The volume reveals the genealogical links of more than 30 characters portrayed by Hermenegildo Bustos and some of the clients who commissioned him to carry out exvotos. Through oral, documentary and graphic sources, the historian and chronicler J. Jesús Verdín Saldaña presents a series of portraits and ex-votos in which the protagonists, helped by punctual notes and descriptions of the author, come to life once again. In the paintings reproduced here, just a sample of the vast work of the great portraitist Hermenegildo Bustos (1831-1907), the various social classes and castes coexist in a scenario in which the uses and customs of the time, trades, geography and religious and social practices complement, with almost archaeological success, the life of those portrayed, to offer us a panorama of the 19th-century Mexican idiosyncrasy.