Guanajuato as a Body

One of our assignments for Culture class was to describe Guanajuato as a body. The first thing that came to mind was a hand because if you look at the lines on your palm, they greatly resemble the labyrinth-like roads here. Ashley and Andrea, the girls in the same project group, thought it a good idea, and added that each part of the hand can represent different aspects. We decided that the bones are the university (it is often said Gto is a university with a city instead of a city with a university), the blood is the people who pass through all the city, the veins that contain the blood are happiness/contentment, the muscle are the history (Gto has a rich, strong history), the fingers are the different colonies, the painted fingernails are the gamut of colors that the buildings have here, the tendons are the mines (especially because mines have the veins of deposits), the bracelet represents the highway “Panoramica” which circles around the city (you can draw the correlations there), the joints are the tunnels here that join everything together, and the knuckles represent the “cerros” or hills that encompass the city.

I drew the hand with these parts detailed, Andrea made different colored handprints all around it, and Ashley helped brainstorm and color. We had a blast working together, from the pre-planning, to going to the “Papeleria” to buy supplies (paint, poster board), to meeting at my house with our “pan dulce” (sweet bread) to carry out our plans. That’s also a picture of a bug we killed/smothered with yellow paint. Crazy, I know…