The following event dates back more than twenty years, when I made contact for the first time with the Otomi Indians in the craggy regions of the eastern Sierra Madre. At that time I went through life fortified by the hope and inspired by the naiveté and enthusiasm that I would add a supplementary stroke of the brush to the ethnographic picture of Indian Mexico. The disposition of my mind was far from that of a researcher seized by the expectancy of the unforeseen, desirous to change the all too static and stereotypical image of the autochthonous communities that the academic tradition had created of the Americas.