Amending memories: The nimble mnemonics of Mexican popular culture

Every Mexican, from birth onwards, received a welter of memories that fashioned, explained, contradicted and enlivened personal experience and guided behaviour.¹ These pieces of collective memory drew on family stories, widely-told rumours, neighbourhood recollections, church homilies, heroic tales and well-oiled anecdotes of matriarchs, old soldiers, town-square loiterers and market-place gossips. Of course, communion lessons and grade school classes added some formal structure to these personal mental collages of the past. Each Mexican soon possessed a fine thicket of personal views of the community's heritage.