In this essay, we address emerging tensions that are increasingly facing persons, such as ourselves, who choose to reside in borderlands both inside and outside pedagogical settings. Such tensions include matters of location and dislocation, rootedness and uprootedness, diversity and commonality, space and place, time and distance, and so on. The first author enacts her own negotiations of these tensions and offers possible pathways of envisioning human diversity in more heuristic ways. In dialogue, personal narrative, personal history, and classroom re-enactments, we offer a different framework for envisioning difference. Ultimately, our goal is to show one way that we can create the possibility of new imaginations of difference, commonality, diversity, and culture in the college classroom. (Contains 3 notes.)