Cowboys and Indians
	Today, migration from Mexico to the U.S., legal and not, is at an all-time high. Much of it is circular, and rapid: migrants work seasonal stints and return to transform their homeland with habits picked up in the north. And, in a phenomenon that has made the notion of "Chicano," with its binary and mostly negative view of American history (brown and white in constant battle) practically quaint, Mexican migration has expanded out from the traditional Mexican-American centers of the Southwest, where most of the great Mexican barrios existed without a significant amount of intimate contact with other ethnic or racial groups, to the black and Asian inner cities and, in a historically new and unique situation, even to formerly all white-black (and poor) areas of middle and southeastern U.S.
	For me, these changes are self-evident, but on the nightly news in the United States, the white-black focus is still omnipresent, and the interaction of the "natives" with the "migrants" is reduced to a pithy debate on the merits or evils of "immigration."
	And little is said about the fact that migration is a two-way affair. Today, because satellite dishes are ubiquitous in both the First and "developing" world, access to MTV and CNN (which recently began airing a 24-hour Spanish-language edition) is universal. We all dance to a World Beat. And, although it might be more difficult to apprehend at first, the Mexican migrant presence in the U.S. is having its influence on the "native" culture. Urban theorists speak of how the public space of various major cities of the Los Angeles variety (extended, centerless, without a great amount of street life) is renegotiated. Street vendors tropicalize the sidewalks with stands of fruit and pirated cassettes of salsa, merengue and cumbia. The Virgen of Guadalupe begins appearing on the streets of formerly WASP cities. And in a sign that the interaction is moving past the superficial (like the ubiquitousTaco Bell's and Burrito Brothers' eateries across the U.S.), inter-ethnic marriage is rapidly increasing (in California, some 30 percent of young couples are mixed racially or ethnically). These are clear signs of a migrant mestizaje ocurring in the cities of the U.S. Latino immigrant kids living in the formerly majority-black inner city adopt Hip Hop style and, in turn, offer a tropical aesthetic to the American blacks. On the east coast, one of the latest dance crazes is called "Merengue-House"
	Once again, to me this process is self-evident and, increasingly, prevalent in both major urban centers and rural areas in the United States. And yet, it is a popular culture virtually invisible to the mainstream.
	Ihave spent the best part of the last year documenting the connections between Cherán, Michoacán and cities and towns scattered throughout the United States, and can tell you that neither Proposition 187 nor the landmark restrictionist Immigration Reform of 1996 have slowed the process of integration. What these measures have done is make the proposition of integration an increasingly life or death proposition.
	In the last few years, Washington has not only paid lip service, as it has over the decades, to "holding the line" at the southern border; it has now allocated billions of dollars in new funding for the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol to step up its interdiction efforts. The numbers of "illegals" detained increases dramatically, and so do the risks in crossing. According to a University of Houston report, some 3,000 migrants have died trying in the last decade, numbers that sound like the death toll from a low-intensity war. Most of the deaths result from drownings in the Río Grande or from dehydration when migants get lost during the summer months in the torrid heat of the Southwest frontier.
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