Return of Mammon in a Changed Form: Ideology of Gender in Spain’s Congress

Sitting in a coffee house above the main Plaza in Cusco, Peru, more thirteen or so years ago, I heard the chants of a demonstration marching around the square. 

That in itself was far from weird. The Plaza is a ceremonial center of the region, province, and city of Cusco. Demonstrations, parades, marches, processions, vuvuzeles, bands, loudspeakers, speeches, masses, saints; they all appear at one time or another. 

This made the plaza a fascinating place to hang out and the coffee house, Cappuchino, on the upper floor, a delight—when not overwhelmed with a mix of German, Dutch, English, Chinese and God knows what else from the tourists who throng the city for a day or two. They also intrigued me but Cusco held my focus. 

This day, there was just something in the marchers’ voices, though I could not hear them clearly with my late middle-aged ears. 

I crept to one of the balconies and edged the tourists there to peer out. I saw a small and a bit ragged group of working class Evangelicals with signs decrying educational criteria for their children and especially the obscure, apparently simple, while horribly baroque. and faulty combination “ideology of gender”.

Later, that duo would appear in massive marches in Lima in support of overturning a democratically elected president and as part of an international jeremiad, that now is embodied in Trump’s regime within the US and its attacks on transgender people, and on the notions of DEI. 

Well, this morning, when I was shuffling online through Spain’s daily of record, El País, I saw that the mime of international right wing memes in search of power, Spain’s Ultras, VOX, will hold hearings on the ideology of gender in Spain’s Congress today. They wish to attach it, whatever it is, to “false accusations”, I assume of sexual and gendered violence.  

Since I first came across this then new yet bedraggled term like a raggedy doll all stitched all together from pieces of cloth that did not fit well. 

Two of those rags torn from other dresses and shirts were ideology and gender. 

So simple, apparently, yet what a moth bitten mess. 

My immediate reaction was, wait a minute gender is not, per se, an ideology but is a scientific term, a heuristic (to be way too academic), in short an intellectual tool that, borrowed from notions of genre and grammar, was useful in showing and explaining problems in the idea of sex (as a human kind)—i.e. female and male. 

It also allowed us to look at configurations of sex historically and show subtleties and changes.

It seemed a confusion of dominant ideas, i.e. sex is natural and unchanging, eternal, a given of human kind, i.e. a culture and an ideology, with intellectual tools for showing their less than given reality.

Ideology is such a tired and troubled word which I struggled with for my dissertation. In one way it can be a kind of Marxist and specifically French structuralist thought. It also is a tool of parties and their organization like sects around credos. 

In its simplest sense, for me, lay the simple notion that culture and more precisely idea have some relationship with their social usage, and the groups that generate and maintain them. Yes, in the final instance, to quote a somewhat demented Frenchman, the infrastructure (the economic, social , and political order) sets boundaries and formative pressures on ideas and their organization. 

This is all just nightmarishly complex, because it is hard to wrestle to the ground something so ephemeral as an idea or organization of ideas, an ideology. Like a greased pig, it will slip out of your words (your hands) the minute you think you have snared it and hold it. Nonetheless, it did, does, serve, as a useful intellectual tool. 

But for those creating ex nihilo, I mean naming like God or Adam, an ideology there seems to be a stable order of things outside of words, that words label and make visible.  

Oh my—too much nominalism and realism—difficult philosophy—before breakfast. I can feel the milk in my coffee curdling as I sip it. 

In the usage of the demonstrators, ideology presumed a set of ideas that were false and sinful, i.e. against the real, natural stable order derived from God, the absolute, the ending and the beginning.  

This sets out a theological and political battle not a scholarly one, though it snags terms from scholarship and mangles them. 

The second term, gender, is also complex but for now at its root is a similar notion that the term misuses language to deny the obvious and the godly, that there are only two sexes—as the Orange dictator wannabe declared in Washington—although Vatican documents and those of natural law scholars are already filled with such assertions about reality.  

Unlike, academic terms in the strict sense, they come with powers that discipline them, keep the apparent reality stable and connected to a word, sex, despite all the ice-dancing scholars and philosophers have pointed out in any attempt to seize a reality and label it while keeping both the reality and the label stable. 

Well, it turns out this mish mash of two troubled terms became useful to French and Italian right wing Catholics to name a heresy and a political/religious/academic movement they wished to work against. So they did, along with fellow travelers among Evangelicals, Mormons, and others,; as well as with a big-little man trying to reclaim and rebuild a nationalist Church and identity in Mother Russia.

Over maybe thirty years, the dyad has moved from the margins to the front lines of Ultra Right Wing politics on an increasingly global basis. 

It has become a frontal attack on feminism, Gay and Trans thought and realities. It also is a desperate hope to re-stage and re-claim a Patriarchal, Western family all the while fewer and fewer people see its value. 

Power to challenge, declare heresy, and burn at the stake is the goal. Yes, power. 

