This is a collective biography because it was really the entire group of leaders that embodied the historical tensions of Mexico during the last century. Liberals or conservatives, they assumed their mission as in a holy war. Their collective biography is one of our major tools for understanding the peculiar historical construction of Mexico and the parallelisms on both sides of the Atlantic, finding echoes of different national episodes in this book and succeeding in integrating a historical experience that belongs to them. Because, as Krauze writes, even though the branch separated itself from the tree in 1821, it always was - and continues to be - secretly true to it.