Lucía P. speaking:

What I am going to give you is a page of my grand father’s old passport. It’s a diplomatic passport from Bolivia. Half of my family is Bolivian, all of my father’s family. I have just finished to empty an apartment that contained a lot of things about my family life in Mexico. They were political refugees.

I found this passport that means a lot of things because first of all, it’s diplomatic. In some way, it’s not a normal passport; it’s the passport of a person that has a little more importance. It is a person that is reliable and culturally educated. Of course, this passport was no longer valid after my family had to leave the country.

I would like to give you one of these pages or start to give these pages away to keep it traveling, so that it continues to be part of Bolivian exile, from Bolivia to other countries. I would like you to see it - it doesn’t have anything unusual - only a big photography of my grand father, and then I would like you to pick one of the pages. Also, for me, the ink is very beautiful, the colors and everything. It’s a nice paper.

Passports are usually used when you are away from home. My family was left without a house for a long time. They settled here but it took a long time.

I found this passport just now, as they were visiting me. These are coincidences that tell a lot about me, about who I am. There are things about me that don’t match with the Mexican identity, that are more related to my Bolivian side. The exile has a lot of good things but it also has very sad things. To heal these wounds took a lot of time. It is like a little piece of Bolivian identity in Mexico.

The passport is from 1971, the year that my family arrived in Mexico, when they left Bolivia.
It was a year of many changes.