And in Mexico, what lies behind the masks is a tremendous amount of fear, loathing, and, of course, desire –between self and other. Desire is always contradicting itself in Mexico, and it does so on every level: race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion. The homogeneity that Mexico presents to the outside world (and to itself through "official" culture), that of a uniformly brown and Catholic nation, is itself a mask that hides an exceedingly complex series of divides.

The Indians hate and love the whites; the whites scorn and secretly desire the Indians; the mestizos cannot reconcile themselves with their in-betweeness and so are attracted to and repelled by both white and Indian; the men revere and despise the women; the poor idolize the rich even as they dream of a second Mexican Revolution to bring them down, and the rich romanticize the poor at the same time that they do everything they can to keep them in their place. And so, then, Mexico's severe sexual contradictions.