Moving to a new place, whether in your own country or to a different country, usually bring joys, tensions, and downright shocks. You navigate a way among them and create yourself afresh, although seldom from whole cloth.
As you know, I live now in Spain, on its White Coast, and have for a year and a third. I also just signed up for an additional two years with approval from the Spanish government.
I speak Spanish and have since my parents introduced me into a Spanish American town in New Mexico. Yes, we spoke English. mostly—I mean, I came from coastal South Georgia and in my English had that coast’s lilt. If you say my first name in English with two syllables and a glide between them, you have won some love from me.
My Dad did speak Spanish from having lived in Argentina for three years as a Mormon missionary, though his grammar was far from the best and his accent always hurt my ear. But he had an amazing vocabulary, because he was always reading books in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
The latter because he had removed my first generation American mother from Utah and moved her to different worlds: first to Nashville and the different culture of Tennessee and then to São Paulo, Brazil where they both learned Paulista Portuguese.
My Childhood was in Spanish speaking New Mexico and then on the edge of Chihuahua.
I have lived in Bolivia, Peru, and Argentina as well as spent time in Mexico, Colombia, and, to a much lesser extent, in Chile. Mostly, I just lived in the old U.S. of A. in various English and Spanish speaking niches,
Now I’m in Spain, in a dialect region whose sounds seemed to escape my ear. Although I could speak, I often did not understand what was said back and people often paused when I spoke to them, seeming not to understand me either. The sociolinguistics of this are complex—though I shall not go there; nonetheless, the experience set me back.
I still threw myself into the society, although as I looked around for groups to participate in, I first found expat groups in English. When I applied for my NLV (retirement) visa initially, I was told: “you will love Alicante because the ex-pat community is so strong”. I took pause because I had never participated in the community of Americans or Europeans abroad. Now I do.
Things have changed, not just for me, but for Spain. It is part of the European community meaning that even within it, English is the common lingua franca. Normally, I avoid English and speak Spanish, but I have become part of that group of anglophone expats and have met many Spaniards from here and elsewhere through it who speak English and wish to do so fluently. I have also met many Europeans, French, Germans, Italians, Romanians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Poles, Russians, Czechs, and especially Ukrainians who use English. At the same time I have made friends with people from this city and province as well as the country through Spanish, even in the Anglo-phone groups.
People often try to guess my accent in Spanish—in English, it is obvious, Anglo American. A couple of days ago, a clerk in the Mercadona Supermarket, told me about my speech. He is a slightly rotund man with an engaging personality and a scruff-beard. He said, “you sound Mexican but you are not Mexican”.
Elsewhere, people pick up the massive influence of South America in my voice and grammar, but here in Spain they seem to clearly get my origins from when I open my mouth.
Though I spend time with expats and have friends, most of the time I speak Spanish here, though I do read and write too much in English. Sometimes it feels schizophrenic. But that is my new reality. I’m an English-educated bilingual, retired, adjunct professor. I just have to deal with it.
The American expat places on social media are filled with people complaining about things like the siesta, the lack of American products, a different style of life and different floor plan of homes, etc.
While I want to snicker at their complaints, I remember when I moved to St. Louis, Missouri, I was troubled legitimately by such things. I could not find decent tortillas anywhere, nor could I find chile peppers. The day I discovered in South St. Louis a Puerto Rican store that carried Mexican products I quickly transitioned to heaven. After that, every week I made a visit there.
May other things in the Midwest would surprise me and not infrequently bite a chuck out of my posterior.
Nor do I feel here the nostalgia that seems to inflict immigrants, including ex-pats who I insist are immigrants though generally the two categories are separated.
Nostalgia can be an important, a cultural form. In Argentina it is the stuff of Tango and in Brazil it even has its own word, saudades—though it is not quite the same as the English nostalgia. Saudades just floats off the tongue even if it often comes with a feeling of loss and pain, as well as joy for having memory and having had the reality it speaks to.
What I have found myself missing, now in my second year, is fall colors.
Not halloween, pumpkins, costumes, and phony webs everywhere, but trees in gold and red. I also miss the sidewalks covered with leaves. It is so fun to slide your feet through them.
That takes me back to childhood in New Mexico. (I suspect in coastal South Georgia we did not have much fall color either.)
Nor do I go to the grocery store anymore and get frustrated with what I cannot find to make my food. That was the first few weeks, until I pulled myself up by the ears and turned myself around to look positively at what they have and to cook with that.
Ok, Ok, I still miss the ease of finding Mexican products. It has been almos 400 days since last I had cotija cheese, for example. I have learned to find some stuff, work with what I have, make things I want—such as flour tortillas, for example. I should write an ode to chorizo con papas, o chorizo with eggs. I hare figured out how to make a reasonable version with Spanish products. did find some decent though dry, corn tortillas that have started appearing in the upscale El Corte Inglés near my home, or in a little Mexican store a little further away where I can find chile peppers now.
I have pretty much given up on finding Mexican food I will like in restaurants here or even less in the streets, though the taquería in the central market is not bad.
There just is not a very large Mexican population here. Sigh.
Still I have become a sailor, well attuned to local currents and winds, while still piloting a vessel formed by almost seventy years elsewhere.
What is the result, god only knows, because I do not. I am just enjoying the sailing.
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