The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity

Nikos Papastergiadis

The subjects of history, once the settled farmers and citizens, have now become the migrants, the refugees, the Gasterbeiter, the asylum seekers, the urban homeless.

Migration, in it endless motion, surrounds and pervades almost all aspects of contemporary society. As has often been noted, the modern world is in a state of flux and turbulence. It is a system in which the circulation of people, resources and information follows multiple paths. The energy and barriers that either cause or deflect the contemporary patterns of movement have both obvious and hidden locations. While nothing is utterly random, the consequences of change are often far from predictable. For the most part, we seem to travel in this world without that invisible captain, who can see ahead and periodically warn us that, "it is necessary to return to our seat and fasten our security belts". The journey nowadays is particularly treacherous with financial storms which can break out in Hong Kong and have repercussions in New York, acid rains which are generated in the North drift South, the global emission of CFC gases directly effects the growth of the hole in the ozone layer above the Antartic, the threat of atomic fallout looms larger as the nuclear arsenals of thirty or more countries are positioned along jagged lines of brinkmanship, and the systemic flooding of the ranks of the unemployed as the chilling technology of economic rationalization bites into every locale. These are just some of the known sources of fear. There may be other storms on the horizon which we cannot name, let alone control, that force people to move.

The turbulence of modern migration has destabilized the routes of movement and created uncertainty about the possibilities of settlement. The scale and complexity of movement that is occuring currently has never been witnessed before in history, and its consequences have exceeded earlier predictions. To take account of this excess, migration must be understood in a broad sense. I see it not just as a term referring to the plight of the 'burnt ones', the destitute others who have been displaced from their homelands. It is also a metaphor for the complex forces which are integral to the radical transformations of modernity. The world changes around us and we change with it, but in the modern period the process of change has also altered fundamental perceptions of time and space. Countless people are on the move and even those who have never left their homeland are moved by this restless epoch.

These changes have a profound effect on the way we understand our sense of belonging in the world. It is impossible to give an exact location and date for the emergence of modernity. Modernity has had multiple birthplaces. Giddens's general definition of modernity, as referring to the institutional changes that took place somewhere around the 18th century, is about as accurate as one can get. Throughout the modern period, most people have understood their sense of belonging in terms of an allegiance to a nation state. This task of conferring clear and unambiguous forms of belonging was never a straightforward operation. Nation states were from the outset composed of people with different cultural identities. Among the central aims of the project of nation building, was the unification of these diverse peoples under a common identity, and the regulation of movement across their territorial borders. However, the complex patterns of movement across national boundaries and the articulation of new forms of identity by minority groups, that emerged in the past couple of decades, have destabilized the foundations of the nation state.

This book seeks to examine the interconnected processes of globalization and migration and to explore their impact on the established notions of belonging. It seeks to question the dominant forms of citizenship and cultural identity which defined belonging according to national categories and exclusive practices of identification, by exploring the emergent forms of diasporic and hybrid identitites. There is a great urgency in our need to rethink the politics of identity. If, the historical and cultural field that shapes contemporary society is increasingly diverse and varied, then we can no longer exclusively focus on the traditions and institutions that have taken root in a given place over a long historical period. The identity of society has to reflect this process of mixture that emerges whenever two or more cultures meet.

The political will to adopt such an approach towards migrant communities and minority groups has not been readily forthcoming. While there is a growing recognition that we are living in a far more turbulent world, a critical language and affirmative structures to address these changes have been lagging behind. A haunting paradox lurks at the centre of all claims to national autonomy: while the flows of global movement are proliferating, the fortification of national boundaries is becoming more vigilant. Every nation state is at once seeking to maximise the opportunities from trans-national corporations, and yet closing its doors to the forms of migration that these economic shifts stimulate. New pressures and new voices have emerged in the cultural and political landscape. Even countries like Germany and Japan, which have boasted of their ethnic homogeneity and aggresively restricted the right to citizenship, are increasingly confronted with the inevitability of seeing themselves as a multi-ethnic society. As nation states are losing more and more of their power to regulate activities within their territory, they are becoming increasingly aggressive about the defence of their borders. Tougher laws against asylum seekers, the rounding up of gypsies and ruthless eviction of 'economic migrants' are part of the ways in which governments vent their frustration in a world where they have seemingly lost control but dare not admit it. The need for global action to address local issues has never been more necessary, but there are few signs of supra-national cooperation, nor any new agencies with the powers and responsibilities to address human needs on a global scale.

