Binaries, Retirement, and the Long Fight

 El País, the paper that trumpets throughout Spain, loudly, published an interview with the Princeton bioanthropologist Agustín Fuentes. 

The main subject was Fuentes’ new book in Spanish and in English. Its title mildly says Sex is a Specturm; The Biological Limits of the Binary.  HIdden in that academic prose is a confrontation, an explosion of the basis for Trump’s attacks on Trans people and on so-called “wokeness in general around gender. 

The interview is much stronger. Fuentes, the American son of a prominent Spanish scholar Victor Fuentes who spent his career publishing and teaching in US Universities. Agustín states that the binary of man / woman, or indeed any binary to understand sex and gender is a failure. It is more philosophy than science, he avers. 

Other than the vigor of his argument and a tsunami of recent data pushing it, this is not new. Many of us have been teaching, writing, and arguing the same for more than two decades as the idea very slowly made its way into the scientific mainstream against great resistance and against data. 

That is not what I want to write about.  Instead, I note Fuentes’ courage to publish this when Trump is charging protection money from Universities and demanding they, as well as the whole scientific establishment establishment censor such ideas. 

Trump and the Republican party he has stormed know how Gramscian control works and how closing off institutional venues while stigmatizing ideas and giving them real costs changes discussion. It creates a new world of the given and makes the older the unspeakable. 

Fuentes acknowledge this and says to the interviewer, Matthew Raspanti, that he is working to recuperate Spanish citizenship for when Princeton is forced to get rid of him or it becomes too costly for him to research and write in Trump’s America.  

Curiously, Fuentes was on one of the last panels I attended at my last American Anthropological Society meetings, held ironically in Toronto, Canada.

He is impressive but I did not know that I was setting out on a path he might tread soon, academic exile. In my case, it was under the cover of retirement and was not the first time i had faced exile. 

I saw the thickening clouds of the ultra right and their attacks on higher education, especially on issues of gender and sexuality, as well as more generally what they loosely term ‘Marxist” ideas, 

I came of age during the early stages of flourishing of Western Marxism in the Academy. We read and critiqued it deeply. Nonetheless, I am strongly influenced by Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, E.P Thompson, and many more. My basic approach is political economy with a focus on social formations and historical change. 

After being forced out of BYU because of my research and, even more, writing on guerrilla groups who attacked the LDS Church in Latin America, I found myself without a job, cut off from sources of funding for research, and so on. An important part of why has to deal with stigma, blacklisting, and so on.  

I kept writing and kept researching as best I could and found myself back in the Academy but in the wilderness of a department of Evolutionary Anthropology, and a bit later in a small program at a state college in the most right wing county of Utah. The very idea of academic freedom was contentious if it circumscribed power and collective political and social thought. 

Many of us professors fought and opened a space, as the college became a university and grew—driven by demographic demand. Nevertheless, the university faced constant vigilance from Ultra and less rigid conservative powers in Utah governance and in society. 

As they became more connected with a new ecology of Ultra Rightwing focus on higher education that was growing in importance and in Florida let to the take over of a college, I could see sharply carved writing on the wall. 

It seemed it would be less and less possible to teach what I was trained in and in which i had worked. When combined with personal physical issues, I decided to retire to Spain. It has been refreshing to be in a country where socialists are at the helm and are a strong force (though I am banned from working but not writing as a condition of my visa), such that even conservatives accept many basic ideas though the Ultra Right is growing.

I wish Fuentes well and encourage people to obtain his book and read it. This is the cutting edge of a great thrust of biological science that may be on the edge of erasure by power. I hope it continues to find a home on the margins. 

P.S. The following might interest some of you.  The Decline and Fighta for Academic Freedom and Integrity 

https://davidclarkknowlton.blogspot.com/2025/07/binaries-retirement-and-long-fight.html

Conversation While a Front Approaches

 

The air is cooler this morning, as I sit on my terrace above the street. Not much, just a few degrees. But it makes a difference.  My plants seem more relaxed. 

A front bludgeon’s its was across the peninsula bringing much cooler air. Most of the peninsula can expect thunderstorms and rain, sometimes heavy rain from its clubs and tackles.  Alicante’s capital city will miss out. It will be somewhat cooler but dry. I would love the rain.

I lived for years on the Mexican Border, in El Paso, when young, and grew up with the drama of monsoons in July. Very dry land and arroyos that fill up quickly bringing flash floods even into the city.  

This small corner of Spain, is that dry, perhaps even more so than my El Paso. 

Rain seldom visits us here, even though the spring was unusually rainy. We have days after days of intense, bright sunshine. 

Still, you can see water-carved gullies all over this desert land, just like in El Paso, only more so. 

We get clouds and cooler weather, but storms, no matter how much they bluster and bludgeon across the peninsula, tend to skip over us.  The ones that don’t carve the landscape.

