Giving up on Nostalgia?

by Jenina Yutuc

A tale of mother tongues, idealism, and urban suffocation in a world of precarity

On every third day of April, the skies roared. It was the heaviest storm of the first half of the year. As the story goes, the storm came not from anger but, rather, as a gesture to yield respect for his grand entrance into this world. This was his favorite recycled fable; on cue, he would recite it to everyone who inquired about his birthday. They spoke to each other in all the languages that they knew, inventing a hybrid language of untranslatable parts.

The response, ”Milalabas,” was my father’s favorite to the question “How are you?” Between the eavesdropped conversations, I would hear my dad and our paternal side in Pampanga joke about this reflex. I reflected on its divergence from “Mabuti” or “Okay lang” in the Tagalog language. My father says “Milalabas” to relay both the mundane and grand testaments of survival, a self-deprecating joke and, yet, a refusal and repression of the request to expound on one’s true feelings. It holds a multiplicity in its delivery, but it means that one is simply passing through. I inherited the phrase from my dad and always kept it in my back pocket whenever I was hit with the “Komusta kayu?” from Ma and my Titas in Pampanga. “Mi-la-labas.” Simply passing through.

The capital, Menila, felt to them cold and austere and, yet, in every city, there are many crevices for history, loneliness, solitude, disorder, order, statecraft, joy, and emptiness to inhabit. A jeepney ride to the mall that winter promised a navy-blue sky. I felt at home in the comfort of the nighttime breeze, comfort and home built from my practice of searching for something in the fragments of my childhood and in my mother tongue, spoken at full speed with emotion. The pieces served as solace from the imposing capital city. The streets in the Philippines are always lively with an assemblage of motor vehicles, street vendors, and people occupying little pockets of sidewalk space. Suburban streets in the United States, made from pre-packaged designs and renderings, pale when juxtaposed with this in my mind. The breeze that entered the window signaled a sensation of familiarity; it was a symbol for the becoming, the realization, and the slow rise of home. The promise of return, the comfort of hearing the mother tongue in hushed corners, and the certainty that the sun will always rise even from the darkest nights were all that mattered to me inside these cramped spaces.

These promises speak to the parts of me that I am constantly trying to reconcile: an aching to move forward against a fear of “fleeting hopes” and desperation. I often find myself held in a state of paralysis derived from nostalgia and remembered glory. I’m writing at twenty-one years old to remind myself that an escape to the city, and the way it mirrors the chimera, engender a longing in me for that fleeting hope, some kind of cure to
the recurring universal emptiness that visits every generation. Coming from suburbia and arriving to the city changed me, even though my experiences of both places were underwritten with the memory of that postcolonial “developing” city from which I was born. I cultivated and then hoarded an idealized escapist version of a big city as the “cure-all” to the monotonous suburbias of my adolescence. My perceptions of these cities were constructed out of a rush; I wanted to outgrow and discard my hometown insecurities and grievances.

Even though I continue to grasp at my instinct to see the world in its multitudes—hues, tints, and saturations—the constant suburban monotony of my childhood has embedded itself in me. I suppose it taught me about performing a life of order. However, it often has felt like an encumbrance and, to subdue it, I would dream of far-away places and people through an illusory lens. I longed, even if I don’t know what and who I longed for. As a possible resolution to this internal fracturing, the reading of nostalgia as a “romance
with one’s own fantasy” would ricochet in my mind from the pages of The Grand Tour of Nostalgia. (1) This is how nostalgia has come to guide my work and also become my state of being, my way of navigating the world. I believe that nostalgia can become a strategy of resilience, a rebellion against modernity’s linear trajectory.

Can design save the world?

We should question the solutions that present themselves as benevolent, supported by the noncontroversial themes of sustainability and human-centered design. There is power in lowcost interventions when they fully integrate historical context with local agency and value community knowledge. Architectural interventions
can be centered around the politics of space. Space is political when it confronts questions about the relationship of personhood to spatial design practices: Who is a space intended for? Who is it accessible to? Who is allowed to inhabit it? Revealing the politics of space reminds us that these questions are currently resolved within the context of a hierarchical system.

The prevailing logic of hegemonic society encourages designs that feign a savior role and claim to solve problems that are beyond reach. These problems are defined not only by spatial relationships, but also by the epistemological elements of design such as place, habitation, humanity, beauty, productivity. When we ask if new methods of “human-centered design” can create access for people who have been historically marginalized, we simultaneously reveal who has and has not been considered human in the past.

This realization implies that, to move forward, we must first un-build infrastructure that was designed to marginalize people. If we continue to build upon the existing systems within the existing logic, we will inadvertently be perpetuating that which serves white supremacy and produces structural violence. However, the first step onward does not have to be grand. Subtle and personal shifts can allow for the reimagining of power manifested through space, land, and borders. In the place between remembering and imagining, we can find new ways to create space that directly link past to future with us as the conduit.

I am not an architecture and design student who happens to be from the province of Pampanga in the Philippines, I am a Kapampangan architecture and design student. (2) I come from a childhood where we used the shapes and colors of the sky to our advantage, rendering far-fetched tales from the ephemerality of moving clouds. I remind myself that I can continue to pursue this discipline because I am privileged to have a physical place to call home. Leaning onto a palimpsest of nostalgia of my personal construction, I am resistant to the era of “moving fast and breaking things.” (3)

The province of Pampanga and the comforting chaos dissolved her worries. The chico tree accompanied her to the purple dusk. Regardless of where she would be in the world, she made a simple promise to herself to never completely succumb to her cynicism as long as there was an untranslatable volatile quality to the colors in the sky. It was in that slowed down frame of an alternate universe where the sun and the moon met that she was unperturbed by the positivist logic of the hard sciences.

Within all this chaos, she and the other college students continue to create parallel communities that seek to unseat the habitual, where demagoguery and censorship reign. The world is an unfiltered collection of constant political unrest and inequality. However, they were content because, regardless of how broken the world seems, they made each other believe again through their first-year idealism. Amid the inescapable injustice happening in the world, their interconnection made a heterotopia that even briefly enhanced their capacity to improve the conditions of their country. They were bound by a shared, endangered mother tongue—idealists with obligations to themselves, to their home province, and to each other. Their love may be fated to depart; despite it belonging to another time and an alternate universe, it is still love that is True. They gave the colors and shapes of the polluted Menila sunsets new stories to tell.

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1. Gugger, Harry. The Grand Tour of Nostalgia, Venice Lessons: Industrial Nostalgia. Basel: Laba EPFL ; 2016.

2. From Cortazar’s closing statement in his 1980s Berkeley lecture series (Cortázar Julio, Bernárdez Aurora, and Garriga Carles Álvarez. Clases De Literatura: Berkeley 1980. Barcelona: Debolsillo Mexico, 2016.) “...no es ser un escritor latinamericano sino ser, por sobre todo, un latinoamericano escritor.”

3. Business Insider. “Mark Zuckerberg, Moving Fast And Breaking Things.” Business Insider. October 14, 2010. https://www.businessinsider. com/mark-zuckerberg-2010-10.

Jenina Yutuc is a Kapampangan student of architecture and design, currently majoring in interdisciplinary studies at UC Berkeley. Her thesis deals with the intersection of architecture and public health. She dedicates her designs and writings to her hometown and family in Apalit.