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And however much fun it is to proudly represent your ancestral lands with a flag decal on your car, or a soccer jersey on your back, the staunch nationalism exhibited in both the U.S. and Latin America is growing out of step with increasing migration and the resulting cultural hybridism.

For Kej the hybridism feels as natural as conversation - he sees no merit in keeping traditional and modern music separate.

“Imagine a plant growing out of plastic. Then we made an ironic game of it. Lounge or parlor chairs were originally made of wicker, for ventilation and lightness, but then the wicker was replaced with metal, then braided plastic string, and, finally, cheap and ugly plastic-injection molding. Our project was a counterattack: wicker overtaking everything like a parasite, and trying to regain its place through prostheses, hybridism, and the joining together of the chairs. These are objects that somehow tell their own story, a mutant evolution.”

It’s an enormous struggle and I think that he comes to a place where he finally accepts his hybridism.

His old ideas and tropes—hybridism, immigration, reinvention, mythology, nostalgia for Bombay, rationalism—are faithfully paraded, as are his authorial tics: the slew of allusions, the genius attributes and stilted locution of his characters, the authorial narrator, the comedic naming of minor characters.