Carlos Monsiváis is hard to pin down. He is a chronicler of every aspect of Mexican reality past and present; A cultural critic focusing on poetry, film, art, and music; and an erudite essayist committed to the connections between elite and popular cultures. His style is both acerbic and festive in ways that epitomize the Mexican character, and nothing escapes his incisive curiosity: the cult of national heroes that finds its twin in the society of spectacle, the cultural migrations between television talk and devotional discourse, the mass movements that advance and recede in a welter of democratic projects. As an intellectual, Carlos Monsiváis is unique in (and to) Mexico. You cannot walk in this country without seeing or hearing him on every street corner, nor can you open a book without sensing his influence. His presence is so omnímoda—so omnimodal—that we no longer know which came first: Mexican culture as Monsiváis observes it, or Monsiváis observing Mexican culture.