José Cueli: Graciela Iturbide

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Raciela Iturbide, who will be awarded the Princess of Asturias Award for her photographic style, has said that she is not interested in portraying misery, but rather dignity. She is a worthy successor to Don Quixote de la Mancha.

Over the centuries, Don Quixote has not been lost, and he reaches us today mired in the same poverty as ours. We have almost lost the pride of our broad ancestry due to our increasingly diminishing wealth, our threadbare breeches, and the dignity we display similar to Don Quixote's, firm in strokes and restrained in color.

Don Quixote was a local gentleman, moderately well-off. Dressed in modest means and eating lavishly, he consumed three-quarters of his meager estate. He occupied himself with nothing, since work is a peasant's task, and so his idle moments were most of the year. Out of a noble instinct, he read books of chivalry that recounted the exploits of great lords.

He invested his small fortune in seeking improvements to his spirit, which engendered an exalted idealism that was present in dignity, that which eludes us.

This quixotic gentleman, like those of another and present era, was happy in his poverty because he had the pure blood of his lineage, bread to nourish him, and a heraldic house that provided him shelter in the winter and shade in the summer. In other words, he had everything a poor man of his stock, ideas, and character could desire in these times, and on this he based his greatest vanity.

The peasant puts on the boots of the defeated Don Quixote and feels attracted, even captivated, by what he says and doesn't say, what he suggests, culls, delves into, and ironizes, reducing characters and profiles that appear to us, his brothers from other cities and latitudes, as distinct, indecipherable. Yes, distinct even as a culture and social entity. With traditions, tastes, cuisine, and preferences we don't know how to interpret, festivals we don't understand but that surprise us, regardless of the sociopolitical conditions that are unfavorable to them.

The peasant hasn't stopped living, but he has stopped moving. That's why he appears passive and apathetic, like a mask of that caste inherited from Don Quixote.