I came to a point towards the end of your conversation that I though was fitting. The idea that America has invaded, destroyed, colonized, etc., a significant number of other countries only to move on and forget about it ever happening is very much like what so many wish to do with immigration reform. Kill it, build a wall and bury the idea of there ever being a problem… seems a very “white” or “colonial” idea to me.

I grew up in the Caribbean, and recognized Diaz’s point about the “shuttling” quality of the Caribbean diaspora, nowhere better caught than in the Puerto Rican writer Luis Rafael Sanchez’s wonderful story, La guagua aréa (The Flying Bus), which takes place entirely on a plane between San Juan and New York City. A forbidding online abstract (http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p114290_index.html) for M. Priewe’s Culture’s in and of Mobility: “The Flying Bus” and the Figuration of Transnational Space, necessarily omits the fun while giving a sense of some of the issues at play:

One such pivotal site is represented in Luis Rafael Sánchez’s short story “The Flying Bus,” which (literally and figuratively) takes place on an airplane suspended between Puerto Rico and New York City. My critical reading of the story aims at accentuating how it portrays a transnational social and cultural space that is configured by physical and cultural mobility, allowing and even forcing the passengers on the plane to be at “home” in more than place, to live pluri-locally and transnationally. The story is thus indicative of how in times of increasing mobility over and across national borders—and especially within the Western Hemisphere—the meanings of roots and routes and also of “here” and “there” are no longer fixed; as a consequence, routes seem to become roots and transit becomes a place of dwelling. Hence, this paper seeks to carve out Sánchez’s specific figuration of the dialects between transit and dwelling, local places and transnational spaces, in order to derive at preliminary theoretical conclusions for cultural mobility.

But don’t let that put you off — read the story if you can.

Thanks again for the conversation.