Book excerpt: A Cultural-Inside Guide for Businessmen & Travelers: Mexico's traditional values and morals were forged in a caldron of aggressive religious intolerance, corruption, racism, male chauvinism, and an elitist political system that connived with the Church to keep ordinary people ignorant and powerless, and deny them the most basic human rights. But the reality of Mexico has always been obscured behind a variety of masks-of piety, pride, courage, gaiety, indifference and stoicism. In this provocative and insightful book internationally known author Boye Lafayette De Mente goes behind the masks that have long obscured Mexico to reveal the cultural influences that created the character and personality of Mexicans, and provides guidelines for dealing with them.