The idea for de [slash] re construction was born in an episode on a sofa backstage of a nightclub under a railway station set upon the Thames. I was bored waiting to compete for 50 pounds, so I let two 30-somethings from Newcastle guess my race. They were the types who see the time when “the Sun never set on the Union Jack” as their ancestor’s selfless act for the betterment of the world and now getting the short end of the stick. As expected, they threw out their guesses rapidfire, searching me, piercing me apart, looking at my nose and comparing it against every other nose they’ve seen. The same with my ears, hands, almond-shaped eyes, and throwing it all together again like I was Mr. Potato Head. We traveled around the globe with me as an “exotic” Egyptian, Guatemalan, Native (apparently all indigenous people exist as one to my surprise!), and we made it around to all 7 continents, even Antarctica on their umpteenth guess. I said no to all of their guesses and by showtime, I revealed my ruse. They laughed it off and they bought me a drink after the show toasting to their past. Yes, the one that never existed.

On paper (if there can be such a thing) I am Syrian, Argentinean, Black, Mexican, and Choctaw (Indigenous North American) born in Los Angeles and raised in her badlands out East. Described in the 60s as a place where “it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion but hard to buy a book” and where the “future always looks good […] because no one remembers the past.” Not much has changed. It is an area developed by a Canadian engineer by the name of George Chaffey and his brothers by successfully channeling the water from the mountains into the valley creating endless groves of lemons and oranges. Their taming of these badlands earned Ontario, named after the province they grew up in, the label a “Model Colony” through an act of Congress in 1903 by “setting new standards for urban living.” And Australia can thank them as well for masterminding the country’s first irrigation colony and providing a vast majority of the country’s table grapes to this day.

And when Chaffey left, the groves left with him. In high school I remember walks with my grandmother where we passed this one old ranch house from time to time, the only place with traces of its glorious beginnings with eight orange trees fenced off. Oftentimes the branches heavy with citrus would burst over the chain-link fence and she would peer up into the branches and point at the ones she wanted me to pick. She was an experienced harvester, but now on the side of the street were serious foragers. On the walks home she would tell me of the ranch she grew up in in Syria, 17 miles north of Damascus, with her parents and 10 siblings all working in the fields by the age of 6. They had figs, olives, pears, apples, corn, okra, green beans, cilantro, parsley, squash of all kinds, cucumber, and probably much more lost in her memory, but she recalled a gleeful abundance. Now, the land sits dried up with the youngest person in the village celebrating 70 next year. That one old ranch is all that’s left of those groves of Ontario and my grandmother’s harvesting.

But what replaced the groves was not a wholesale reversal of the values that founded this land, but simply a continuation of what Chaffey began. The land was bought up by real estate developers, including Fortune 500 construction companies, and homes sprung up in the hundreds of thousands. The city planners used zoning as their weapons deciding what space was to be used for, which undoubtedly led to the who. Cookie-cutter everything every which way in perfect lines and squares that mirrors a twisted game of Tetris. And now, the largest master-planned and first gigabit community in Southern California is being built 20 minutes down the street from me, past the international airport with Los Angeles’ freight, distribution centers, and shopping malls. Now Ontario Ranch but was the “New Model Colony” during rezoning in 1999 showing that they do in fact remember history.

So here I am as this racially ambiguous mutt in a community constructed as a model for life across the country, deciding how one is supposed to commute to work or school, use public space, and consume. I was interested in how these maps, the ones that defined space, were able to orchestrate my identity and the lives of the people around me. How it allowed our identities to manifest and influence our values, ways of life, operating systems, all of it, divorcing or rather “freeing" us from our complicated histories.

However, I was unable to divorce from my identities, thus operating outside of this logic. I was a brown that was uncategorizable in a land openly proud of carpet-bombing the Middle East and secretly hoping for the militarization of the southern border with Mexico. A place where an AR-15 can be pulled on a group of 20 peaceful protesters and the police stand behind the barrel. A place with the memory of a goldfish but with a look to the future with absolute clarity thanks to the immutability of the grid even in the face of drought and fire. Thankfully the housing bubble keeps all the bad “things” out. Who was I supposed to be in a place that apparently had no way of recalling the past but was constantly defining who I was and supposed to be?

Chiang Mai was a playground that taught me the vocabulary to begin to search for answers. The assumptions created about my personhood are used elsewhere, and increasingly weaponized. If you hang out in the right places and you learn of the absurdity of identity quickly. The first assumption is that a country is simply called one thing, and that in that country people use a common language to understand one another, and that the lines drawn are absolute. From the people I spoke to in bars, cafes, libraries, and at the food carts I learned that it is never simple.

I learned that Burma refers to the colonial past, Burman is one ethnicity, Burmese is one language and serves as a vestige of the various state-building efforts from the British colonial government demarcating spheres of control. So when you are in Chiang Mai, simply saying your Burmese, which refers to being from Myanmar or the one ethnicity (the ontological violence is always evident here), explains nothing about your experience. You identify differently by language, ethnic group, administrative district which really operates as distinct states in a very confusing astrology to an outsider like me. And then once inside Thailand a hierarchy appears based on a formula of privilege dependent on the classical assumptions for example class, but also dependent on history: the event that sparked you or your family to migrate and then your legibility to the state.

But why maps and why here? Like a lot of things in my life, serendipity. I ended up in the British Library to see one of the fathers of Detroit Techno and Afrofuturism, one half of Drexciya, and found myself touring their collection of postage stamps. I went over to Argentina and it cataloged stamps from as far back as 1820. What type of image did Argentina want to send in 1889 and why was it different from the one in 1920? What narratives sustained my family in 1960 and through the dictatorship? Were they on the “right” side? And two weeks later before returning home for the holidays I stopped by my favorite stand and picked up a copy of Jack Self’s Real Review, a contemporary culture magazine interested in exploring “what it means to live today.” Inside was a postage stamp with the face of the late Queen Elizabeth as a cheeky remark on the value and reach of Empire. In both instances, I was made to understand that design created a worldview, a story, that had the power to define the way one interacted with reality. I became aware of how maps described our physical realm through design, and it changed depending on the perspective of the mapmaker, and seemingly are able to bring worlds into existence.

So when I jumped into the archive I saw maps of “Burma” from different eras. I dreamed of the places they were shown in and the lives they lived. And when the Royal Geographer was tasked with creating a map of Myanmar in the early 1800s would you believe he was interested in respecting different conceptions of space and identity? Or rather did the riches of the Irrawaddy Delta and the close proximity of British East India Company only a hop and skip away capture his imagination? And who were these maps for? Certainly those anthropologists theorizing about natural selection and constructing racial hierarchies, but also for the Royal Family and the numerous Boards throwing money every which way to get a return on investment. What happens when people throw their money at a promise based on a conjured-up reality which only exists on these large pieces of paper? You start speculating and the whole pomp of it all turns it into a sick game.