These first days of the new year are supposed to be all about renewal, which is why in my traditionally contrarian self I am thinking about one of my greatest flaws: my own reluctance to change. I thought of it today as I was walking down Arlington Heights, Illinois, the suburb of Chicago where my mom lives, and a boring suburban store where I typically stop by every year had closed. It bothered me more than I expected and altered my traditional annual stroll. The question in my mind was: why does it bother me so much to see that otherwise unimportant change? To explain this I need to talk (once again, as I have done it before) about Lagos de Moreno.
Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, a city with a population of about 111,000, is named after the Mexican independence hero Pedro Moreno, who in 1817 was captured and beheaded by the Spanish, his head displayed at the entrance of the town to set an example. The city has often been dubbed “La Atenas de los Altos” (the Athens of the Jalisco Highlands), in reference to the many writers and artists who have emerged from the region. Despite of the growth of the city, Lagos remained a small town in many respects. It also retained its belligerent spirit: largely a very Catholic, conservative society, it was one of the strongholds of the Cristero War of the 1920s (a local rebellion in protest of the secularist articles of the 1917 Mexican constitution). Perhaps as a result of its reverence to tradition, the city is one of the best historically preserved in the region.
There is a house in downtown Lagos that has belonged to my extended family for at least three centuries, if not more. According to my late uncle Carlos Helguera, (who lived in the house for several decades until his passing in 2012), the house was coincidentally purchased by an Helguera circa 1750, then was purchased by the Soiné González family around the time of Mexican War of Independence, when Pedro Moreno fought and was captured. My paternal grandmother, Maria Soiné González, was born in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, in the late 1800s; she was the daughter of Guadalupe González, and Luis Soiné, a Mexican woman and an Alsatian immigrant who was professor at the University of Guanajuato.
Carlos took over the management of the house shortly after the death of Elena Soiné, who was in many ways a matriarch for the town. A peculiar aspect of the house I observed ever since I visited as a child in the 1980s was that Carlos kept the distribution of objects in the dining and living room practically identical as how Tía Elenita had left them the day she died, down to the position of trays, cups and saucers, history museum-style. In the closets there were top hats and clothing from the era of Benito Juárez (1860s), and on the living room there were turn of the century photographs of anonymous teenage women— students, I was once told, of my great-grandmother, Lupita.
We loved going there to visit, and it was a great and nostalgic family escape because everything was so predictable about Lagos, everything always exactly the way it was from when we were children. It was as if time there moved in a slow time-lapse of cultural decades, not actual years. Many years later, when I already lived in the US, I proposed that for the New Year celebration in 2000 we should have a family gathering in Lagos. My brother ridiculed me: “that would be like welcoming the 21st century from the 18th century!” (he was right).
There was a general store a few blocks down from the house known as “La Colmena”. It was a hole -in-the-wall establishment run by two very old ladies who sat at the counter, encased by walls of old wooden drawers behind them. “They still carry merchandise from the 19th century”, my uncle Billy one time said. When I visited La Colmena, sometime in the early 90s, the old ladies were still there. I purchased a couple inexpensive hinges and an escutcheon—an ornamented flat piece of metal that serves as a keyhole cover— not because I needed it, but because I wanted to take an item that had been sitting in one of those boxes for a hundred years waiting for a buyer.
Carlos was also an artist— a realist sculptor (he in fact was my first sculpture instructor, leading me on weekends to make bas-reliefs cast in plaster and culminating with the creation of a bust of my father). With a background in engineering, he had a great ability for accurate measurement and exactitude, which served him well in his portraiture work. He was also an enthusiast of antique cars, always repairing old engines. He had a clunky Willys jeep, from circa 1949, that he used to drive around Lagos. He was a cultural promotor, always organizing musical events in the town (he played the viola). One time he told me he was upset that the municipality had commissioned a bust of Pedro Moreno, which was placed at the very site where his head once was displayed at the city gates; the gesture, while intended to be a tribute seemed to unintentionally recreate the terrible historic incident. Further, “the head is so out of proportion”, Carlos then told me. He wanted to propose instead a replacement, a full-body statue of Moreno ( “what do you think?”). Alas, his project unfortunately never came to pass (although two years ago the city finally unveiled a formal equestrian monument to Moreno).