The pulling of levers by the Great Oz—them—that we are not supposed to see, while they tell us up is down, right is left, man is man and has god given natures, while woman is woman similarly with a god given nature.  

Forgive me, I must run to the bathroom behind the espresso machine and puke. 

 

 

Coffee Houses and Three Monkeys have Shaped Me

 

As you know, I go to coffee houses to write and to read, and have for years. I took up this habit, before I drank coffee and before there were coffee houses.  

This may sound weird to you, as peeling back the surface of the ordinary and showing its change over time always is. But it is also true. Coffee houses have a history and they are relatively new. 

In English we have two words that show the difference, coffee shop and coffee house and how the first used to enclose the second. 

A coffee shop is a kind of diner or cafe that served well watered drip coffee, what the Brazilians call café-té, that is a tincture of coffee.  In contrast a coffee house focuses on coffee in the modern style, with a good expresso machine, like the classic Italian ones, and with baristas trained in pulling espressos and on that basis making every other coffee drink. 

Two different worlds, two different techniques of getting coffee from toasted beans, and two different cultures of coffee. 

When I first started to come to Alicante in December of 2022 over Christmas, I only found Café Arte, which had a branch near where I was living and one downtown in FNAC’s building. I quickly made the one near my place, staffed with Ecuadorians born in Spain, as my place to sit, read, and write. In the summer of 2023, I continued that custom. 

When I returned, now to stay, in the summer of 2024, there were more places that served coffee with Italian names, an espresso machine, and an American-Australian style of thinking about coffee, far beyond and better quality than the Starbucks in the big Corte Inglés stores. I found an American Coffee house just outside of El Centro, Sip and Wonder where they went the further step of identifying their beans’ place of origin even if not so far as telling its variety or the finca, the farm it comes from. 

Coffee houses in those years globally were becoming more and more identified with “specialty coffee’, a movement from within the coffee world that I had first started seeing in Cusco, Peru, in the early years of the second decade of this century, when I wrote about it.

Specialty Coffee was already developing a definition, organically in the work of coffee professionals around the world to improve coffee from farm to roasting, market, and the final drink, an entire chain of production. An association, The Specialty Coffee Association was formed in 2023 joining the American and European groups, both with long histories. This association ranks coffee on the basis of factors all along its path from plant to cup using a 100 point scale.  

Among other factors, this scale emphasizes the distinctive qualities of fine coffee and its relationship to factors all along the global road from that tropical farm to a. cup, here in Alicante for example. Baristas now have a whole language to describe to qualities of flavor, similar to those used for fine wines. 

The words specialty coffee, since they are part of a global system of production and marketing including global contests and conferences, are now widely recognized as symbols of quality. 

The words are appearing all over Alicante, like desert flowers after a good rain. This year has seen the opening of many coffee houses, which contrast with the traditional coffee shops or bars / cafés of Spain. The latter are still place were people go for breakfast or to hangout after work or in the evening. Coffee Houses tend to draw a more international crowd and one more involved with international culture. It feels like every couple of blocks in this older, downtown part of the city, as well as in the old city, there are now coffee houses or specialty coffee stands on almost every other block. This has been a stunning growth. 

As I wrote, I became part of this world while researching and writing on Cusco, Peru. Through various circumstances, I met the three young men from rural Cusco who became a brand, Three Monkeys.  They have studied coffee along the entire chain, and have sought to improve every aspect from working with coffee producers to politicians, vendors, and so on to improve the coffee of Cusco and their own skills.  Along the way they opened their own brand of specialty coffee, mostly from their family’s finca, a laboratory and training school in Cusco, and a Three Monkeys Coffee house in that Imperial City. 

Their Coffee house was named number 22 in the List of the World’s Best 100 Coffee Shops. They also received a Sprudge Design award for their Coffee House.

The long lasting trio behind all this, Neto Solórzano, his nephew Iván Salas, and their friend Diego Huillca were named to the Forbes list of the Fifty Most Creative People in Peru for 2025. 

Yesterday, I found out Diego had won the II National Championship in Latté Art for Peru.  He and last year’s winner will now compete in the world championships to be held in San Diego, California and in Brussels.   

Congratulations Dieguito.  You so deserve this and congratulations to all the Monitos for this year of recognition and awards.

I remember vividly conversations with Diego and the other monkeys about the national and international Barista competitions and about the talent Diego so evidently showed already a decade ago and more. You and your team have worked hard, and I have been honored to meet you and talk with you, Neto, and Iván more than 12 years ago. You touched me then and continue to do so today with your drive, determination, skill and humanity.

Me and Don Quixote

A calm and quiet Saturday morning finds me on one of my favorite coffee houses, sipping an Americano and feeling the need to write. 

This has not been the easiest of weeks: at times panicked with lots of running around. I have been dealing with a problem with my visa renewal and an impending deadline 

Whether in the US, where I am from, or here, hitting the bureaucracy cold, with little idea of where you go or why, is hard, confusing, and frustrating. 

Yet this experience has been strangely pleasing.  

