Keats Kennelly is a poet, writer, educator, and photographer in Washington, DC. Their work includes the poetry collections Year of the Dragon and The València Poems and the zine series Horse Statues of Washington, DC. They are a member of Metro DC DSA. All photos in this piece courtesy of the author.
“When life seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?”
- Don Quixote, Book II
A man emerges, contorted from jagged stone, unsure if he commands the moment or is completely overwhelmed by it. He is atop an aging, seemingly wild horse, with little if any control of himself or the beast he rides. A lance in his hand is the only still part of this sculpture of pure movement. His other hand is thrown behind him, as if grasping for air, or something just out of reach.
It is Don Quixote, coming forth into our world and out of his own.
Don Quixote has been a mythic literary giant for over 400 years. The first part of the novel was published in 1605 in Madrid, Spain. A second part came in 1615. Both were written by Miguel de Cervantes, who wove elements of his own life — poverty, captivity, wounded pride, and relentless hope — into his seminal work.
Don Quixote starts off his adventures as Alonso Quixano, a poor man who, having read too many chivalric romances, goes mad and decides he is a knight errant. Falling into delusions of grandeur, he sets off on his weary work horse, Rocinante, and later acquires a squire, formerly a simple farmer, named Sancho Panza. Together they set off on quests to prove their chivalric worth in the real world, where there is little chivalry and romance left. Their trials, glorious, absurd, and tragic, exist mostly in Quixote’s mind, yet they reshape the world around him all the same. As a consequence, the world bends to the unbreakable will of a man on an impossible mission. A mission to go out into the world and do the best he can to make the fiction true and the truth fiction, come what may.
Outside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, a bronze and marble Don Quixote statue stands frozen, as if paused between centuries. It straddles worlds not just between Cervantes’ Spain and our District of Columbia, but between madness and meaning, reality and illusion. He is forever tilting forward, forever reaching out with his lance. Around him, the Potomac River hums with the rhythm of commuter traffic, the echo of violins filters through the hall’s glass walls, and somewhere inside, another performance begins, another story about impossible belief.
Standing before Quixote, you realize he is less a monument than a mirror. His battle is not against windmills, the "giants" he faces in the novel, but against indifference, the slow corrosion of imagination in a place built on politics and triangulation. His horse, Rocinante, strains forward into an invisible storm, as if pushing through bureaucracy itself. And yet, Quixote rides on.
There is something profoundly American about this misplaced Spaniard gazing over the river, a dreamer exiled into both marble and motion. He belongs here: a mad idealist among monuments to men who believed themselves sane.
Perhaps that’s why the sculpture feels alive; not a relic of literature, but a reminder that faith in the impossible is a kind of rebellion. That imagination, when wielded with conviction, can outlast power.
And maybe that’s the quiet genius of Cervantes’ hero and of Aurelio Teno, the artist who carved him here: to show that even in a world of steel and stone, one man can still look up, see a windmill, and call it a giant.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Don Quixote outside the Kennedy Center is no mere sculpture.
He is a gift from Spain, sent to honor the American Bicentennial in 1976, the year Spain began to free itself from the shadow of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. A bronze offering from a nation emerging from censorship and silence to one proclaiming 200 years of liberty.
The irony is exquisite. Spain, reborn, sent its mad knight to the United States. Spain sent its penultimate dreamer who saw giants where others saw windmills, as if to remind this young empire what freedom costs, and what imagination demands. Don Quixote arrived as both a blessing and a warning: that idealism is sacred, but fragile; that belief can either liberate or destroy.
That warning has gone unheeded. The building behind Don Quixote, the very hall that received Spain’s gift, has been seized by the forces his story was meant to guard against.
In February 2025, President Donald Trump installed himself as chairman of the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees, replacing its leadership with political allies. Staff were dismissed. Programming was reshaped in favor of Trump’s tastes. A Charlie Kirk vigil and the Conservative Political Action Conference’s Christian Persecution Summit replaced the kind of art that once gave the building its meaning. The FIFA World Cup draw displaced the resident National Symphony Orchestra. Then, in December 2025, workers were made to affix new letters to the building’s facade. What once read, “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts” now reads, “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”
Artists began to withdraw. The Washington National Opera, which had performed at the Kennedy Center since 1971, left. A production of Hamilton was canceled. Over 100 staff members departed in a single year. Ticket sales collapsed. The death knell rang in February 2026, when the president announced that the building would close entirely on July 4, 2026, for two years of renovations; a shuttering timed, with no apparent irony, to the nation's 250th birthday.
The new name affixed to the exterior, the new programming, the new planned renovations are not the only aspects that have changed. The minute changes were less reported, less noticed. The once golden pillars outside the hall are now white, making the architecture great again with what was considered a more traditional look.
And so, the mad knight now stands guard outside a darkening place. The violins he once heard have gone quiet. Spain sent its dreamer to a house of imagination. That house has been renamed and hollowed out.
Quixote remains, tilting forward, his lance aimed at a giant no one else can see.
