What Changes, What Stays the Same
How I will cast my ballot.
As everyone feverishly debates and examines the Trump and Biden administration legacies in these days before the election, I have instead been thinking of events that might serve as a better preface of where we are now: the Great Recession and the election that immediately followed it.
On election night in 2008, Dannielle and I were at Café on Clinton— a quiet restaurant on the corner of our street in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn; we had gathered for dinner with a few friends to watch the presidential election results. I remember being the waitress standing by the bar amidst the half-empty restaurant as we all went through the simple process of ordering drinks while watching on TV what would be a pivotal moment in the history of the United States— the election of the first Black president. We had actively worked to support Obama’s campaign, and we were on pins and needles. When the election was called, we were exhilarated, embracing one another with tears of joy, overtaken by an indescribable euphoria—feeling that the country had taken a crucial step toward a new era. Like most, we had been swept away in Obama’s soaring rhetoric and had fully embraced the mantra of hope and change that had been the bedrock of that campaign, even while we understood, like Mario Cuomo once said, that one campaigns in poetry and governs in prose.
Years later, I was at a Bed and Breakfast in Houston (those places where you wind up sharing breakfast with strangers) and met an activist who had worked with Obama during his community organizer years. She told me about how evident it was already at the time that Obama would go far, and how his charisma and intelligence captivated white leftists who would not recognize, or admit, that they had a race problem. She told me: “for progressive white voters, he was the Black friend that they never had.” She also recalled how once she asked him, half-jokingly, what kind of president he would be. “Certainly not as liberal as you”, Obama told her.
Will Obama be seen by history as a transformative candidate? Partially the problem in answering that question is the excessive stock we place on the notion of change in politics. As historian Gary Gerstle, author of “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order”, argues, electoral politics and the deep cultural divide and tribalism that they generate often mask the fact that there is a longer-term political order, or a consensus, as he says, that “is much more powerful than any divergence between the two political parties.” This is why what we consider two diametrically opposed political parties are sometimes seen as hardly distinguishable by observers from other parts of the world.
The fact of the matter is that Obama’s promise of hope and change would later be ridiculed by the right (remember Sarah Palin saying “how is that hopey changey thing working out for ya”?) and it hurt because there were aspects of truth to it. Obama’s bank bailout in his attempt to prevent a collapse of the banking system was seen by working families as a capitulation to Wall Street at the expense of Main Street, fueling both left- and right-wing populism— Bernie Sanders on one end of the spectrum, and Trump on the other.
I remember my deep sadness on the last night of the Obama presidency, when Estela, then seven years old, had gone to bed, and my worrying about the following four years to come.
I can’t comprehend the selective nostalgia that some conservatives have of the Trump administration , wanting to think that things where somehow better (although some of which likely has to do with the fact that Trump inherited the Obama economy, in a similar way in which he would inherit the Biden economy should he win the presidency again). I, in contrast, am keenly aware and perfectly remember what happened every day in that chaotic and terrifying Trump presidency, which we all painfully followed day by day on the news and social media. The racism, the misogyny, the undermining of the safety net, the cruelty toward those in need, the incredible selfishness, the criminality, the lies and conspiracy theories during a pandemic that significantly worsened the death toll, and mainly the frontal attack against facts and truth, of whose objective is to create such nihilism that moves people to believe that there are no shared facts upon which to have a rational debate, and finally the attempt at destroying the very democratic process and will of the voters, which we are about to experience again. Those last years were a nightmare of social poison that as we all know culminated in violence. Michael Wolff, who wrote one of the first memoirs of the Trump administration, “Fire and Fury”, said in an interview that, in the beginning, even those who were part of the Trump White House initially thought that his unusual figure could perhaps bring a fresh or new perspective, that they were "willing to think that this unusual figure had a new way to approach things" that just might work. "I feel that that is not the case now, and I saw and learned that everyone around him feels that is not the case. The train will hit the wall."
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So much has been said on this election that I only will make a few brief points on immigration— one of many urgently critical issues.
Practically every time you hear the far right in the US speak about immigration the term “criminal” is almost invariably attached to it. This flies in the face of the fact that there are countless studies that prove that both legal and illegal immigrants are less likely to commit serious crimes precisely because of the potential consequences of facing law enforcement.
