Perpetual Motion
	We are on the road. Perpetually. Always arriving. Constantly departing. Many destinations and just as many points-of-origin. We. All of us. All of us mojados, all our backs wet, all Wetbacks, bathed in the waters of a river where our dreams and bodies and pasts may drown, or where we may be resurrected, our past connected with our future. All of us,"legals" and "illegals," Mexicans and Chicanos, Gentiles and Jews, white-black-yellow-brown, working-mid-upper class. For we live in the Age of Migration. And whether you, reader and viewer, have actually physically moved or not doesn't really matter.
	Though many of us have. Perhaps you're part of the white middle class that fled the central city for the suburbs and then escaped the suburb-turned-inner-city for the big skies of Montana? Maybe you're an African-American kid whose family goes back three generations in an old northern industrial city and your neighborhood became a warzone and now your mom thinks you'd be better off with your aunt in Louisiana? Or a member of the Salvadoran family that came up to Los Angeles during the war, dad swearing he'd return home as soon as the death squads died, but how to return now, after 15 years of life in the USA, with children who speak better English than Spanish and a good steady job and a house in the San Fernando Valley? Or are you a native of Michoacán headed back to your ancestral home after yet another season in the picking fields of the American heartland?
	Even if you haven't been sent packing by the new economic orders or civil war or urban warfare, you've still moved; the world comes to you. You watch CNN and are instantaneously transported to whichever spot of the globe is hot today, or you travel o'er the globe via the Internet. You spin the radio dial and end up in India on that World Beat station. You eat cuisine from Thailand and Morrocco and Argentina at restaurants where the cooks and busboys are inevitably Mexican. You catch a ride in a taxi driven by a Pakistani. You buy a sweater at at street stand presided over by a Nigerian.
	It doesn't matter where you are, who you were, who you might have been in some other era before the world started to collapse in on itself (there have been other times when culture and commerce moved fiercely across frontiers, but never on a completely global scale). So you're a white teenager in the suburbs? You are culturally connected to the black inner city through Hip Hop. You were once Catholic, now you're a Promise Keeper or a Pentecostal. And even if you're just a plain old fashioned "straight," you can vicariously cross the sexual border at will; Ellen personifies the gay lifestyle once a week on primetime network television.
	The New Americans will not take you to all these cultural spaces, but it will take you on a journey through one important slice of the migratory swirl. Joseph Rodríguez and I, for the last year and a half, have been following migrants from Mexico&endash;&endash;most of them Cherán, Michoacán&endash;&endash;as they shuttle back and forth between their homeland and their new homes in the United States. We are not interested in whether these people have "papers" or not; some do, some don't. Let the politicians debate immigration policy&endash;&endash;they who think that they can legislate against the force of global economics and culture.
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