I am sure the reasons are meteorologically complicated though the  obvious answer is that we are in the rain shadow of the mountains that rise on the coast and the uplift to the great Spanish plateau.. 

A few weeks ago, Alicante and water was a topic of conversation when I met a movie-star handsome Ph.D.student in a cafe who has lived here for years while studying in the university. He is Palestinian from Gaza. 

Instead of spending more than a few sentences on the genocide, he steered our conversation elsewhere, such as to Alicante City and his impressions as a Levantine Arab. 

To him, Alicante feels like an Arabic city. Everywhere he turns he finds styles, concepts, and words from the Arab world. 

He said the city’s name, Alicante, sounds to him like an Arabic phrase which means a place with no water, a very dry place.

Alicante was an Arabic town and the Arab castle still sits above the city (with Christian accretions) on Mount Benacantil). 

Over the centuries, Alicante has had much back and forth with Algeria and Tunisia, as well as with Morocco. 

Indeed, this city is one of two in Spain with the largest percentage of foreigners among its inhabitants, some 23%. This is the official number composed of people with residence permits. The actual number is much larger. 

In the Province of Alicante the largest number of immigrants is from the UK, mostly an older group of retirees and sunny-beach seekers from the land of green and rain, However, in the city, the largest group is from Morocco, followed ever more closely now by Colombians.

Before the Arabs, Alicante had an indigenous population. Then Phoenecians came here, probably to take advantage of its port. The Romans, built a small city here, called Lucentum, the place of light. A small set of its ruins can be visited north of Mount Benacantil. 

Spain as a whole was a very important Roman province and people still speak versions of its language. Iberia was a center of the empire. 

In fact, the first non Italian Emperor came from from Sevilla, then Hispalia. He was the very gay or bi emperor Trajan who was popular and had a huge impact on the entire empire. 

I devoured a book review this morning in El Pais for a new book about him by the historian David Soria (Trajano, el mejor emperador Desperta Ferro 2025).

Sevilla located on the Guadalquivir river was a Roman place. Then the Goths intervened and later Sevilla became an important city in Arab Spain. 

Arabic flourished here though much of the population retained versions of their Latin now Arabized. This is reflected in contemporary Spanish where even simple words like shirt (camisa) or cotton (algodón) are Arabic.

But there is an historical break when Alicante—like other places in Spain—carried out an ethnic cleansing.The Arabized and Islamic population was driven out and people from Catalonia and Aragon were brought in to repopulate the area. Centuries elapsed before Arabs again became a significant part of the population as they are today. It was in the nineties that Moroccans began here in numbers. 

In all of this one hears the fears of the right wing types who speak out against immigration as a threat to the Spanish nation and to ideas of population replacement. However, the majority of the non-immigrant population of Alicante favors immigrants and tries to embrace them and let them know they, like rain and cool air, are welcome. 

Another numerous group of immigrants that is growing perhaps faster than Moroccans is not Arabs, but is composed of Ukranians, most fleeing Russia’s devastating adventure. 

Monday morning, as I went into one of my favorite places, where the air conditioning was fortunately strong because it had not cooled off in the night, I was warmly greeted by a woman who works by the front window rolling shaping and forming dough.  This morning, she was cutting pieces of focaccia. 

She asked how I was and whether my eyes were better (I have had an infection in both eyes and a reaction to Ciprofoxin).  When she verified the swelling was gone and my lids had almost returned to their normal color, she said “I had my eye operated on last week.”

In Spain, she said, they do not do the operation and so she had to return to her home country, Ukraine. Her city, as she said is close to the Russian border.

I was doubly surprised because I had thought she was Argentine, as almost every other worker in this cafe and Italian food shop is. I was also surprised she returned to a war zone for her surgery. She said, in response: “When you live there you mostly just go on with your life. You can’t let the war stop you.”

Days of the Dreaded Sun

The dreaded sun of late July has already appeared.  Though its heat never dissipated through the night, it is burn up the streets even more.

Being very pale and someone who has had cancers removed from his skin,  as well as blistering sunburns, I have never been one of those blonds who beginning as early as possible in late April begins losing his shirt and seeking every opportunity to be near reflective water. I have never developed that tawny tan that blonds get.

I slather sunscreen whenever I go outside in the day, and try, desperately try, to stay in the shade. I watch the sun on the ground, on people, and on buildings, from places where its mostly absent.

Still the beaches fill with people in daytime and northern and Eastern Europeans turned red abound.  

If only I were like my poet friend who goes to the beach at night, when the moon slides across the sky, and tucks himself into the waters of a slowly cooling sea. 

It is not only the sun that is hot, politics is also roaring and sparking, as are fires in some of the peninsula’s mountain forests. 

