Architecture narratives in Mexico have traditionally been Mexico City centric, considering less culturally significant that in Northern Mexico causing the destruction or modification of historical buildings as the absence of a local tradition of preservation give the locals the impression that there is nothing worth preserving. Rejection of the archive considers this lack of recognition and classification by the official archives as an opportunity for the region’s architects to revise the memory and identity of Northern Mexican cities through an anthropological and social approach of their ordinary settings to devise a narrative of their own. Without the constraints of proper classification, obsolete urban infrastructure and the ruins left by narco-related violence become heritage sites just as vernacular and historically significant as brick and adobe. The absence of the archive is the opportunity to merge a revised past with the identity of the present to define that of the future.