The protagonists of these chronicles are the men and women who face the big city every day; travellers who are surprised by the urban vagaries and the linguistic gibberish of their inhabitants. Or the author himself, who wisely weighs the pros and cons of the supposed economic development of the people. The protagonists are defenseless citizens who try to get used to the capricious designs of a government that is determined to make life out of squares and the perplexed observer who discovers the manias confirmed by deep-rooted national prejudices.

La casa de usted y otros viajes is the last of the three volumes in which Guillermo Sheridan grouped the journalistic work of Jorge Ibargüengoitia. His work, one of the most important and original of the 20th century, crosses almost all genres: novel, short story, theatre, newspaper article, essay and children's stories. Often, he took real-life scandals and subjected them to whimsical, sardonic treatment. Thus, Los Relámpagos de Agosto (1964) uses cartoonish mayhem to debunk the Mexican Revolution's heroic myths. Somehow it won the Premio Casa de las Américas, despite or because of the consternation which its flippancy caused. For Las Muertas (1977) he turned to the most outrageous criminals of his native state: the brothel-keepers Delfina and María de Jesús González, whose decade-long careers as serial killers emerged in 1964. Jorge Ibarguengoitia himself met a tragic end, on what became one of the blackest days in Latin American artistic history: departing from his then home in Paris, he perished along with Peruvian poet Manuel Scorza, Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama, Argentinian academic Marta Traba, and 177 more passengers in the crash of Avianca Flight 011 on 27 November 1983.

The writer is buried in Antillon Park in Guanajuato where a talavera plaque marks his remains. In translation, it simply says, "Here lies Jorge Ibarguengoitia in the park of his great-grandfather who fought against the French."