The Borderlands
	More than anything, I want to write about a culture that is evolving, one that transcends the demarcations of border patrols and free trade zones (and that has arisen, in part, because of them). A culture that deposits the music and the legend of the late, great rapper Tupac Shakur in the Indian highlands of Michoacán, and Indian festivals from the highlands of Michoacán on the Main Streets of small towns in the Upper Midwest; a culture that sends Catholics tumbling into spiritual tribes that speak in tongues and causes "straight" American men to lust after Mexican transvestites, a culture that breaks down the old black-white structure of the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. and bodes the end of the PRI's stranglehold on Mexican politics, a culture that globalizes the best and the worst of all our desires and ways of seeing the world.
	I write, then, of the borderlands, of life and death in the borderlands. And this border, or, if you will, post-border culture, is much more than a regional phenomenon. More than a geographical region, I write of a cultural space created by forces that are not unique to this region, but part of a much larger, indeed global, evolution.
	Perhpas what we are seeing is, in the context of the history of the Americas, merely the ongoing process of mestizaje, which originally described the mingling of European and Indian blood and culture that created the mixed people (mestizos) that are the majority in Latin America today. Mestizaje, unlike the U.S. assimilationist term "melting pot," allows for the Indian influence to serve not as a historical footnote but as an enduring, ever-evolving legacy. Likewise, it allows for new influences to be adopted continuously without really jeapordizing the historical root. Mestizaje is a journey that has no end; it is the cultural version of perpetual motion not in theory but in practice.
	"Mexicans can't forget; Americans never remember," the adage goes, and it does capture something of a cultural truth in terms of the way things are perceived from one side of the border or the other. But mestizaje allows for an intermediate space where the future does not necessarily annihilate the past, where both commingle in the present. I walk out of my apartment in Mexico City and hear the ubiquitous street musicians play songs from the days of the Revolution; I turn the corner and at the video arcade Indian-looking kids are drop-kicking bad guys, Ninja-style. In the highlands of Michoacán, a satellite dish trained at the heavens receives The X-Files, but Indian fiestas are still celebrated much the way they were before the arrival of the Conquistadores.
	As north and south come together in one huge borderland, traditions clash and meld. The north offers its optimism, something the south desperately needs; the south, in turn, offers a new way of looking at the way cultures develop. Mestizaje, I believe, is much closer to the experience of the United States than the "melting pot" or the more contemporary, politically correct (and slightly nationalist) idea of cultures in the United States approximating a "chunky stew."
	Americans (of all races and ethnicities), though they often want to deny it, are becoming mestizos, too. Walk into the bedrooms of the youngest Americans (black or white or yellow or brown, working-, middle- or upper-class), and listen to what they listen to on their CD players. You will hear the strains of a band called Sublime, whose late lead singer, Bradley Nowell, sang songs peppered with Spanish and set to a reggae beat (Nowell was a tow-headed surfer type from Long Beach, California). Or you will hear the "artist formerly known as Prince" performing a salsa jam as hot as anything out of the Lower East Side on a Monday night. Or you'll meet an iconoclastic pop genius named Beck, who titled a recent album Odelay, which, he tells us, is the way an Anglo kid like him­­who just happened to have a Mexican step­­dad from Chihuahua­­pronounces the Mexican colloquial affirmation, "¡Orale!"
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