He has stood here for nearly 50 years, watching Washington change, or not change at all. Watching the flags rise and fall, the power shift, the language of democracy grow louder even as its meaning thins. His horse still writhes beneath him, his lance still aimed at an unseen threat.
But the District around him is changing in ways Americans wouldn’t believe if it were not happening in front of them, to them, to their community. In 2025, the newly created Department of Government Efficiency unleashed sweeping layoffs across the federal workforce, the economic backbone of Washington, DC. Entire agencies were gutted: the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Health and Human Services. Tens of thousands of workers in the DC region lost their jobs or were placed in administrative limbo, waiting to learn whether they still had careers at all. By the spring, the District’s unemployment rate had climbed to 5.8%, and the chief financial officer of DC projected a billion-dollar revenue loss over the next three years.
The human toll is not abstract here. It is your neighbor listing their house. It is the family at your child’s school who disappeared over winter break. Almost one quarter of DC residents told pollsters they were seriously considering leaving; among those households touched by the layoffs, that margin grew to nearly half. The federal workers who populated the cafes and Metro cars around the Kennedy Center, who jogged the trails along the Potomac, who sent their children to the same schools as ours, are being driven out. Not by poverty or war, but by a deliberate effort to dismantle the institutions they served.
I teach third-grade English Language Arts at an elementary school not far from where Don Quixote stands. My students are learning to write paragraphs, to build arguments, to believe their words have power. They are learning this in a country where the Department of Education has been stripped to its frame, where nearly 23,000 books have been banned from school libraries nationwide since 2021, where executive orders threaten to withhold funding from schools that teach the “wrong” ideas about race or identity. When I read to my students, I am not engaging in nostalgia. I am engaging in resistance, however small, however quiet. Every lesson plan is an act of faith that the story still matters, the paragraph still holds, the child who learns to write a concluding sentence today might one day write the truth which someone in power does not want told.
And now, as a new strain of fascism festers in the marble corridors of Washington, DC, Quixote’s relevance sharpens to the point of pain. Once again, delusion masquerades as destiny. Once again, the powerful invoke purity while dismantling truth. Once again, the mad appear sane, and the sane are mocked as naïve.
But Quixote endures, not as a hero, but as a mirror. His madness was never the sickness; it was the cure. In him, Spain sent us its hard-earned wisdom: that imagination can resurrect nations, and apathy can end them.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Spain knows this story well.
The same land that gave us Don Quixote also gave rise to a very different kind of dreamer. One whose vision was rooted not in imagination but in fear. Francisco Franco's coup in 1936 fractured Spain along its own fault lines — poets against generals, peasants against landowners, a nation destroyed by its own reflection.
The Spanish Civil War was more than a conflict of ideology; it was a war over the soul of reality itself. The Republic had promised progress, land reform, education, equality, but the forces of reaction, armed with myth and the Church and the army, rose to reclaim the past. For three years, Spaniards fought not just for territory, but for the meaning of their country’s soul. Picasso painted Guernica. Renowned Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca was executed. Ernest Hemingway became a war correspondent. Priests blessed executions. Families hid their loyalties behind locked doors.
When Franco’s fascists finally triumphed, the dream of a modern Spain collapsed into silence. For nearly 40 years, the country lived under dictatorship, censorship replacing literature, loyalty replacing truth. In Franco’s Spain, even the act of remembering became subversive.
And yet, in that darkness, the spirit of Quixote endured, quiet, bruised, but breathing. Students met in secret. Writers disguised dissent as folklore. Artists painted hope in symbols too abstract for censors to read. Beneath the marble mask of the regime, imagination kept the country alive.
Then came 1975. Franco’s death opened a wound and a window. Spain, uncertain and trembling, looked inward and chose again to believe. Chose democracy, not delusion. Chose the dream of freedom, however fragile. The Transición to democracy was not triumphant, it was tentative, uneasy, miraculous. But it was real. A collective act of faith to rewrite Spain’s story, to create a better future on the remains of the past.
That spirit of defiance has not died with the end of the Transición. Fifty years on, Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez stands against the same forces that once silenced his country — this time not only from within, but issuing from Washington itself. When the United States launched its war on Iran in 2026, Sánchez refused to allow American forces to use Spanish military bases, closed Spain's airspace to American warplanes, and distilled his government's position into four words: "No to the war." Trump threatened to cut off all trade with Spain in retaliation. Sánchez did not yield. The land of Cervantes, which once whispered its dissent in back rooms and borrowed metaphors, now speaks plainly into the open air.
Mere months after the Transición, Spain sent Don Quixote to Washington.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The ghosts that Spain exorcised half a century ago have found new life here.
In Washington, the architecture of democracy still stands, but its language has grown hollow. The same marble pillars that once symbolized resilience now echo with the rhetoric of grievance. Flags wave not as symbols of unity, but as nationalistic tribal markers, declarations of belonging to the truthless faith of fascism.