Towards the end, while speaking with one of those “nameless”, “faceless” bureaucrats, in this case named Roberto. I know because I asked. It suddenly occurred to me I did not have to go through all this. 

I could have hired someone, a lawyer—what in common Latin American Spanish is called, often despectively, a tintorillo. 

These are people who make their living helping people with government processes, whether scribing, negotiating, processing, or other. You used to, and maybe still can see, them gathered around the doors of government offices on little benches and at small desks, typewriter and carbon paper before them.

I would have gone high to a good lawyer who specializes in these processes as I did to get my initial visa. That process was smooth and a dream. I did learn, however, how many mistakes I would have likely made between what I thought the instructions and the wisdom on line—some of it garbage—said and how I operationalized it, put it into action. 

It was expensive to work with my attorney in California and her helper attorney in Madrid. But the process was clean and smooth. For a beginner, that was helpful. 

After a year, in part to save money and more to learn, I decided to forego that this time. Furthermore, a friend I made here in the community of Americans in Alicante told me in a coffee house where we had just met while waiting for a performance, to avoid spending the money and just do it myself.  

So I did.  Have I made mistakes, yes, and fortunately not fatal ones, although this week I wondered. In any case, this was my choice, and despite feeling often like someone taking a doctoral exam without having ever attended a class, it was worth it. 

I had to study hard, in a language I have spoken all my life but whose official variant in documents I do not know. I am learning this bureaucracy’s terminology and how they apply it to processes. Furthermore, as the ethnographer in me should know, I am learning the organization behind the terminology is simply not the same as in my  grasp of bureaucracy from my life experience. 

Duh, I am in a different country. This one may even have invented modern Bureaucracy, according to some scholars, back in the days of Charles the V of the Holy Roman Empire, when Spain ruled much of the globe and galleons navigated the oceans carrying legal documents, from Spain to its overseas territories, now called colonies often, and from them to it. 

Historians have field days—intellectual picnics—in the archives that hold this legal correspondence that still remains. Around five hundred years of it. 

How naĩve of me, when facing the modern rendition of this ancient organization of state to think it would simply be like what I knew. 

Of course, it also was not radically different. Max Weber, brilliantly grasped many of the fundamentals of bureaucracy in his early twentieth century sociology.

I spent hours, nay days, if not more, reading the complex and confusing instructions on line written to meet the needs of the bureaucracy, while also to instruct petitioners, as well as going deeper and reading the laws,. It was not just reading, but studying: back and forth and cross-correlating.

Then I had to put it into practice without even fully knowing if I had ti all right. 

The rudest moment of last week was when I took a document I figured was the right one, along with the form showing I had paid the tax required to present it. I found the right place to present it—after a few miles of walking from building to building in the hot August sun. This time, a nameless, somewhat stern but bemused man (I could see that in his eyes) looked at my passport and told me I had left Spain in March and had never re-entered though there I was sitting before him. 

I felt like all was a loss. I had gone to Turkey, but had flown back through Prague and Vienna, though none of those border posts had checked my documents or stamped my passport. I realized the document showed a lack and I could not prove otherwise. Fortunately Europe came to my rescue. 

I looked at him calmly and narrated briefly how I had returned and that I had no control over how Schengen authorities handled passports. 

He stayed stern, asked me a few more questions, returned my passport, and then said to my confusion and relief. “You do not need this document. Your procedure is going properly.”

There were more problems, of course. 

I had a program online to transmit documents to my file in Extranjería fail to authenticate the certificate on my laptop. I struggled with it, and after a good while realized I was being neurotic: doing the same thing over and over while hoping for a different reaction. 

Roberto, mentioned above, said “no worries. I’ll fix it for you.” and he did though he did not have to. 

He also submitted my documents. 

I learned in this that Extranjería can ask for documents but cannot upload them past the initial application. For that you must go elsewhere I now know where.   

A different bureaucrat—a delightful man named Jesús (breaking frame I told him in El Paso he would be called Chuy)—took time to tell me where and how I should go about submitting the documents and that otherwise my file was complete and there should be no problems. 

I felt like I was leaving both buildings having made friends.

Despite the difficult learning curve, I have found the Spanish bureaucracy to be filled with people who are interesting in themselves and live good, human lives, even if the institution is a bit disconcerting. 

Guess what, it is so in my country as well. 

I remember when Motor Vehicles refused to renew my driver’s license and the gruff agent at the desk would not tell me why. It turns out that somehow I had improperly been put on an offenders list. Once the confusion was resolved, requiring me to spend considerable time on the phone with different people, the same man unsmilingly and with no sense of irony gave me my license. 

So, although in a fit of frustration some time, I may eat my words, for now, I can only say that I continue to find Spain to be a delight and its bureaucracy to be no worse than mine though I am fidning the agents to be friendly and helpful. 

And, more importantly, I am learning much even if there is no degree certificate at the end of this schooling, just a greater appreciation for Don Quixote and Cervantes’ wisdom.