The 'chaos' of Global Migration

The current flows of migrant labour are now fundamentally different to earlier forms of mass migration. There have been dramatic shifts in the destinations of migration, restrictions on residency and strict limitations on settlement. The great metropolitan centers of the North and West; New York, Paris, London - in terms of migrant influx - have been eclipsed by the capitals of the East and South. Is this because the prospects of work are better elsewhere, or are there other reasons? There are currently more construction cranes in operation within the new economic zones of China than there are anywhere else in the world. The world's tallest building is neither a cathedral in Europe, nor an office block in New York, but the twin towers of Kuala Lumpa. Mexico City is swelling at a rate that is stretching its urban infrastructure to breaking point. After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster over 400,000 people were displaced; the ecology of their homelands ruined for centuries to come. Today people are on the move for a variety of reasons. NAFTA agreements force peasants to be on the move across the Americas; political and ethnic clashes have displaced millions from their homes in Africa; some of the most educated women in the Philippines accept exploitative contracts to work as housemaids in the Gulf States. Do all these people fit under the term migrant?

The early mappings of international migrations were predominantly Eurocentric. They were defined either in relation to the colonial ventures from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, or to the processes of industrialization and rapid urbanization in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Between 1500 - 1850 approximately 10 million slaves were transported from Africa to the Americas. Between 1815 - 1925 over 25 million Britons were settled in predominantly urban areas of the colonies. The 'classical period' of migration referred to the trajectory of peasants, from the peripheral-rural based societies to the core-industrial countries of Western Europe, United States, Canada and Australia.

For many migrants the first sight of their new country was caught from the deck of their ship. After the First World War, most migrants heading for the United States would have probably disembarked and gone through immigration procedures on Ellis Island, just off New York. The dock and hall of Ellis Island is now part of a museum. At the end of the twentieth century, the aeroplane has become the dominant means of mass transport. Today, migrants mostly arrive by descending into what Marc Auge calls, the "non places" of modern airports. The journey from a Third World village to a First World city can now be calculated in terms of hours. The greater levels of mobility in modernity, however, have not been reciprocated by more hospitable forms of reception.

The current trends of global migration reveal a far more multidirectional phase. In this context, migration is neither directed to, nor exclusively generated by, the needs of the North and the West. The vast majority of migrants are no longer moving exclusively to the North and the West, but also between the new industrial epicenters within the South and the East. While for the earlier periods of migration, movement was generally mapped in linear terms, with clear coordinates between center and periphery, and definable axial routes, the current phase can best be described as turbulent, a fluid but structured movement, with multi-directional and reversible trajectories. The turbulence of migration is evident not only in the multiplicty of paths but also in the unpredictability of the changes associated with these movements. However, this has not meant that the pattern of movement is random and and the direction is totally open-ended. There are also strict barriers and firm counter-forces which either resist or exploit the flows of human movement, just as there are 'passengers' who carefully control their journeys rather than being swept toward unknown destinations.

The relationship between work and migration has always been unstable and ambivalent. During the colonial period migrants from the 'mother country' were selectively encouraged to 'settle' in the 'new' societies. The rapid urban expansion and industrialization in the nineteenth century also demanded that some migrants were also recruited when certain needs arose, and expelled when their services were no longer deemed necessary. However, in the current geo-political climate these relationships have become even more jagged. Where migration is now regulated through contractual or negotiated terms, the civil and work rights of migrants are severely limited. Where migration is permitted for temporary periods, policing is extremely draconian and the abuse of human rights is rife. An increasing number of migrants are taking employment and entry into countries on an illegal basis. The migrant in all these circumstances effectively lives in a police-state - susceptible to exploitation and constantly in fear of punishment and deportation.

