In 1983 my family moved from Mexico City to Vancouver, British Columbia.

     I am writing these words in New York City in 1988.  For the past three and a half years I have mostly lived and worked in New York.  I came here from Canada in 1995.  I was twenty-seven years old, and about to experience, though not for the first time, the poignancy of geographical relocation. 

    Over time, this poignancy has lead me to a layered and often skeptical dialogue between the self and place; between place and the self, between being somewhere, and always being from somewhere else.  I have shied away from the belief that there is a single geographical centre from which the bulkiest part of identity emanates.  A place is the perception of several things: landscape, culture, language, nuance and smell.  It is memory and family.  Loneliness, imagination, weather, community, architecture, archaeology. It is time and space, layered or not, familiar and foreign. All of these attributes can be, to some degree, transmutable: cultures travel, in spite of the resistance of more predominant ones. And memory is in constant replenishment.  For a while, immigration was apt to provoke in me a subsequent hunger for itinerancy.  So I moved often with a hunger which is in fact a search for other possible homes: the elsewhere that is also me.  One of the places that I always come back to–perhaps the only one now–is Canada.

     As I walk in New York City–this so-called centre–I know that there are places in the world–other centres–that I will never see, never experience, or that I will see and experience once only.   I realize that these places will have no apparent nor quotidian resonance in my life other than, perhaps, the resonance of a name printed on a map. Vancouver could have been one of those names and places, and my life, I know for certain, would have been impoverished, surely unimaginable. This mode of thinking is, of course, a hypothetical trigger of fantasies. These fantasies are the extractions of a question which has often been asked of me: what would life have been if in 1983 my family had not moved to Canada, from Mexico City.