Resist propaganda.
But he also recognizes its limit.
Zunzunegui destroys myths without building a living memory.
He leaves the individual “free,” but without community, without a shared project, and without a reason to organize with others.
It is the freedom of the castaway: free, yes, but alone in the ocean.
The Explorer asks:
What kind of design, brand, or country can grow from this way of remembering?
The answer is uncomfortable: the design of cynicism, the branding of distrust, a country without social fabric.
III. Dussel: Memory as an Act of Liberation
Enrique Dussel begins from the opposite shore.
For him, questioning myths is necessary, but memory also has to build a future. And that future must be collective, popular, and liberating.
His central proposition is radical:
Latin America does not have to become Europe. Europe must decolonize itself.
The Western modernity admired by Zunzunegui was not born innocent. It was born genocidal, extractive, and racist. The Conquest was not simply the triumph of civilization over barbarism. It was epistemic violence: the denial that other peoples possessed valid forms of knowledge.
The Mexica were not “primitive Europeans.” They inhabited another rationality: cyclical, ritual, communal, and ecological.
In a time of climate crisis and crisis of meaning, that Mesoamerican rationality is not merely part of the past. It can become a proposal for the future.
Dussel does not ask us to romanticize Indigenous peoples. He asks us to recognize and integrate their knowledge as an applicable epistemology.
Not to “be Mexica again,” but to recover forms of knowing that were erased and that we need now.
IV. Lorenzo Meyer: Memory as Structural Resistance
Lorenzo Meyer occupies an intermediate territory.
He is less radical than Dussel and less skeptical than Zunzunegui. His instrument is the hard fact.
He documents the invasions of the United States:
- The war of 1846–1848, which took more than half of Mexico’s territory.
- The occupation of Veracruz in 1914.
- The Punitive Expedition against Pancho Villa in 1916–1917.
He does not romanticize them. He does not relativize them. The facts speak.
Mexico has been repeatedly invaded by a power that assumed its own superiority.
This is structural memory, not mythology.
Without it, Mexico cannot negotiate its future with dignity. If invasions, lost territory, and violated sovereignty are forgotten, subordination begins to appear natural.
Meyer’s memory does not seek hatred. It gives a country a spine. It makes limits visible.
V. Xicoténcatl: The Speech No One Wanted to Hear
In 1519, before Hernán Cortés reached Tenochtitlan, Xicoténcatl the Younger warned the Tlaxcalans.
Why trust these foreigners? he asked. They have an unknown god, strange customs, and an insatiable hunger for wealth. If we join them against the Mexica, who can assure us that they will not later do the same to us?
Freedom is worth more. Defend the soil. Resist.
No one listened.
Tlaxcala allied itself with Cortés. Together they destroyed Tenochtitlan. Later, the Spanish subdued Tlaxcala as well.
Xicoténcatl’s warning repeats throughout Mexican history: an external power offers an alliance, someone warns that the alliance may become betrayal, and the warning is later forgotten.
Selective memory is useful to power.
Remembering Xicoténcatl means remembering that subordination was not inevitable. There were options. History could have been otherwise.
That memory is dangerous to every project that needs Mexico to accept subordination as destiny.
VI. Henri Lefebvre: Space as Embodied Memory
Henri Lefebvre, the philosopher of space, proposed that space is not an empty container. It is a social production.
Every society produces its space according to its values, needs, and representations.
The Templo Mayor is not “less monumental” than a cathedral. It organizes a different universe.
The cathedral says: God is above, the human being below, and aspiration is vertical.
The Templo Mayor says: the cosmos is horizontal and vertical at once; the human being is part of a cycle; one does not merely aspire toward the divine, one participates in the order that connects it.
When both spaces are compared only through technical development, space is stripped of its symbolic meaning.
Zunzunegui reduces it to a measurable object. Lefebvre asks what structure of meaning it embodies.
The application is immediate.
Designing an office is not arranging furniture. It is giving form to a way of working.
The Silicon Valley open office says: transparency, forced collaboration, constant visibility.
A space with doors and private moments says: concentration, deep thought, respected boundaries.
Space is the living memory of an organization’s beliefs.
