The birth of a great people occurred after the conquest of Mexico and the mix of Spanish and indigenous blood:

     All mixed bloods were called castas . . . These street people, who huddled, starved, and begged on every corner of the town . . . were known as léperos. Social lepers, they begged, did odd jobs, and robbed. By the seventeenth century, mobs of léperos thronged the capital and constituted a growing threat to public order. They could be wantonly destructive, even murderous . . . they were the first Mexican bandits . . .

     The lépero lived as he could . . . ready to cut either a throat or a purse, begging for food or work, screaming under the whips of the town authorities . . .

     Ironically, the léperos were to survive, grow, and finally inherit modern Mexico. They proved, not the degeneracy of man, but mankind's tenacity in the face of hideous adversity.

                                        - T. R. Fehrenback, Fire and Blood

Does any man truly know who his father is?

- Homer, The Odyssey

Often not a whisper of trouble reached the accused until the blow actually fell . . . Kept in solitary imprisonment, cut off entirely from his friends outside, denied the sympathy of support he might derive from their visits or communications, he was left to brood despairingly, a prey to agonized doubts, in ignorance even of the charges brought against him.

                              - Maj. Arthur Griffiths, In Spanish Prisons