Migrant Blockages, Global Flows: Worlding San Francisco in a Global-Local and Transoceanic Frame

The figure of a billion migrants moving precariously across borders, oceans, and national and regional frontiers, often torn from homelands and cast into refugee sites or encampments, gives the lie to trickle-down economics and liberal care. Such human figures flee economic crisis, ethnic intolerance, rural disintegration, war, and environmental disaster. This specter of fugitive complexity, threat, and liminal sublimity haunts late capitalist globalization across the Pacific Ocean and other world oceans; the migrant troubles borders of nation-state, race, religion, and region. Situated on the edge of the coastal Pacific, with human as well as environmental resources, from the Sierra river systems to the San Francisco Bay and Mount Tamalpais, San Francisco becomes a vanguard global city that consolidates finances, agricultural resources, creative-destructive dynamics, and technocultural creativity of the Silicon and the Fresno valleys, as well as Napa and Marin to the south, north, and east.