One of the last times I was in Lagos and stayed at the house hosted by Carlos (also known as El Jefe), he was elderly and increasingly unable to keep up with the maintenance of the historic building (as we know, keeping things the same sometimes is more work). We had interesting conversations about art. He, a realist sculptor, wanted to know why I gravitated toward contemporary art and art that is propelled toward the unknown. I gave him my reasons— I explained that I was interested instead in things like “social sculpture”— which he accepted with true interest and curiosity.
One of those nights, while staying in one of those old, colonial, high-ceiling rooms of the house with menacing mosquitos (which we tried to keep away by burning “radiolitos” or incense-like burning insecticide), I was assaulted by a deep, unbearable sadness: I could see how this place, frozen in time, was only an illusion of permanence. The world moves on, with or without us, and I knew that. But I desperately wanted at least one thing in my life to never change, to remain the same. I had that irrational desire, just as I felt Carlos also had it, for that house to look exactly always as in the day aunt Elena had left it. I wanted the old ladies of La Colmena to live forever, keeping 19th century hinges and hardware in their store for the hypothetical customer one century later.
This feeling is typically described as methathesiphobia, or fear or change. Studies have shown that our brains typically don’t see a difference between uncertainty and failure, which is to say that the unknown is automatically perceived negatively. Consistency and permanence give us a sense of safety and identity; it is what tradition is made of. We feel whole when we are part of something that we know is there to stay.
At the same time, the desire for permanence is, in essence, a selfish desire, and an impulse —unconscious, or not— for preserving privilege. Those who want things to remain the same feel so because they fear they will lose something in the process; by contrast, those who are at a disadvantage can’t tolerate —and naturally do not see any benefit in maintaining—the status quo. This is why, as social historians generally agree, major political revolutions are the result of collective discontent pushing for a fundamental restructuring of society. I had to come to terms with this fact first as an immigrant and then as an artist. As an immigrant, one seeks to restore the memory of what has been lost, and one’s yearning for it prompts us to strongly embrace traditions and rituals that give us meaning and make us feel whole again. As an artist one is taught to be radical and revolutionary, but as I have written many times, this radicality tends to be merely performative, not altogether paradigm-shifting, so not to overly disrupt the art establishment that might feed us. So too often we only embrace a semblance of philosophy of change; one that might better serve our careers and not be too overly disruptive. Ultimately we act conservatively, selfishly, because we fear that not doing so might harm us.
I instinctively had that concern as a young artist and asked my favorite professor one time, “can one be successful as a conservative artist?” To which he replied: “it would be hard.” That was all I needed to hear. I then overcame my fear and did what I had not thought I would ever do before: I stripped naked to perform, I created elaborate hoaxes in public as protest performance pieces, I touched on risky and delicate matters of politics race in works that thankfully did not survive. But the step was taken and I knew I had to learn how to break away with the safety of tradition.
In New York we often hear the Yiddish adage “only a goat backwards”. But the problem with all the rhetoric around moving forward is that we don’t think enough about what constitutes authentic and significant (or even positive) change. I have learned that oftentimes there is only the illusion of progress while retaining the status quo, and that form of clinging to the past is often the worst way to honor it. Furthermore, trying to make the present in its shape can only result in building monsters that poorly attempt to resemble that which no longer exists. It can be, in a way, a cope-out mechanism to retain the status quo while believing that we are changing. This is a fundamental question, I think, we face in art: what is it that we will do, this and future years, to truly question the status quo? It is something that might allow us to fulfill a generational responsibility which as Jonas Salk once suggested, is “to be good ancestors.” Pedro Moreno knew it and fought for that ideal on behalf of future generations.
I thus believe that in this and every future new year I have to always work toward being less like the frozen-in-amber hardware store like La Colmena and more like Pedro Moreno (hoping, however, to keep my head on my shoulders in the process).
Just one thing: what does this mean?>>>> Yiddish adage “only a goat backwards”.
I tried using google but got no satisfaction.
Happy new year (and yes, lets embrace change with the new collection of months ahead...!)