Along with the shifts in global geo-politics there have been profound changes in the patterns of economic and cultural exchanges. The revolution in information technology, which has coincided with the restructuring of capitalist markets and the dismantling of the socialist command economies, has had a drastic impact on the forms of migrant labour. The new dogma of 'flexibility' in the workplace has meant that working class communities can no longer assume that employment can be guaranteed in their particular locale. Declining public transport and congested roads has also meant that the journey from home to work is often increasing. Commuting times of 2-3 hours a day is not uncommon, in Los Angeles and Moscow. Meanwhile politicians across the world are instructing their labour forces that, in order to be competitive in a global market and in a technologically advancing world, they must accept the inevitability of both the mobility of the workplace and the redundancy of traditional skills.

Migration, it must be stressed, is not a unique feature of our modern times. >>From the perspective of the frantic mobility of the present it is tempting to imagine the past as a stable and relatively isolationist period. Yet, people have travelled vast distances throughout history. Examples of cross cultural exchanges, complex networks of trade and translocal identities are ever present throughout history. Anthropologists have painstakingly examined how different communities borrow religious symbols from each other and develop rituals for integrating different types of strangers. These strategies for internalizing difference have been remarkably elastic, varying from the incorporation of the 'prized' bride of a neighbouring community, to the introduction of a liminal position for the anthropologist. All cultures seem to have mechanisms for making a limited space for others, or for selectively absorbing strangers as 'one of their kind'. Archaeologists have also mapped extraordinary trading routes in ancient history. For instance, the discovery of traces of silk and cocaine in Egyptian tombs has suggested possible links between the Mediterranean, China and South America. Our knowledge of the extent of ancient sea travel is still very crude. Even with Thor Heyerdahl's brave reconstructions of the ancient techniques for trans-Atlantic and cross-Pacific routes, we have only begun to gain a glimpse of the persistence and breadth of pre-modern forms of long distance navigation.

However, until the invention of the 'tall ships', the railway, steamships, automobiles and ultimately the aeroplane, the frequency of movement, the volume of migrants, and the distance that could be crossed, was restricted. Today there are over 100 million international migrants and 27 million stateless refugees. This means that there are more people living in places that are outside their homeland than at any previous point in history. The turbulence of migration is not only evident in the sheer volume of migrants, but also by the emergence of new subjects, communication networks and forms of economic dependencies. The modern migrant no longer conforms to the stereotypical image of the male-urban-peasant. Women in manufacturing, electronic assembly lines and domestic workers are now at the frontline of global migration. Over 65% of the migrants from Sri Lanka and 78% from Indonesia are women. The value of remittances sent to the homelands of foreign workers has been estimated as being over $10 billion. These transfers of payments are second in value to the trade in crude oil. In places like the Philippines and Albania the major contributor to the national economy is accredited to the earnings of foreign workers. The paradigm of the nation-state as the principle anchor in the conferral of identity has also blinkered our understanding of migrant flows.

Modernity and Migration

The tension between movement and settlement is constitutive of modern life. As Derrida noted, the condition of exile is at the center of the nation's culture. By not confining the significance of migration in terms of the paths into and alterations within the nation state I am not denying the value or relevance of this body of scholarship. The nation state is still an active force in the regulation of migration. We do not live in a borderless world. The significance of migration in the formation of nation states has only begun to gain its proper recognition. My concern with the broader patterns of global migration is not driven by indifference to or ignorance of such tasks, but is motivated by a parallel need to outline the general context in which migration is occuring and to evaluate the available concepts for representing this phenomenon.