We are living through a slow, deliberate corrosion of reason. Fascism here doesn’t march in uniforms or salute to drums; it drapes itself in scripture and nostalgia. It promises greatness while dismantling empathy. It speaks in the tongue of patriotism but acts in the service of power. It does not build monuments, it weaponizes them. It turns symbols already thrown into question into monuments meant to terrorize. Christopher Columbus wiped out entire populations of native peoples, enslaved them, raped them, brutally tortured and murdered them. Now he is memorialized as a marble weapon resolutely standing outside the White House as a signal to native communities: you don’t belong here. This land was never yours.
The machinery is familiar. History’s handwriting has not changed:
Vilify the press. Rewrite the past. Control the curriculum. Criminalize difference.
Tell the people they are victims. Tell them truth is treason. Tell them only the leader can save them.
In Washington, DC, the machinery is not a metaphor. In August 2025, the president declared a crime emergency in DC and deployed over 2,000 National Guard troops to the District’s streets, despite the fact that crime rates had fallen to a 30-year low. Armed soldiers now stand at Metro stations, patrol tourist corridors, and set up checkpoints in neighborhoods where families walk their children to school. The Metropolitan Police Department was federalized. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, with new weapons and new recruits, came to the District in greater numbers to bring chaos, fear, and absolute terror. Out-of-state guardsmen from half a dozen Republican-led states arrived in a place that had not asked for them, did not need them, and did not want them.
If you live here, as I do, you felt it immediately: the way the District’s rhythm changed. Free DC signs, T-shirts, and hats sprang up all over. Parents rerouted their walks to school. Restaurants saw their reservations drop by a quarter in the first week. Neighbors organized volunteer patrols, not against crime, but to stand between their children and federal agents and soldiers who had been sent, ostensibly, to protect them. The DC attorney general called it an unlawful occupation. A federal judge agreed, ruling the National Guard deployment unconstitutional. Yet, in January 2026, the deployment was extended through the end of the year.
This is what it means to live in the heart of an empire: to be both its symbol and its subject. Washington’s 700,000 residents have no voting representation in Congress, no power to refuse the troops, no recourse when the president commandeers their police. The Home Rule Act, already tenuous, was exposed for what it has always been: a leash, not a charter.
Don Quixote stands a short walk from where the guardsmen patrol, bronze lance raised against the same wind that ruffles their fatigues.
And so, as Spain once did, the United States is learning how fragile democracy truly is. The book bans. The checkpoints and abductions. The threats against teachers and journalists. The whitewashed lessons in classrooms where children are told that slavery was a “trade.” The lawmakers who quote God while legislating hate. The justices who mistake faith for law. The mobs who wrap their rage in flags and call it freedom.
All of it, the spectacle, the denial, the performative cruelty, is the same illness with a new symptom.
Here in the capital, you can feel it rising like humidity before a storm. You can see it in the eyes of men who believe that power is purity, and purity is theirs alone. You can hear it in the speeches that praise order over justice, control over compassion. You can trace it through the fear that silences even the brave.
And yet, Don Quixote still rides, bronze against the blue sky, absurd and unbroken. His lance gleams in the sunlight like a question we still refuse to answer:
What is madness, and what is faith?
The bronze catches the last light of day. The nation’s capital glows, marble and steel, illusion and empire. Inside the Capitol's chambers, new laws are written. Elsewhere, books are banned. Teachers are silenced. Children are told that the truth is too dangerous to know.
And still, Don Quixote rides.
He leans forward into the wind, eyes fixed on an invisible horizon. He does not rest, does not yield, does not compromise. His madness remains his grace.
He endures for every artist, every teacher, every dissenter who refuses to surrender imagination to the machinery of control. His defiance is not heroic but human, the fragile insistence that goodness is still possible.
Perhaps that is the real meaning of this monument: not heroism, but resistance. Not sanity, but conscience.
And in DC, conscience is stirring — not in the halls of power, where the windows have been darkened, but in the streets, in the wards, in schools, in the ordinary miracle of neighbors who choose not to be silenced. In the months since the occupation began, Washingtonians have organized with a speed and seriousness that recalls the movements Spain used to claw its way back to democracy — as if something cellular in a District built on self-governance recognizes the moment and refuses it. Free DC, the grassroots campaign, has built teams across all eight wards and trained residents in the ancient arts of noncooperation and civil resistance; “Free DC!” has become a chant heard at soccer stadiums and street corners alike, rising from the same ground where guardsmen patrol, bouncing off marble facades that were never meant to be occupied. The Metro DC chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America has organized community defense against immigration raids, fought to suspend local cooperation with ICE, and continued to press for public power and social housing. These are not abstractions; they are the material conditions that make democratic life not just possible, but worth defending.
The forces Free DC and Metro DC DSA are fighting against are not windmills. They are giants. The people of Washington, DC — teachers, parents, organizers, artists, federal workers rebuilding their lives after DOGE dismantled their careers — are choosing, as Spain once did, to tilt at them anyway.
The fascists will always come, in Spain, in the United States, in every age that forgets its poets.
And still, the dreamers will rise.
Don Quixote rides forever toward the impossible, reminding a weary world that truth is not safe, but sacred. That madness, when born of love, is sometimes the last sane thing left.
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