The Borderlands
	Now the people of the United States have always thought of themselves, and been thought of abroad, by admirers and enemies alike, as a people on-the-move. For two centuries, Americans moved across the land from east to west with their Manifest Destiny dreams, taming successive frontiers. Of course, many of those who today call themselves Americans have, throughout the history of the nation, found themselves in situations similar to today's migrants: fleeing religious persecution, civil war, poverty, slavery. (Americans also had the luxury, of course, of traipsing over the globe not as exiles but as wielders of the Big Stick­­Mexico, for example was invaded three times by the gringo. The United States: an empire equal parts good and evil, to be loved, hated and grudgingly respected, as any empire must be.)
	Mexicans, however, were never thought of, from the perspective of the north, as a people on-the-move, but rather as a people stuck-in-time, alternately seen as primitive, mystical and docile (the stereotypical Indian) or as the representatives of the Old World in the New (the legacy of European Colonialism and the adoption of its style by the Mexican elites). But from the time of the Revolution on, to greater and lesser degrees, Mexicans have been a people on-the-move.
	Some of us were travellers long before the meeting of the Old and New Worlds: the nomadic tribes of Amerindia. In Cherán, which is neslted in a rugged highland area populated by the Purépecha people, notions of migration are an essential part of the regional identity. Their very name means "a people who travel." There is conjecture in some anthropological circles that the Purépechas are related to the Incans of Perú; the dialects of both peoples have key similarities. Perhaps some Incan bikers decided to roam o'er the continent thousands of years ago, arrived in Michoacán and were enchanted by its rich volcanic earth, the stunning lake at Pátzcuaro, the swarms of monarch butterflies floating in the temperate breezes.
	If this is true, then it would be no coincidence that the Purépechas of today are famous all over Mexico and the United States for their tenacity as Wetbacks; they've been migrating northward, to Pennsylvania and Illinois, to Arkansas and Kansas and California, since the early part of the century.
	So then, to be American (north and south) is to move. To run away, to run towards, forever leaving, forever arriving, forever trying to return. One of the primordial myths of the Mexica people (popularly known as the Aztecs), is the story of how they left their original home in search of a new paradise, Aztlán, which they never found. After the Conquest, the Spaniards picked up on tales of other paradises, like the Seven Cities of Cibolá, whose streets were supposedly paved with gold, and said to exist somewhere in the region of what today is the Southwestern United States. Grand Spanish expeditions searched fruitlessly for the gold, instead finding important overland trade routes.
	Today, for the descendants of the Mexicas, Aztlán is California. The Seven Cities of Cibolá are places like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, New York, San Francisco, Phoenix, St. Louis. Paradise does not die easily. The elemental irony of the debate over immigration in the United States is, of course, that the "Americans," whose own origins are a classic migrant story, are now the ones telling the Other Americans, the Mexicans, to stop moving. They will not stop moving.
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