Movement is not just the experience of shifting from place to place, it is also linked to our ability to imagine an alternative. The dream of a better life and the nightmares of loss are both expressed by the metaphor of the journey. It is not only our 'life narrative' but the very 'spirit of our time' which seems to be haunted by this metaphor. The journey of modernity - which sought to base action on the solid foundations of reason, which sought to build a rational order that would supersede all previous forms of waste, folly and mystification, which believed that truth and proof could substitute for dogma and religion - has turned out to be an endless march into the unknown. The future which was filled with such promises of progress, liberation and emancipation is now darkened by fear and insecurity. Zygmunt Bauman, one of the most astute and sober critics of the transformations of modernity, argues that the preset destination of modernity is now unattainable and that there has been a break in the vision of progress and control. His account of post-modernity is not an apocalyptic declaration of ending, nor a naive proclamation of succession, but a bitter-sweet appraisal of the way modernity has lost its direction and driving force. The measurement of modernity against its own goals has revealed that its aspirations and promises can no longer be plotted onto a linear graph, or situated in a privileged location. At this juncture, modernity does not seem to follow a clear path, progress drifts and tumbles. As Bauman noted, the distinctive feature of post-modernity is that while it can no longer predict what lies ahead, there is still the insistence that it is better to keep moving.

The dynamic of displacement is intrinsic to migration and modernity, however the links between them have been largely overlooked. Migration was often interpreted as a transitional phase within modernity. As a consequence, the earlier sociological models, which shared the founding assumptions of modernity, have tended to represent migration in terms of trauma and disruption. The emphasis given to tracking the harsh economic, desperate political or brutal military forces that push people away from their homes, has often obscured the less tangible desires and dreams for transformation which gives migration its inner heading. Since the pioneering work of sociologists like Stephen Castles and Jean Martin in the 1970s, there has been an unequivocal demonstration of, both the central role played by economic and political structures in the regulation of migration, and the distorted levels of cultural exchange caused by the migrant's socio-economic inferiority within the host society. While the sociological mainstream emphasised the levels of stratification and integration, the critical schools stressed the contradictions and conflicts, but both positions understood the social as a total system. Migration was thus seen as either a necessary addition or an unwelcome burden to this system. The impact of migration was reduced to a temporary feature, rather than as an ongoing process which constitutes modernity. However, as the post-modern critiques of the social have attempted to redefine the boundaries and processes which shape society, there has been a further opportunity to reconceptualise the relationship between migration and modernity.

The Stranger in Modernity

What is also overlooked in many of the recent debates on identity politics is the relational aspects of identities. While it is necessary to recognise the specific contexts within which identities are constituted there must always be a concurrent process of connecting identity to a broader social consciousness. Edward Said has been particularly critical of the tendency toward exclusivism in identity politics. He argues that the politics of ethnic affirmation has been driven by the logic of displacement where one form of ethnic particularity competes with another for the position of authority. To counter this ingrown and defensive vision, Said offers a mode of being that he calls 'worldliness', which is a form of identity that emerges through the practice of connecting individual meanings of cultural differences within the "large, many-windowed house of human culture as a whole."

Hybridity has become one of the most useful concepts for representing the meaning of cultural difference in identity. In the work of Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall identity is defined as hybrid, not only to suggest that origins, influences and interests are multiple, complex and contradictory, but also to stress that our sense of self in this world is always incomplete. Self-image is formed in, not prior to, the process of interaction with others. This interpretation of identity as hybrid is a direct challenge to earlier quasi-scientific claims that hybrids were sterile, physically weak, mentally inferior and morally confused. The colonizing fantasies of the 'master race' as culturally and eugenically superior were underscored by a stigma that was projected on hybrids. This stigma has now been converted into a positive gain. In many of the recent applications of this concept, the figure of the hybrid is extended to serve as a 'bridging person', one that is both the benefactor of a cultural surplus, and the embodiment of a new synthesis. However, this benign view of hybridity has a number of limitations. By stressing the hybrid's positive achievement of reconciliation between cultural differences it blurs the very relational process that hybridity ought to highlight. In the rush to find an alternative to aggressive and chauvinistic forms of identity, the concept of hybridity has frequently been promoted to the position of a new form of global identity. This celebration of identity as hybridity has failed to pay sufficient attention to the deeper logic of accumulation and consumption that frames modern identity. In a society where the principle that dominates social relations is not reciprocity but consumption, hybridity is often reduced to the occasional experience of exotic commodities which can be repackaged to sustain the insatiable trade in new forms of cultural identity. Hybridity, as a metaphor for identity formation, can only function critically when the dual forces of movement and bridging, displacement and connection are seen as operating together. It is only when there is a consciousness of this oscillation between different positions and perspectives, that hybridity can offer a new understanding of identity.

