Bricklayers (Dialectic of Consciousness/ Hegel in Mexico p. 59)

"Nevertheless, what happened to them in the passage from one job to the other has an extraordinary meaning. The "world of men" placed them socially as "anthropological laborers," in a situation where they were "on the verge of realizing a true human form of labor, "on the verge of converting themselves into real human beings and not only because of the fact - which they will have commented upon with mocking joy - of having served for some days for this "crazy guy" who contracted them for a strange and incomprehensible activity, and paid them, to boot, with an unusual generosity. They were "on the verge," yes, but this "on the verge" stayed there, suspended, without resolving itself, like a fantasmatic emanation above the anthropological work that disappeared, in the same way that the vagrant flames of fuegos fatuos float over the graves of a cemetery. However, such being "on the verge" repeats itself and remains in the labor of bricklaying to which they returned, because in a certain sense and in a new but essential form, they continuet o be "anthropologists"on their job as house builders."

HEGEL IN MEXICO / BOSTEELS - Dialectic of Consciousness/ Revueltas

'Our individual has written a letter, he has "worked" on it, but he ignores the fact that this whole vast set of activities (writing, sealing the letter, buying stamps and attaching them, introduc-ing the letter in the dropoff box) is inserted in a mass of human work that is common, general, total, constant, active, past, present, and historical in the most plastic sense of the word, this invisible matter in which the lines of communication are drawn and draw themselves, from the time when one of them discovered himself in "the others" and succeeded in inventing and emitting the first "signs of identity," a first scream, a first smoke signal, a first letter. The postal system reveals nothing to our individual, even though it allows him at least to be this hu-man being in whom he does not yet perceive himself, but in whom he no doubt will one day come to perceive himself no sooner than he assumes consciousness of it.'