“A shift in the structure of experience…” As I pass down Broadway this misty late-winter morning, the city is ever alluring, but thousands of miles to the south the subsistence farms of chickens, yams and guava are bought by transnationals, burst into miles of export tobacco and coffee; and now it seems the farmer has left behind his plowed-under village for an illegal partitioned attic in the outer boroughs. Perhaps he’s the hand that emerged with your change from behind the glossies at the corner kiosk; the displaced of capital have come to the capital.

The displaced of capital have come to the capital, but sunlight steams the lingerie-shop windows, ?the coffee bar has its door wedged open, and all I ask of the world this morning is to pass down my avenue, find a fresh-printed Times and an outside table; and because I’m here in New York the paper tells me of here: of the Nicaraguans, the shortage of journeyman-jobs, ?the ethnic streetcorner job-markets where men wait all day but more ?likely the women find work, in the new hotels or in the needle trades, a shift in the structure of experience.

A shift in the structure of experience told the farmer on his Andean plateau “Your way of life is obsolescent.”–But hasn’t it always ?been so? I inquire as my column spills from page one to MONEY&BUSINESS. But no, it says here the displaced stream now to tarpaper favelas, planetary barracks with steep rents for paperless migrants, so that they remit less to those obsolescent, starving relatives on the altiplano, pushed up to ever thinner air and soil; unnoticed, the narrative has altered.

Unnoticed, the narrative has altered, but though the city’s thus indecipherably orchestrated by the evil empire, down to the very molecules in my brain as I think I’m thinking, can I escape morning happiness, or not savor our fabled “texture” of foreign and native poverties? (A boy tied into greengrocer’s apron, unplaceable accent, brings out my coffee.) But, no, it says here the old country’s “de-developing” due to its mountainous debt to the First World–that’s Broadway, my cafe and my table, so how can I today warm myself at the sad heartening narrative of immigration? Unnoticed, the narrative has altered, the displaced of capital have come to the capital.