Communities of Difference

In the final chapter of this book I conclude that the significance of migration for modern society will not be grasped if its meaning is confined to conventional definitions of physical movement and social settlement. As a consequence of the restless dynamism in modern society, the boundaries of community, as well as the more general sense of belonging, have changed radically. We need to understand the flows of cultural change from at least two perspectives: the movement of people, and the circulation of symbols. However, as noted earlier the introduction of foreign symbols and different cultural practices is no longer dependent on the physical presence of strangers. New channels of communication travel across established borders, meaning that cultural displacement can occur without the movement of people.

This transformation in the cultural politics of belonging is clearly linked to the expansion of media technologies. Benedict Anderson astutely tracked the influence of the invention of the printing press and the mass literary projects that led to what he called the 'imagined community'. Once texts could be reproduced in greater volume and circulate across vast distances new affiliations between people could be formed. Communities were established with less regard for geographic proximity and more attention to a common language and shared ideals. People felt a belonging through a communion of certain structures of belief, rather than by the obligations and responsibilities that are drawn from day-to-day and face-to-face contact.

The revolution initiated by 'print capitalism', which altered the sense of 'togetherness' as it magnified the possibilities for disseminating narratives of 'us' and 'them', has taken a further turn with the ascendancy of camera and computer based telecommunications. The increased domestic access to telephones, faxes and electronic mail, the diversity of uses for televisual screens from pleasure and information, to security and surveillance has led collectively to a proliferation of images and messages. These technological advances enabled optimists, like Marshall McLuhan, to prophecise over the birth of a new communitarianism. However, as McLuhan also noted, the essential drive of telecommunication is interruptive: "Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than 'a place for everything and everything in its place'. You can't go home again." For him, this radical transformation of our relationship to space was meant to mark a liberation from the 'tyranny of distance', and provide the network for a single and integrated society that would occupy the whole planet.

Such enthusiasm has not been shared by all the commentators on the new technologies of telecommunication. For Guy Debord, the promise of a global village was warily perceived as either a mirage or a new form of totalitarian surveillance. The illusion that home was everywhere in the spectacle was, for Debord underscored by the haunting feeling of being at home nowhere. He predicted that the access to the new media technologies would be highly selective, and their uses reflect the vested interests of existing holders of power. Whether or not we agree that the increasing role of the media has led to political emancipation or cultural enrichment, it is now beyond doubt that, for those who are 'hooked' into these circuits, there has been a series of transformations in the modalities of individual perception and collective memory. Paul Virilio also claimed that, as the screen dominates the post-industrial interior, the moral density of civic society is eviscerated.

At the end of the 20th century, urban space loses its geopolitical reality to the exclusive benefit of systems of instantaneous deportation whose technological intensity ceaselessly upsets all of our social structures. These systems include the deportation of attention, of the human face-to-face and the urban vis-a-vis encounters at the level of human / machine interaction. In effect, all of this participation in a new 'post urban' and transnational kind of concentration.

The links between modernity, migration and the media have remained relatively under theorized. However, Scott McQuire's recent work has excavated many of the deep philosophical and cultural paths that intersect at the junction of camera-technology, modernization and displacement. The age of the camera not only coincides with modernity but heightens out attention to the anxieties of the 'homeless subject'.

