In college I learned about "diversity." It was kind of a cult. It was "progressive." In those days liberal arts colleges held up all their facets—curriculum, student body, faculty—against various checklists. The basic checklists were the troika of Race, Class, and Gender. Sometimes there was a Sexuality checklist (a slippery, icky thing most people didn't use unless they were shamed into it). Then there were checklists nobody except the admissions office thought were important, such as the State or Country of Origin checklist. The Race list was the most contentious, in part because of its inflexibility. There were never more than five categories. Besides White, there were Black/African-American, Asian, Hispanic/Latino, and Indian/Native American.

I believed this. I was part of the cult. It got to the point where I couldn't walk into a lecture hall or even a party without going over the checklists in my head and gauging the diversity quotient ("DQ") of the gathering.

This was the early 1990s, when, as you'll remember, George Will used the Old Left term "politically correct" to convince the media that all us flustered, clear-eyed, DQ-gauging students were the new Red Guard. The scourge of the critical world was identity politics, the memoir boom, political art, victim art, Oprah, and celebrity, all bundled together in an asteroid that had turned the Kingdom of the Universal Truth into a huge, empty crater. Every other serious nonfiction book had a subtitle like Memory and the Politics of X and talked about rewriting history from the point of view of those who lived it. Whether you were part of the Red Guard or not, chances were you were obsessed with publicly proclaiming who you were, or denouncing those who did.

I moved to New York City in 1992. The metropolis quite simply mocked my internal DQ monitor. "Black/African-American?" it asked. "Do you mean only the descendants of slaves brought to North America? What about immigrants from Africa itself, who often have little in common with them? What about Jamaicans, Martinicans, Trinidadians? What about Afro-Brazilians, Cubans, Dominicans?" I had never seen a black person speak Spanish before. It sounds funny to say so now, but I hadn't even really realized that a Latino could be black. I didn't learn until the Zapatista rebellion began how many Latinos were Indians who might not even speak Spanish.

This kind of overwhelming diversity—the kind that renders the checklist a joke—is still unimaginable in small, expensive colleges (and in much of the United States). But though lists are a blunt instrument, they are used so widely and for so many reasons that they can't be ignored.

That's why I love the 2000 decennial census. Here is its version of a Race checklist: White, "Black, African Am., or Negro," American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Native Hawaiian, Guamanian or Chamorro, Samoan, Other Pacific Islander, Other Asian, or "Some other race." (The "Long Form" also asked for ancestry or ethnic origin, "For example: Italian, Jamaican, African Am., Cambodian, Cape Verdean, Norwegian, Dominican, French Canadian, Haitian, Lebanese, Polish, Nigerian, Mexican, Taiwanese, Ukrainian, and so on.") And, for the first time, you were able to check off more than one Race box.

Little by little during the first few months of this year, the Census Bureau unfurled the results of the full headcount. Over 6.8 million people (2.4 percent of the total population) checked more than one race. The census results also seem to indicate that big cities in the U.S. owe their "rebound" not just to the much-vaunted drop in crime, but to the much-feared influx of immigrants. Chicago grew for the first time in 50 years thanks to Latinos, who now compose a quarter of the city's population. And New York City's population has climbed past 8 million for the first time in history. For the past ten years gentrification in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn has captured most of our attention because it drove creative types away from formerly cheap neighborhoods. But the stealth story seems to be in the outer boroughs, which are absorbing immigrants at a rate unknown since the days of Ellis Island.

Never mind how many of us were undercounted, or how unfair the congressional redistricting will be. Even though the voices demanding that the country close its borders clamor the loudest, "American" now applies to so many different kinds of people that you learn not to hazard a guess at someone's background, because you may be off by an ocean, a continent, a hemisphere. (A friend of mine assumed that a co-worker was Dominican because he had a Spanish surname and deep brown skin. He was Filipino.) You end up putting off judgments about people indefinitely.

For artists living at a time of radical demographic change, self-expression is fraught with anxiety. If I'm not sure who you are, or whether you understand my vocabulary and cultural references, how can I say anything? Can I speak only to people who are just like me? Perhaps this fear of being misunderstood helps explain the obsession with personal and cultural authenticity and purity that marked identity politics.

