Why does migrant life seem to be decisively absent from its own future? A personal essay on the opacities and inevitabilities of diaspora, inspired by poet and novelist Renee Gladman.

Featured in Dark Matters: Critical Theory of Technology, published by the School for Poetic Computation, 2019. Archived at the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York City, 2019.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about lines. Lines as a means of demarcation—across a page, around a neighborhood, between two countries. I wonder how botanists decide which species to classify as native versus invasive.

Today, poet Sesshu Foster discussed remapping the Chicano barrios of east L.A. to make legible the cultural sites eroded by the construction of new highways. Big, concrete lines towed violently through the city. Map-making and zoning fold lines to reshape space, like geopolitical origami.

But a line is just a point that travels. It’s the extension of a self. Like a line of poetry, or a sentence in a book. A grand stroke of ink! A motion helmed by the shoulder that sets sail as the chest expands. Your body working fluidly to carve new life out of a blank canvas.

I journaled these notes on the train back from a discussion at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop last spring, titled Cities of the Future. The event invited artists to theorize how migrant communities might imagine our future homes in the face of US ethnocentrism and border violence. Poet and novelist Renee Gladman spoke about her Ravicka series, wherein she composes abstract cityscapes through her ‘prose architectures’—words threaded into psychogeographical networks that trace the contours of urban space. Dreaming with the theme of migrant futurity in mind, Gladman ended the night by hypothesizing that “the city of the future will be a drawing.”

Gladman’s impressionistic metaphor interests me precisely because of what it does not show. Its precarious architecture feels haunted by the question: why does migrant life seem to be decisively absent from its own future? This absence takes many forms: an absence of a body, of autonomy, of humanity, of knowability. Think of the ways science fiction subsumes race and imperialism into its ideologies of ‘alien’ and ‘cyborg.’ To embody non- or post-humanness in this genre often means to embody qualities of the migrant—of inherent foreignness and political transgression. 

In Ted Chiang’s 1998 time-bending novella Story of Your Life, extraterrestrial Heptapods bestow humankind with a language to let us see our own future, only to remain entirely opaque and unknowable themselves, vanishing as swiftly as they appeared. The same cipher that opens one species forecloses the other. Chiang’s story aches of diaspora and the way it apprehends memory, grief, and inevitability. Its 2016 film adaption by Denis Villeneuve is aptly named Arrival—a point of encounter, an unknown origin, and the intimation of everything lost in between.

Being migrant is, paradoxically, not synonymous with being mobile. Who is left behind in the world of tomorrow? And who do we indenture to build it? Silicon Valley fetishizes a future where the low-wage service work historically performed by migrants is made obsolete through automation (or, as Astra Taylor writes in The Automation Charade, “fauxtomation”: the deceptive way an interface shadows and displaces human labor, but never actually stops exploiting it). Its liberal promise of Hyperloops, private space travel, and self-driving cars feels far less seductive when our mobility—our sense of agency over space, over class—is still ultimately circumscribed by the vectors of racial capitalism.

In this sense, the migrant condition implicates all colonial subjects. This cycle of dislocation is a fixed expression of any system reliant on occupation, extraction, and exploitation; the irony in the absence of migrant futurity is its refusal to acknowledge this. At what point must we reconcile with the inevitability of migrant life? The creeping awareness that we all will become, if not already are, refugees of the climate crisis, housing crisis, and more—communities bound for upheaval and displacement by way of racial capitalism’s bottom line.

Yet it is often the promise of a self-determined future that creates the migrant and holds it captive. My dad immigrated to the United States at age 17 with his mother and younger brother. In exchange for room and board, they assumed a new life as unpaid domestic workers at the estate of a prominent white family in Hillsborough, a small municipality in the crest of the San Francisco peninsula. Ranked the fifth richest town in America this year, Hillsborough is home to old money retirees and Gilded Age mansions, preserved by a new class of tech plutocrats at the helm of Silicon Valley’s fortune (and the invisible laborers they indenture). Just 25 minutes south of the estate my family serviced is the office where I began my first job after college, 39 years later—at a tech company in Palo Alto, known for its contracts with ICE.  

The full circle of my family history marks the constant churn of migrant life: one wherein absence becomes the condition for a possible future, and where the future will always yield an absence of some sort. What will it take to break free from the centripetal force of empire? Perhaps Gladman’s “city of the future” feels so illusory because it is not actually a place, but a moment of release—an intimate unraveling from the threads of space and time that sew us to our inevitability.