Mexico is a land of masks, mirrors and illusions, as its storytellers and poets so love to remind us. As a country - and a vast, epic, extraordinary country - it defies all definitions, expectations, generalizations and stereotypes. What might be true of parts is seldom true of the whole; such is the intoxicating diversity of Mexico. This place of shadows, opposites and contradictions has 31 states that make up the Estados Unidos de Mexicanos. These states envelop desert and rainforest, smoking-gun volcanoes and trembling earth, jungle canopies and deep-fissure canyons, agricultural tablelands and smoking geysers, striking coastlines to the east and west and great mountain ranges sweeping into the skies. "It isn"t one country", writes Carlos Fuentes, Mexico"s greatest contemporary novelist, in "The Death of Artemio Cruz", "Its a thousand countries with a single name." In landscape and cityscape, the scale and drama of Mexico can be overpowering. In our imagination it might...