ESPERANZA WRITING PAGES
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Introduction: At a young age, Esperanza Leon moved from Venezuela to the United States with her family. After schooling in East Hampton and Toronto, Esperanza found herself back in Venezuela, discovering life on her own. With a split life between the United States and Venezuela, Esperanza struggles to find her identity and where she belongs. She has gone on to open the Solar Gallery with a concentration in Latin American art. Her experiences have proved to be a guiding force in creating her gallery and doing what she loves.
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Esperanza Leon was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1972 and moved to East Hampton, NY and the age of four.
“My father is quite a bit older then my mother. We traveled a lot even when we lived in Venezuela and I was under the age of four, I remember going all around the county. He was kind of an explorer and wanted to see all the parts of the country. Even if I don’t remember in detail, those memories, even as ambiguous as they may be, stay with you.”
Esperanza and her family often traveled, sometimes months at a time, taking her out of school and relying on a tutor.
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“I started kindergartenat the elementary school in East Hampton. I went to school here through 8th grade. After 8th grade I went to school away in Canada in Toronto for four years. It could have been five years because they still had grade 13 at the time, but I pushed it all into four years. After I graduated from high school I decided to take a year off because I was completely spent, so I traveled. Part of the year I spent in Europe and part in Venezuela. After that I went back to Toronto and went to the University of Toronto, majoring in Art History. While I was in Canada I gravitated towards people who were from different backgrounds. I guess that was inevitable.”
5. “After I finished college in Toronto, I moved to Venezuela. I deliberated after I graduation between moving to Spain or moving to Venezuela. Having studied art history and my focus becoming Latin American art, it became clear that it was a better idea to move to Venezuela to pursue that interest. I stayed there for five years.”
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“There are good things and bad things about each place you live always. Once you’re an adult you see the harshness of the reality. My true experience of Venezuela came after I had graduated from University. At that point I was tired of North America and decided I wanted to be somewhere else. So I went into the chaos of South America, which at the time I needed, but also it was a major impact. There’s an ease of life here that you don’t necessarily have down there. I was confronted with that. I would question, why is this like this, why is that like that, why do people drive like crazy people! It was the quality of life that angered me and has become much worse now. On the other hand, what I had been looking for which was sort of warmth, I could find there.”
7. “What I had found from my friends in Canada was wonderful, but in my friends from Venezuela, there was an immediate closeness that didn’t necessarily happen in Canada.
People that I know from other countries, like Columbia or Brazil also find there is a coldness or standoffishness that exists here where you don’t let people in. This doesn’t exist in Venezuela. I guess that kind of made up for all the chaos and lack of structure.
And I miss that. I still do miss that.
There was a social side that is more easy and flowing. Here it is about work, work, work, and the social is about work as well and that part is hard.”
8. In Venezuela, Esperanza split her time between living in Caracas, and a smaller city.
“In a smaller city in another state, I would commute to work in my car and I lived in a place that was very rural. There was no illumination, no lighting systems, and big puddles would form if there were rainfall.”
9. “I remember my friends would say, “Your crazy that you’re going home alone.” I was managing a small cultural center theater and we’d often have functions that would last until late at. There were incidences that you would hear of, such as people getting their windshield cracked from someone throwing rocks, or things like that, but fortunately, nothing ever happened to me. “
10. “Venezuela has been a democratic country since the 60’s, although people don’t necessarily think that. There have been more authoritarian and dictatorial regimes and ones that has been less so, but inevitably there has always been a lot of corruption. They create chaos and things don’t work properly. The bureaucracy is ineffective.
People complain about the DMV here, but in fact, it works beautifully. Like so many other systems here, they function well. You can get your drivers license in the mail! The mail doesn’t exist in Venezuela. It was really hard and sometimes took up to 6 months to get a post card to me. It was a miracle when things got to me. It’s not so much of a concern these days because of email, but at the time when I was there, in the late 90s, email existed but there wasn’t easy access.”
11. “When I entered my last year of being in Venezuela, Chavez came into power. He is currently still the president. The country is being driven into retrograde. There are many things that you can say are improvements, like people being interested in the government and politics and participating in the votes. That could be seen as positive, but really, there is so much insecurity and so much crime and devaluation of the currency that most of the people are not happy. It’s difficult to make a living and people are leaving. It’s really devastating to see because in the past in Venezuela, people didn’t leave no matter how things were going. That’s not the case now and it’s sad to see.
12. Though she was lucky to never experience any, Esperanza talks about the fear of crime though out Venezuela.
“I was very luck to not experience much crime. One time I was wearing my cell phone on my belt. I was on the subway and in what seemed like a flash, some guy tried to rip it off of me. It happened so quickly that I couldn’t react. He was sort of a blur. He didn’t succeed and thankfully nothing happened. I wouldn’t have cared if I lost a cell phone, but that was my only encounter with crime. That was when I was living in Caracas.”
“I would never wear flashy jewelry in public, but I refused to submit. I’m going to wear the watch I have worn my whole life. If someone wants to cut my hand off for it, so be it. I felt like it was bad enough that you live in a house with the windows barred and behind gates. My house at the time wasn’t all gated in but I had the iron gates to the door, then the door, and then the gates on the windows. We’re already living in a jail. Let me just live and be as careful as possible, because otherwise, you’re just not living.”
13. “I decided to finally come back to NY because I missed my family. When I first went down, I was following my career interest and I was in love. When that ended and I began to feel that it was time to come back, I left. I had literally been away from my family since I was 13 and only came home for visits. I was never really around. I came back not thinking that I would stay in East Hampton, but when I returned I realized how much I missed the beach and this place and how comfortable I felt here. “
14.”I have a foot in each place. When I’m in Venezuela people ask me where I’m from. When I’m here, people ask me where I’m from. That’s how it is. You have a hard time identifying your self to others. There’s not one label you can put on me. Even the Latin American label is a contentious one. I don’t call myself Latina. I use it for the gallery because it’s a geographical designation. As far as saying everybody in Latin America is the same, well, that’s not true. It’s that idea that you don’t fit into one place or one label, but your part of many things. “
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“I had a job at a gallery in town and worked there for about a year and a half, and the idea came into my head was what I needed to do was to start my own business.”
“I opened the Solar Gallery in 2001 on north Main Street. I opened it on October of 2001, which was an interesting time because of the terrorist attacks in September. But I wanted to keep moving forward, what else could I do? So I opened the gallery and found that people were looking for that release from all this tragedy. The gallery started because of my interest in art from Latin America and here there was no one doing that. I’m not competing with anyone. Who would want art from Latin America here? I didn’t know but I thought id try to find out. “
16. “I started with a more comprehensive view. It’s solar and its art and design. I started with paintings and sculptures, but also added objects of Pre-Columbian things, or hand carved objects, but that fazed out when I moved here.
I started out with a group of artists I had known in Venezuela, but as soon as you open a gallery people want to show their work. You learn what to filter out and I learned that I had to really love it if I was going to show it. “
17. Esperanza continues to run the Solar Gallery today, striving to always have a unique show exposing Latin American artists. She remains living in East Hampton with her family.