But just as national borders prove porous, more and more artists seem willing to step into the breach between the end of "I" and the beginning of "you." Maybe this is a rejection of what's come before, a little Hegelian antithesis to stir things up. But I think that this is because artists are naturally curious about what they see about them, and have a natural ambivalence toward rigid distinctions. (Art, of course, is better at expressing ambiguity than certainty.)

Lately I've been inspired by the work of artist Franco Mondini-Ruiz, which crosses and uncrosses so many borders it makes me dizzy. Mondini-Ruiz is best known for Infinito Botánica, an ongoing artwork that can be wobbly described as a performance/installation that happens to overlap majorly with his own life. The son of an Italian father and a Mexican mother, he was raised in San Antonio, Texas, a city whose heritage reflects 500 years of cultural conflict and mixing, and which is situated relatively near a certain important border.

A few years ago Mondini-Ruiz bought a little botánica—a kind of neighborhood folk religious shop that sells things like statues and candles depicting Catholic saints and virgins, as well as herbal remedies, incense, and oils that bring good luck (or love, or money, or whatever). But the meaning of Latin religious icons is not simply sacred—they have a formal, almost baroque majesty expressed in gilt elaborations, almost lurid colors, dramatic facial features, and the exquisite suffering of Christ on the cross. They are also mass-produced and cheap. And because they are used in the home, they remind one of warmth, protection, and affection (or, depending on what your upbringing was like, of intimidation and alienation).

Of course, Latin American artists have been using Catholic imagery since the sixteenth century. Mondini-Ruiz, however, took the botánica one step further by also selling Mexican and Tejano folk art, thrift store finds, Tex-Mex kitsch, found objects, pieces by regional artists, and his own off-kilter contributions—all of which jibed somehow with the visual language of Mexican-American culture. Its camped-up aspects were unmistakably queer. And it was fun. According to the catalog for the exhibition Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art (showing this fall at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art): "At Infinito Botánica a good bargain could be found on a vintage cowgirl dress that once belonged to a famous Chicana writer, a Mexican film lobby poster, a faux pre-Columbian artifact, or thrift store painting. Week-old donuts encrusted with miniature pornographic glass sculptures were declared the next collectible by Mondini-Ruiz, who would lecture to the shoppers on its future place in art history."

Although Mondini-Ruiz closed the store in San Antonio and moved to New York City, the botánica still travels with him. For the 2000 Whitney Biennial, he set up a table on Madison Avenue and sold his wares, which cost as little as a dollar. Shopping as an activity is integral to the work. The prices and the look of all the objects (recognizable to anyone who lives in this consumer culture) spur "customers" to interact with one another and with Mondini-Ruiz, who is charming and has a delightful sense of humor. Once they realize that yes, he is an artist, and those prices are for real, they laugh at the curiosities and discuss the appeal of the objects—certainly not the behavior of most people viewing art in a museum or gallery. They become simultaneously part of the artwork as well as interpreters of it. While not overtly political, Infinito Botánica often incorporates racist Pancho Villa imagery of Mexicans with huge sombreros and serapes and bushy mustaches, which is a pretty easy motif to find in Texas thrift store ashtray and lampshade displays.

By including this unflattering imagery in a work of art that ultimately celebrates Mexican-American style, Mondini-Ruiz shows the contradictory ways in which the U.S. absorbs disparate cultural signifiers: with a combination of hostility, fascination, and an ultimately kitschy, sometimes demeaning affection in pop culture. That's why his trinkets spark recognition in viewers who are not Latin American—they don't aspire to represent any kind of essential Chicano "reality," but they combine to make a kind of fantasy land where cultural mixture happens as if by magic. I talked to Franco in April, just before he was getting ready to do Infinito Botánica in Helsinki, Finland. "There are nine Tex-Mex restaurants in Helsinki!" he exclaimed. "The culture is everywhere!"

Allison Xantha Miller is an editor at Paper magazine.