Last week I wrote about Torre Pacheco, a town in the melon fields filled with Moroccan agricultural workers. The right sought to create an image there of villainous criminal migrants, words that might as well have spring from the fiery tongue of an Orange hate-monger in Washington.  

The Ultras poured in, young men hoping for thuggery and to achieve some nationalist dream, internet goons and influencers, as well as politicians. The police came out and cordoned off the majority Moroccan neighborhood, arrested thugs and politicians, the latter for illegal hate. Spaniards also came out to support the immigrants whether just to pollsters or in more concrete actions.  

The Ultras tried again, in another town, a suburb of Madrid.  Again failure.  But their professional tongue waggers with colorful capes as if they could be national symbols, instead of mass producers of prairie pies, keep trying.  For some reason, the conservatives who are not Ultra, are refusing to denounce them, even while hoping their stink draws flies who vote conservative.  They play a dangerous and polluting game. 

But people are talking. Immigration is a constant theme.

It could still mire the Socialist President Sanchez whose wheels are mired in the thick mud of corruption.  

However, the opposition, conservative party, the PP, sprang a corruption scandal of their own. One can hear its hissing from their political tires. Their vehicle slows.

It is a hot summer, hotter than average. The papers occasionally publish deaths; already they number more than a thousand for Spain for two months. Mostly deaths of poor people and elderly, I am told. 

Still the days have turned noticeably shorter, and soon it will be August when many take vacation. The heat will still be here, but its abatement comes closer. 

Honestly, this year, I will not mind when the day comes I put my shorts away for the year. 

 

Tomatoes and the Sublime in Alicante

Tomatoes, fat and shiny draw me.  They are elegant, almost preternatural, and sublime with their wealth of shades and flavors. 

Tomato season has arrived in Spain. 

Supermarket tomatoes appear all year round like key rings of plastic saints, so different from the fully sculpted and full rendering of Holy Figures in the main Churches and processions. Tomatoes fresh from local fields, like images of the Holy Mother, bring in the divine and claim space in the Public Market, at least from vendors that know the value of the local and of devotion.

One of those is Silvia  a smiling blondish woman whose eyes carry traces of pain. Yet she is building a business emphasizing quality tomatoes. Every vegetable vendor in the market offers tomatoes, but her’s are a class apart. 

Her stand is not filled to overflowing with product. It has medium sized baskets with tomatoes carefully chosen for ripeness as well as foremost quality. When I go to the market, I always look to see if Silvia is there and know, that if she is, I will spend more than I had planned. 

This morning, while she finished with another client,noticed she had a few different products that seemed carefully chosen. The client was weighing and feeling the three different bottles of olive oil she offers from a grower in the nearby area of the Sierra de Cazorla, Jaen.

Not only is this tomato country, it is even more, olive country. Groves of gray green, smallish trees mat the city in all directions.  White buildings, tile roofs, palm trees and olive groves symbolize because of their omnipresence this part of the Eastern Mediterranean. But some areas are better for growing than others, and some farmers have better reputations.

That is why I rely on Silvia. When we talk, I feel like I am before a found of knowledge. 

Of course, I have years of experience talking to producers and vendors in markets in Latin America, the US, and now here. It is almost always worth getting to know your vendors and building a relationship with them.

Silvia greets me by name and remembers what I bought last time. This time I asked something different.  I asked about two different bottles of chile pepper paste. They are the two major kinds of hot peppers of this part of Spain, the ñora and the choricero. 

After quickly dispatching the issue of heat, we talked flavor. The choricero is darker and a bit smoky, while the ñora is brighter and airier.  Silvia said that here in Alicante people prefer ñora for their cooking. They add just a little bit to their stews and such. 

This led to some joking about machismo and men claiming to be able to eat the hottest chiles found.  

Silvia dipped her head a bit in propriety, and then told about when she lived in Argentina. Her husband was from there and her mother-in-law would bring out chiles that were very hot.  Thin and long, generally no more than an inch, the mother-in-law would giggle and call them “la puta que te parió”. A profanity that means the “whore that bore you” but is more equivalent to F*%$. They carry a striking and biting burst of heat. 

We then talked about other vulgar names for them in South America and so on before we agreed that while one can eat very hot foods, that level of spice can make it difficult to taste other flavors.

We also lamented, that at least in Alicante, there is not a culture of chiles yet that takes note of color, texture, flavor, and—sigh—terroir.

Though that theme was spicy and sharp, it led to Silvia grumbling about how people want tomatoes to have a look that stands out from normal supermarket offerings. Sh pulled out a couple of beautiful smallish and perfect tomatoes, as if the ideal type of a vine ripened fruit. 

People do not seem to want these though they have the best flavor, she said. They are a Japanese. tomato that only a few growers here have.   

I too would have passed them by, but because I talked with her, I learned about a treasure.