I fully attest to the veracity of those studies. Sometime in 1996, seven years after emigrating to the US and fluctuating of legal status with visa and work permits, I became a permanent citizen. The green card that arrived in the mail felt like a salvation to me; primarily because it represented a door to fully participating and contributing to American society, with the several responsibilities that it entailed —particularly paying taxes— and accepting the limitations of that status— primarily not being called for jury duty, which I know is something that most of us don’t care much about— and being able to vote. But I knew that my status was still lower from a US Citizen and had a strong awareness, like most immigrants, that my presence in this country was a unique privilege that I needed to fulfill and protect.
My legal status journey during first decade I lived in the United States was only part of a larger cultural process during which I had to contend with issues of otherness. I soon found that I could not completely blend anywhere, partially due to my somewhat unusual cultural background — a white, atheist Mexican interested in philosophy, modernist poetry and in the music of Stravinsky. My cultural isolation made me feel skeptical of, and even detest, proofs of national purity. Even though I came to the US during the height of the culture wars and the rise of identity politics, I wanted to make art without adjectives, not “Mexican” art. Yet at the same time, on that decade I realized that I could not work against the historical legacy and the racial politics of the country to which I had immigrated, even within the very Latino context where I worked.
In one of my first museum jobs, our chief curator was, like me, born in Mexico. He was married to an American woman and together they had a daughter. He was a mediocre administrator and insecure human being. When people like that land in positions of power, those kind of traits get easily amplified and are painfully endured by others under them. He constantly teased my direct supervisor, who was Mexican-American, making fun of his accent in Spanish and his disconnect with Mexican culture; I found the chief curator’s attitude stupid, demeaning, and insulting. He continued his micro-aggressions until the day when my supervisor told him: “whatever you are saying about me, the same applies to your daughter.” After that day, he never dared to tease him again.
Many years later, I found myself as the father of an American daughter, while still keeping my green card. Over the course of all those years I had not given much thought at the idea of becoming a dual citizen, primarily because I do not believe that one’s identity is determined by paperwork. I also fully believed, as Carlos Fuentes said to me once when I brought him to speak at a museum, that a Mexican, regardless of where they are, can’t afford not being engaged with what happens in the United States (and I related to Fuentes as someone who was the son of diplomats and spent the majority of his life outside of Mexico, and yet remained very attached to the politics and culture of the country).
Then in 2020, on the night of the first presidential debate between Trump and Biden, I started the process of becoming a dual citizen. Today I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris.
Paramount to me now is the issue of democracy, beyond any other: this is an existential election where the very continuation of a democratic system of rule is on the ballot as opposed to the autocratic direction that we are witnessing many countries take all over the world. As conservative judge Michael Luttig recently wrote, “America’s democracy and the rule of law are the only truly consequential stakes in the 2024 presidential election. Yes, there are important policy issues about which we disagree. But that has always been the case and always will be. In this election, these policy differences are comparatively inconsequential, if consequential at all.” The Lincoln project best summarized the stakes in this video:
But then there is immigration. I am cleared-eyed about the shortcomings of Democrats on this issue; in the past I also have been critical of the ways in which Democrats —from Obama to Biden— have handled immigration policy, and like many others I vehemently disagree with key aspects of their foreign policy. But the fascistic criminalization of immigrants, and the levels of racism and cruelty displayed in the MAGA campaign culminating in the breathtakingly racist comment of Puerto Rico being a “floating island of trash”, makes it urgent to forcefully reject the politics of hate.
Hope feels devalued, yet we need to cling to it. And as to change, we need to understand the frameworks of the possible and the unexpected, consider the dialectics of variation and constancy, and remain clear of what are the things among us, the values, that we should not ever compromise on. This is best expressed in the famous song by Chilean composer Julio Numhauser, later immortalized by Mercedes Sosa, Todo Cambia. It says, “What changed yesterday/ will need to change tomorrow/ just as I myself change/ in these distant lands” And it adds:
Pero no cambia mi amor
Por más lejos que me encuentre
Ni el recuerdo ni el dolor
De mi pueblo y de mi gente
[But my love does not change
As far as I find myself
Nor the memory nor the pain
Of my town and of my people]