The members of the literate and scientific elite of the Porfiriato, as in the case of Julio Guerrero, shared the idea that sin was insufficient to define and define and guide human behavior. This is not a casual event, they all participated in the same experience: that of the definitive exhaustion of a paradigm of knowledge whose foundations were rooted in a religious conception of life and the world. These men, formed in the context of secularization and the triumph of the liberal State over the Church, became at the end of the 19th century the reductive conscience of a State that sought to redeem Mexican society from backwardness and a supposed moral debacle.

The story that follows is an approximation to the experience of appropriation of modernity by different social groups in Mexico City between the years of 1870 and 1930. This experience can be analyzed from two variables: modernization of the city and the development of citizenship. In the first case, modernization leads us to the study of the rigid social structures that contextualize -based on criteria of inequality- the processes of urbanization and suburbanization of the city. In the second case, citizenship leads us to the subjective experience of men and women who, in their struggle for equality, seek to transcend the borders of differences marked by the social structure.

Josué and Dora, the boy and the old protagonist of Central Station, lead us through the different paths traveled by the less favored populations of a great metropolis: Rio de Janeiro. The screen confronts us with harsh images of daily poverty and violence that occur in a central subway station, where illiterate people, unemployed people, gangsters, street children and other urban actors coincide with their respective itineraries.