Perpetual Motion
	We have christened this project The New Americans because we believe that the migrants are telling the "natives" who they are becoming, and because, from our vantage point, the migrants&endash;&endash;the New Americans&endash;&endash;embody everything that is American, in the broad, continental sense of the word. In truth, the title owes everything to Joseph Rodríguez, an extraordinarily faithful and inspiring friend and magnificent documentary photographer, with whom I undertook a trip across the U.S. looking for migrant stories among a Mexican migrant population that in recent years has fanned out across the country, from the largest cities on the coasts to the smallest of "heartland" towns.
	Earlier this year, in North Carolina, on a night after a grueling 12-hour drive winding through the Smokey Mountains, we pulled into yet another Motel 6 and got into a nasty fight about nothing, about everything&endash;&endash;bickering like old lovers tired of each other's irritating idiosyncrasies. We shouted at each other in the parking lot; the Mexican gardeners, hard at work keeping the Motel 6 lawns green and trim for the itinerant salesmen and middle-class families on their shoestring vacations, watched with bemused curiosity.
	Joe stalked off. And returned a few hours later after a sojourn to the local Borders Books (yes, even in the outback of the Carolinas they drink espresso and buy literature), with a copy of Robert Frank's The Americans, you know the one, with the introduction by Kerouac. It was a meant as a kiss-and-make up present for me. On the title page, Joe wrote: "To Rubén: An important time to look at America again." So, over fifty years after Robert Frank snapped pictures and Kerouac wrote of an America kinetic and lazy and segregated and poor and brooding and impossibly big and varied, and over sixty years after Walker Evans and James Agee (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) revealed a part of America (Depression-era tenant farmers) indispensably important for to understand the changes taking place at that time, Joe and I went out on the road, looking to see the country at this new crossroads. May the gods of photography and literature forgive us what may be a certain dose of pretentiousness, but we believe there is a story that must be told.
Joseph Rodríguez	I must say that when I began this project by moving to Mexico City in February of 1996, I didn't think that I'd be writing about "America" (I envisioned writing a book more specifically about change in Mexico), but then again, I didn't think that I'd be in Raleigh, North Carolina in May of 1997 or in Cherán, Michoacán in June of 1996 . . . or Nogales, Arizona, or Warren, Arkansas, or Watsonville, California, or Washington, D.C. But the road opened itself up to me, through the people that I met, and I had no choice but to become the road, and let the road become this project.
	The New Americans is a project that will be distilled in various media. I will publish a book in late 1998, with photographs by Joe; there will be several articles appearing in various print media in the coming months, also with photographs by Joe; there will be vignettes aired on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered"; and then there is what you are seeing now: an "exhibit" of some of our work-in-progress.
Rubén Martínez	But this is only the beginning of the ZoneZero portion of the project. We have received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to continue posting our work on the Internet through this Website. We will try to replicate, as "virtually" as possible, a new series of research trips in the late Spring of 1998. Joe, armed with a digital camera, and I with a computer and modem, will send "dispatches" from various places and partcipate in live "chats" with those interested in the issues raised by our documentary work. We hope you will join us. Stay tuned for updates on the exhibit and "chats."
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