Yearning for Known Quantities

Musings in a Mexico City café.

Lo he leído, pienso, lo imagino;
existió el amor en otro tiempo.
Será sin valor mi testimonio.

[I haver read it, think, imagined it;
love existed in another time.
My account will have no value.]

Rubén Bonifaz Nuño (1923-2013)

Mexico City

As I write these lines it is Wednesday morning and I am right now sitting in Vips, in Insurgentes Sur, in Colonia Roma. I suspect I am the only person among my friends who is actually fond of Vips, the classic commercial diner of which there is seemingly one in every other block in Mexico. It is an existential affection perhaps, not really culinary —given its subpar diner food— but what is important to me is that this place has looked exactly the same for the last 40 years. As we know, brand loyalty is built on always delivering the same product.

I am also a few blocks away from another seemingly immutable staple of the commercial landscape of the city: Sanborns. It is almost embarrassing to confess nostalgia for a place like that, but it so happens that this Sanborns on the corner of Aguascalientes and Insurgentes was the last store I went to (with my parents and aunt) at the last minute before I left to the airport to fly to Chicago to study as an 18-year-old. As it turned out, it was a defining moment for me, not just because it marked the end of my Mexican life, but because it divided my own self into the lifelong negotiation of two realities.

And this sensation of permanence (even if it means seeing the same, evergreen type office workers having breakfast as always, or the Sanborns attendant wearing that perennial ugly red jacket) happens to be exactly what I desperately need right now in this moment of deep political uncertainty. Not that I can escape it: as I arrived in Mexico, the US had just imposed tariffs on both Mexico and Canada, which both governments were able to pause for the time being. This wide cultural (and practically temporal) divide that I crossed at 18 when I left Mexico for good, is no longer such a divide at all, at least in terms of how global economics and geopolitics now impact practically every corner of the globe.

We also are currently living a topsy-turvy moment as the notions of change and permanence are concerned. American conservatism has always been, historically, about small government and the respect and protection of institutions and the status quo (and the reluctance to reform them in a progressive direction, thus the term “conservatism”). Today, ostensibly to honor the small government goal of conservatism, this far-right administration has launched an insane demolition derby on steroids within two weeks, firing federal workers, eliminating entire government agencies like USAID, and taking other drastic, draconian and likely illegal measures which mainly aim to centralize the power at the very top; a move that is already widely acknowledged as a coup. Ironically, then, the conservative/liberal roles have flipped in a sense: change, in this political environment, has been regressive, and liberalism has now been forced to be about defending and protecting institutions.

The Mexican writer Carla Faesler recently posted: “I am exhausted by the lament “the past was better, today everything is awful, woe is me”. I do not wish to repeat such lament; although a few of her friends noted that nostalgia aside, one should be able to objectively note that things are not better now than they were before.

So, I have to come to terms with my desire as an exile to seek continuity in culturally vacuous places like Vips and Sanborns. Maybe it is because I am afraid to admit that there is a culturally vacuous aspect about myself. But I also suspect there is a more profound collective human desire within this yearning for known quantities.

I am here doing research, somewhat fittingly, on the subject of telenovelas, for an upcoming project that revisits my first social practice project back in 2002 which dealt with them. As I speak with people involved in the Mexican soap opera industry, one of them over coffee discussed with me the way in which the dominance of the form has lost power (partially due to streaming and the weakening of live TV) and how the simple dramatic models without great complexities don’t seem to work very well anymore, at least for a good portion of the viewership. He quoted a friend at some point: “I miss the time when we knew who was good and who was bad in the stories.”

The comment contains, in fact, a complex sentiment. The yearning for a simpler time, a kind of pure innocence without contradictions and messy complexities is what the traditional melodramatic model of the telenovela delivered for decades. Viewers primarily need a hero and a villain who is vanquished in the end with a happy ending, and this guarantee allowed them to lose themselves in this world of escapism.

But what I also read in that comment is perhaps a recognition that escapism will no longer protect us from the world that is coming to shape before us; or at least that our constant exposure to things like social media make these Cinderella-like stories of a fantasy past slightly outdated. Escapism is not what it used to be. But it is a problem of form, not of content: we are always in search of those reassuring known quantities. The poem at the beginning of this text, by the Mexican poet Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, represents to me the idea that the artist endeavors to deliver self-certainties (“I know what this thing is, whether my account is to be listened to or not”)

Recognizing the need for comfort food in troubled times, and learning how to serve it not merely in a predictable, but in a thoughtful and provocative way, and if necessary subverting it to question it and help us see again, is the perennial task for every artist.