Question

Read the following passage about a tile restorer named Diego in Seville, Spain:

Diego spent his afternoons in the historic neighborhood of Santa Cruz in Seville, mixing cobalt blues and copper greens to repair the broken azulejos of the local plazas. To the passing tourists, his work was merely a quaint demonstration of a dying craft. To the elderly neighbors who sat on the iron benches, however, Diego was rebuilding the backdrop of their memories—the very walls where their parents had whispered secrets and their children had played. Lately, the city council had begun replacing the handmade ceramic tiles with mass-produced, weather-resistant polymer replicas that required no upkeep. Diego’s hands, calloused and stained with mineral pigments, refused to pick up the plastic composites. Even when his commission budget was halved, he continued to search for the specific local clays that gave the traditional tiles their warmth. For Diego, a wall was not simply a physical barrier or a structural necessity; it was a living manuscript of the neighborhood's collective soul, and to let it turn to plastic was to erase the texture of their shared past.

Which of the following best describes the central theme of the passage?