The Limits of Explanation

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, and even in the early 80s, there were vigorous debates within sociology over how migration could be explained. It was presumed that migration doesn't just happen, it has to be caused by something. There were two prevailing models. First, the voluntarist perspective which defined the movement in dual terms of an internal push out - due to the stagnation at home, and an external pull up - from the promise of greater opportunity elsewhere. Second, the structuralist political economy perspective, which charted migration according to the global division of central industrialized capitalist societies in the West and North, and peripheral peasant based societies in the East and South. There were inherent limitations to both of these perspectives, with the former overly stressing the individual's decision as rational calculation, while the latter resulted in a form of economic determinism that subordinated race and gender under the heading of class.

These social divisions and their relationship to migration have now been addressed in a new series of debates on agency. However, despite a period of intensive theoretical contestation, the debates about the paradigms for understanding the causes of migration have lulled. Most contemporary accounts of migration are now either more empirical, or present an eclectic theoretical model which is composed of both voluntarist and structuralist concepts. The presentation of a new general theory of migration, or even an extension to the previous theoretical debates is lacking. This has left a serious gap in our knowledge of the turbulent dynamics of migration. For by continuing to explain migration purely in terms of cause and consequence of other forces, the social scientists have remained dependent on an out-dated mechanistic universe. Both the conservative-functionalist and the progressive-Marxist models have tended to explain human movement in terms of a water-pump system. The energy for movement was confined to the flows that were generated by the engines of industry and regulated by the valves of state policies. As industry demanded labour, governments turned valves, and the flow of migrants either contracted or expanded. This crude model is unable to accomodate what I call the auto-dynamics and multi-vectorial flows in this turbulent phase of migration.

The social scientist's version of the water pump model of equilibrium, assumed that something will emerge only if there is an attending force to displace something else, or if there was a pre-existing vacuum from which it could be drawn. Such structuralist models were also transposed onto the subjectivities or the life narratives of migrants. To construct the stereotype of the 'migrant as victim' a number of social forces were given priority over the agency of the individual. Translated into cultural politics this means that the identity of the migrant was extracted from the fixed repertoire of stereotypes associated with the place of origin, that the space for the representation of different perspectives in modernity was finite, that the resources for mutual understanding amongst strangers was limited, and that the success of one interest was always at the expense of another. Narratives of migration in the social sciences have thus repeated the territorial competitiveness and binary oppositions that they were meant to critique. One of the crucial aims of this book is to present alternative models for conceptualising cultural exchange.

The task of rethinking the social with cultural difference as a constitutive feature is only just beginning. This task will need to proceed on at least two levels, one which can attend to the changes in the configuration between the local and the global, and the other which develops a broader conceptual framework for representing the processes of cultural transformation. Given the enormity of this task, it might be worthwhile by beginning to note the steps that have already been taken. Many scholars have commented on the problems associated with administering the social policy of multiculturalism on a national basis. There is also growing debate about the contradiction in the political trajectories and the poverty of the philosophical framework for representing cultural difference. However, while the issues emerging from cultural difference may seem complex and intractable within the context of the nation state, how much more demanding do they become when viewed from a global perspective? What framework will structure the negotiation of cultural differences in the age of globalization? Under whose jurisdiction and with which tribunals will the rights of minorities be represented? The aim of this book is not so much to complete this task of re-thinking cultural identity in the context of global migration, but to lay down a number tracks that will assist in the understanding of the changes that are taking place all around us.