I ended up taking a few of those and then a couple of big beefsteak-style tomatoes fresh from the edges of the city, Altea and Muxamel. They are wonderful. Their flavor is a beautiful balance between acidity and sweetness.  

They make me want to go buy some fresh bread from a good local bakery and make tomato sandwiches, with fresh basil leaves from my balcony, a splash of good red wine vinegar, and that olive oil from. Cazorla in Jaén. 

Braves Running in Violence at Dusk

 

As I was leaving, the mood in Alicante’s Public Market turned fierce this morning. Normally it is calm and businesslike, except when knots of tourists block stands and paths to listen to their guides and then buy nothing. 

Today, a small gray-haired man, about my age, raised his arm and shook his fist at two tallish, darker skinned men behind the display case in a meat stand. Their eyes were ready to shoot fire as their skin turned darker with rage. 

Inevitably curious about Alicante, I paused.

Spaniards like you went to work in other countries, the gray haired man shouted. That was not so long ago.  

It is all because of you guys, the Right. You create these problems

Strangely ceding a couple of points, one of the taller men shouted back, well we did not go to delinguir.

That word means to commit misdemeanors and sometimes crimes. 

I moved away before the match drew more people and turned even more angry. In Bars, and elsewhere, Spanish can argue forcefully. Their voices are resonant and really boom. But I have never seen an argument in the market through this whole year of being here. 

Part of the reason I walked away was because the context seemed to me explosive and to draw from violence last night and the night before in a neighborhood of farm workers in the next door region of Murcia.

Everyone awakened these days to news that either focused on an elderly Spanish man being apparently beaten by a young Moroccan man whose friends filmed it and put it on a Tik Tok, the news says. I have not seen it. Or, people would perceive hordes of masked self-proclaimed Spanish nationalists marauding through the evening both nights in a hunt (cacería) for immigrants, read Moroccans.

The roving men, armed with machetes and sticks, shovels and hoes, if not more, came from as far away as Madrid, Valencia, or even Alicante, to heed the call of a local leader of VOX, the ultra right wing party to hunt Moros (Moors or Moroccans in local parlance). The call was for vengeance for the man’s beating and to take security into their own hands. 

But the call also comes after the national party has called for the repatriation of millions of immigrants and their Spanish-born children using language from Germany that Trump and his ghouls also rely on, including the notion of replacement theory. 

At the same time, the ruling party, the Socialists, argue that Spains economy  is growing because of immigration to meet the demand for workers, even if young men often find it hard to obtain work. 

The issues are hot, inflamed by face to face debates in parliament where VOX and the conservative, post Franco, PP, the People’s Party through verbal thrusts of sharpened rhetoric to slice and wound the country’s president, who of course sends similarly h9ned swords of words to pierce his enemies, the PP’s Feijoo and VOX’s Abascal. 

Sanchez, the President, stood at the podium: Señor Abascal, why do you hate immigrants. Abascal merely closed his face and looked smug. His deputies delivered the charge of racial replacement later. In the meantime, to not be left out, Feijoo who most likely will become president should the socialists fall, thrust out, you Mr Sanchez, are a hypocrite. You claim to be a feminist but you have lived from money your father-in-law made from owning brothels and Gay saunas. You literally, have live from the exploitation of women. 

Not even the bulls running down the streets of Pamplona and into the bull ring where they will be killed by matadors before thousands have created such tension as Mr. Feijoo slicing Mr Sanchez with the bellowing cry putero, pimp. 

To not be out done and to change the focus of national discourse, VOX’s strong young men and more rotund older men have gone hunting for Moroccans.

Here in Alicante, all this appears in the news as neighborhoods that used to be villages carry out one of the most important annual rituals, the Moros y Cristianos, the great battles between Moors and Cristians when the Cristian kings took Alicante from Spains Moorish kings and carried out an ethic cleansing, replacing them with Christians back in the twelfth century of so. Despite nine-hundred years, that event still draws people and creates memory as well as a division in the population between Spaniards (Cristians) and Moors).

Just as I do not know what happened in the market as the smaller man faced off against the two larger men, I do not know what will happen in Spain, nor in Murcia, nor even Alicante. 

History is far from dead here. The market celebrates annually the day the Italian fascists, in support of Franco’s fascist forces bombed the town’s market and killed more than three-hundred people. Yet one of the founders of Spain’s fascist party is from here and French right wing Pied Noirs colonists were withdrawn from Algeria and settled in Alicante when not even France would take them because of their history of violence. Still, the city was the last capital of the Republic and has/had a vital Communist and Socialist presence. 

I read on line that local Communists are organizing to defend workers rights against VOX’ threats of more general cacerías of immigrants. 

Yet the blood has not settled into the bricks and stones of the streets in Murcia, nor has it fully joined the sand in Parliament. Swords, lances, and colorful banderillas (hooked stakes) have not been put in lockers.  More is sure to come.