The way we remember the spaces of the past—temples, milpas, plazas—determines the spaces we will be able to design for the future.
VII. Dussel vs. Zunzunegui: The Debate Mexico Needs
The Explorer imagines the two thinkers face to face.
Zunzunegui: We must stop idealizing the Mexica. They were imperialists. They subjugated other peoples. They were no better than the Spanish.
Dussel: True. They were not angels. But that is the wrong question. The question is whether their rationality was valid, what knowledge was denied, and what should be recovered today.
Zunzunegui: That is romanticization. We cannot go back.
Dussel: I am not proposing that we go back. I am proposing that we recover what should never have been lost: a relationship with the land, cyclical time, community as structure.
Zunzunegui: None of that creates economic development.
Dussel: And what has Western development created? Climate change, inequality, depression, a crisis of meaning. We need another kind of development.
The Explorer does not choose a winner.
Zunzunegui is right to distrust mythology. Dussel is right that we need other epistemologies.
He uses both as tools, not as dogmas.
VIII. Invasions as Structural Memory
The dates repeat in the Explorer’s notebook: 1846. 1914. 1916.
He asks himself:
How does one design the identity of a country that has been repeatedly invaded and must still negotiate with the invader?
No branding manual can answer this question. It is strategic, ethical, and memorial before it is technical.
Three options appear:
- Forget. It happened long ago. Be pragmatic. Negotiate without resentment.
- Remain in resentment. Never forget, never forgive. The United States is the enemy.
- Turn memory into dignity. Remember in order not to repeat. Negotiate from memory, not from oblivion. Take a position of dignity, not subordination.
The Explorer chooses the third.
When an international client asks him to “Mexicanize” a brand, he asks:
Which Mexico? The exotic Mexico made for the tourist’s gaze, or the Mexico that negotiates from its own epistemology?
The answer determines whether design proceeds from memory or from forgetting.
IX. Dusselian Education: Ten Principles for Not Forgetting
The Explorer translates Dussel’s educational thought into ten operating principles:
- Education as liberation, not as reproduction of the system.
- Overcome Eurocentrism without denying Europe: integrate it critically.
- Practice real intercultural dialogue, not folklore.
- Recognize the Other as a full subject, not as an object of study.
- Assume an ethics of alterity: responsibility toward those who have been denied.
- Build critical education that questions power instead of serving it.
- Decolonize knowledge and recover local epistemologies.
- Secure the active participation of the oppressed, not paternalistic charity.
- Make humanization the goal, not merely competence for employment.
- Practice transformative praxis: thinking and acting at the same time.
These principles do not belong only in schools.
They belong in organizations, brands, and every system that claims to be ethical.
The Explorer applies them at amg consulting mx*.
X. Memory as a Project: The Only Exit from the Labyrinth
Mexico is trapped in a labyrinth of memory.
If it forgets, it loses dignity and repeats subordination.
If it only resents, it remains paralyzed in the past.
If it remembers in order to build, memory becomes a project—and therefore an exit.
Remember:
- The invasions, so that negotiation may have limits.
- Mesoamerican epistemologies, so that nonextractive futures may be imagined.
- The ignored speeches, like Xicoténcatl’s, because options have always existed.
- That space is a social production, as Lefebvre teaches, not merely an index of technical development.
Design:
- Organizations that do not repeat colonial logic.
- Brands that do not sell exoticism, but express an epistemology.
- Systems of value that do not imitate Silicon Valley, but invent from the milpa.
Memory ceases to be a warehouse of the past when it becomes a construction material for the future.
XI. The Explorer Closes Part I
The Explorer completes The Root and the Soul.
He has established four foundations:
- The Baroque ethos as a way of inhabiting contradiction.
- The milpa as an epistemology of interdependence.
- The council as a living dialogue among voices that still sing.
- Memory as a project capable of building dignity.
Now he knows where he thinks from.
Mexico is not merely a geography. It is a living epistemology.
He is ready to enter Part II: The Alchemist’s Workshop.
The question changes.
It is no longer only: Where do I think from?
It becomes: How do I build myself so that I may build for others?
The root is clear. Now the work of forging begins.