The urgency of such a task is particularly evident in multicultural nation states like the United States and Australia. Three decades after the civil rights movement political leaders are now being compelled to confront the entrenched divisions and unacknowledged crimes perpetrated along the lines of cultural difference. While the indigenous peoples of Australia struggle with the legacy of genocide, one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world, countless unexplained deaths of young men while held in custody, the pursuit of land rights through the courts and compensation for the stolen generation of children which were taken away from their family in order to be assimilated into white society, the Prime Minister John Howard vacillated over his own moral duties. He responded to these burning claims by insisting that the current regime should not bear the burden of the past. Meanwhile he pursues a path of consolidating the interests of mining companies and pastoral leaseholders at the expense of the indigenous people. Across the Pacific Ocean, the University regent of California Ward Connely, who is black, and must surely be aware of the bitter statistic that for every black male that completes a university degree one hundred are sent to prison, dismissed President Bill Clinton's attempt to initiate a "great and unprecedented conversation about race", because he claimed that "where the American people want to go is beyond this whole issue of race."

Within what sort of framework is it possible to get beyond race and re-think the issues of cultural difference? There is little evidence of success so far. The practices of exposing institutionalised racism are in themselves but the first steps towards dismantling the structures and categories of domination. New techniques and strategies are necessary for critiquing the hierarchies of power and justice. The liberal principles of equal opportunity seem inadequate to the task of achieving social equality and often conflict with their intrinsic claims of cultural neutrality. Should there be one form of identity which is central and dominates others? Does a minority position threaten the cohesion of the social? These questions have intensified as the multicultural debates begin to consider who defines the parameters of the social, the limits of tolerance, and what sort of identities are considered compatible with the codes of modern society.

While not a new phenomenon, migration has never been as multi-directional, and the experience of displacement has never been as multi-dimensional as it is today. When the performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena, and founding member of the Border Arts Workshop, asked himself the question: 'Who am I?', his response - an itinerary of multiple and mixed places of origin - was not presented as a sign of an exotic biography, but as a metaphor for the contradictions and complexities of belonging.

I wake up as a Mexican in US territory. With my Mexican psyche, my Mexican heart and my Mexican body, I have to make intelligible art for American audiences that know very little about my culture. This is my daily dilemma. I have to force myself to cross a border, and there is very little reciprocity from the people on the other side. I physically live between two cultures and two epochs. I have a little house in Mexico City, and one in New York, separated from each other by a thousand light-years in terms of culture. I also spend time in California. As a result, I am a Mexican part of the year, a Chicano the other part. I cross the border by foot, by car and by airplane. When I am on the Mexican side, I have strong artistic connections to Latin American urban pop culture and ritual traditions that are centuries old. When I am on the US side, I have access to high-technology and specialized information. When I cross back to Mexico, I get immersed in a rich counter-culture: the post-earthquake movement of opposition. When I return to the US, I am part of the inter and cross-cultural thinking emerging from the interstices of the US's ethnic milieus. My journey not only goes from South to North, but from the past to the future, from Spanish to English and from one side of myself to another.

Cultural identity is increasingly in excess, or excluded from the traditional political categories of exclusive membership to a singular nation-state. But then, how to represent an identity that does not correspond to some form of national origin? The difficulty of grasping this complexity is linked to a series of fundamental questions which theorists are now confronting simultaneously: 'what is the future of the nation state?', 'what are the boundaries of society?', 'how do cultures survive?', and 'how do we understand agency?'.

We now need new models not only because the density, velocity and multi-directionality of current migration flows have baffled analysts and discredited earlier theories, but because they also need to be related to the economic and cultural phases of globalization. The decentering and dematerialization of economic activity has summoned the spectre of 'placeless capital' and the 'homeless subject'. Vital decisions that affect local economies are increasingly made elsewhere. We have entered an era which Lash and Urry call the 'end of organised capital'. This turbulent state should not be confused with an evocation of so called 'postmodern indeterminacy'. It simply means that the nodal points of economic and social activity are neither integrated within the spatial coordinates nor synchronised according to the temporal rhythms of the nation state. The neat binarisms and linear oppositions of the colonialist and nationalist expansions are no longer the appropriate grids within which the contemporary flows can be plotted and mapped. The flows that these new formations have stimulated need to be mapped in terms of multi-variate circuits.