Now that our homes are at risk in the hands of vulture funds, now that our homelands burn, we need to make our nostalgias dialogue without reducing them to Donald Trump’s agenda or Bad Bunny’s music.
In mid-January, a new trend spread across social networks, under the guise of a song from Bad Bunny’s new album: Debí tirar más fotos invited us to remember everything we’ve lost, or what is absent from us, in a format of short, juxtaposed videos. It was, therefore, yet another marketing campaign for a new musical product, with its own formats and new choreographies, this time tinged with longing for the homeland—what the French people of the past would have called maladie du pays.
At the same time, kilometers away on the same continent, the new American president, Donald Trump, announced that with him, a new “golden age” for the United States was beginning. He dismantled the consensus of the previous administration with presidential decrees, setting the political stage for a brave new world. To many analysts, this world bore a dangerous resemblance to the ghosts of the deepest past, and the first accusations quickly followed: nostalgia, nostalgia, nostalgia.
It’s interesting that both manifestations of this sentiment emerged at the same time, yet are so dissimilar. Over twenty years ago, a Russian exile in Boston, Svetlana Boym, wrote The Future of Nostalgia, likely the most influential work on the contemporary understanding of this feeling. Boym proposed two nostalgic categories: one restorative and the other reflective. Restorative nostalgia would emphasize the nostos, the return home, and characterize those movements that demand a reconstruction of what was lost, a resurgence based on clear and solid identification. This first tendency would define national revivals but, when exaggerated, would also prove highly useful to the far right. The second tendency, however, would be reflective nostalgia, which places weight on the algia, on loss, on pain, on the imperfect process of remembrance. It is not about recovering a truth that once defined us, but about losing ourselves in what the passage of time has made of it: falling in love with the distance that separates us from the ideal and allows us to imagine it.
Thinking in dichotomies appeals to us mainly because it’s comfortable. Although the author intended these categories only as general tendencies, they have been transformed into absolute classifications that provide contemporary analysts with a false sense of certainty. How easy it seems to separate virtuous nostalgias from obscene ones! Thus, it would be simple to attribute Trump’s project to a “restorative” nostalgia, emphasizing the again, the return to lost grandeur. Likewise, we could easily label the laments of the Puerto Rican singer, mourning his past on the island and how recent socioeconomic changes threaten his identity, as “reflective” nostalgia.
Some might say Bad Bunny’s album offers nothing more than a pastiche of bygone images; in reality, we find in it a preoccupation, above all, with the idea of home and its elusive memory. Critics of globalization have warned for decades that in a world where we can feel at home anywhere, we increasingly find ourselves exposed to the elements. Time passes, and in our country, the metaphor becomes literal. What home does nostalgia yearn for in the folds of memory? What dwelling hides so far away, and so deep within? Longing forces us to confront what every home contains—its ghosts. Nostalgia reveals the fictions that construct us: home, origin, memory.
Now, it would seem, a millionaire artist with at least five residences across two continents writes an elegy for the lost home. The president of the world’s most powerful nation, which has been a root for the uprooted for over two centuries, demands a return to the original home, the reconstruction of a “more authentic” house—though what he really means is “smaller.” At the same time, if the worst omens come true, his decisions will force thousands to abandon their homes in the Gaza Strip; in the United States, hundreds of exiles will be paradoxically forced to return to a country that can no longer be their home, only more hunger and violence—the very reasons they left so many years ago. Is nostalgia causing all these dramatic decisions, as journalists claim, or are these policies the ones that will cause even more nostalgia? As always, the nostalgic will not be today’s reactionaries but the eternally dispossessed—of their land, their lives, and their memories.
Our present reality already denies any discourse claiming that history has ended, that the globalized world has become homogeneous, that reflection, rather than action, is all we have left. Against all simplifications of the nostalgia debate, we must argue that there is no “good” or “bad” nostalgia. That would be too easy. There are, instead, many ways to imagine the past—in truth, we are not allowed to remember in any other way. Nostalgia is merely a specific narrative that expresses unease with the present, a yearning for the future, and a conscious—even idealized, why not?—recollection of what has been left behind. If we keep labeling reactionaries as nostalgic, we’ll be handing them another term we need now more than ever: now that our homes are at risk in the hands of vulture funds, now that our homelands burn or are torn apart by water, now that our pasts are reduced to clichés, we must reclaim our nostalgias and make them converse. We cannot let the far right’s rhetoric or TikTok trends define their limits and contents.
While some seem to scorn nostalgia, others keep imagining futures against us, or without us. They point, with raised hands, to an authentic home, but we all know a home is more what we wanted it to be than what it will ever become. If we do not reclaim nostalgia, we lose our ability to critique the present. We won’t be able to question past futures, lost opportunities, or whether our houses were ever truly anyone’s home.