My grandmother had a problem. She liked where she lived, but there was a roundabout near her house where everyone would pile their garbage. It smelled; it looked bad. It needed to go. Since this was the 1970s in Mexico City she couldn’t rely on the government to clean up. A master of spin far ahead of her time, my grandmother had an idea. She went out and bought a four-foot-high statue of La Virgen de Guadalupe (Our Lady of Guadalupe – the patron saint of Mexico) and she put it the roundabout in the midst of all the garbage along with a vase of flowers.

The next time she passed the roundabout she noticed that that no one was piling their garbage there anymore. The next week people started taking away the garbage that was still there. A few weeks after that she noticed that there were new vases with flowers joining hers. Someone was sweeping in front of the statute. By the time five years had passed the center of the roundabout had gone from a garbage dump to an open air chapel where informal services were held once a week. True story.

Now, this could be a story about the power of religion, but I think its more truly a story of spin. With one simple statue, my grandmother changed the connotations of the space. Instead of being “the garbage dump” it became a shrine — she made it taboo to put garbage there. There’s a lesson in that: cultural and social norms influence our actions more than we realize. She didn’t have to yell, call the police, or pay a lot of money to remove the garbage. Instead she figured out how she could get people to want to clean up the space. My grandmother was brilliant.

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