Sunday morning and I find myself in a coffee house writing. Either reading or writing, it is a satisfying and pleasant way to pass a bit of time: something to do, people to talk to, known and unknown, an elixir to drink.
Since I first came to visit Alicante, in late 2022, coffee houses have been exploding like mushrooms after a rain, as they say. This is not a quick and heavy rain, like has been hitting Zaragoza with devastating floods the last few days, but a rather constant and gentle one even if when seen over time it seems to explode. The rain, is the growth of “coffee culture.”
In this case, despite what Google’s AI poses, I do not mean something as anodyne as the mutlifarious and multiplicitous (ha ha, I’m still an academic) ways in which people in the whole range of cultures around the world welcome and use coffee, from its birth in Ethiopia, to Arabia, to Turkey and so on, to Seattle and now to Alicante. Oops, I forgot Sydney and Melbourne.
This bland use of the word culture, while anthropologically valuable, fails here. From the US northwest coast and from Australia have spread a concentrated and specific coffee culture.
It is one of cultivation, rather than simply a sip of morning joe to get you going, it involves ideas of quality, technique, and geography. People can go to school now to learn it and, indeed, a good barista must have knowledge as they work their once Italian Espresso machine,
Anyway, the culture has exploded here, because tourists know it at home and want that kind of coffee, and because locals (including immigrants) see an entrepreneurial possibility.
The coffee house I am in right now was started by an American, I am told, and it screams gringo authenticity even if there is no flag, and even though the art of the walls is
well created from someone properly trained and in contemporary styles who is from Alicante. It is both universal and local, like Macdonald’s or Five Guys, only more so. The local is not simply a bit of cumin on their massive corporate flesh. It is the beef. This small brand is not that of a multinational, like Starbucks which definitely lacks cool, culture, and quality in this world while representing a new universal and growing culture in a matrix of brands, thousands of variously named bars and cafes with their morning café con leche, jars of instant and bags of ground coffee in the supermarkets, next to single-serve coffee pods.
Indeed, on the Maisonave, Alicante’s miracle mile of “classy shopping”, there is a large, bright and shining, if spare store focused on selling coffee pods and various machines to extract brew from them, a whole new industry. Though this is a kind of parasite on coffee culture, this latter world turns its back to plastic tub-lets.
Enough lecture, professor. My point in starting this essay was to write about people. So while all the above is saturated with humanity that is perhaps best described through statistics and graphs. i want to converse individuals, hear and even smell their humanity and history,
While sipping my latté in an Italian café marketing authenticity from that bridge between the Eastern and Western Mediterraneans and the origin place for Espresso machines, i saw one of the bakers vibing to the salsa that was playing on the sound system.
“¿Te gusta salsa? I threw into the air, “do you like salsa?”
“Uf, soy colombiano”, I am Colombian.
It turns out he is from Cali which has branded itself and created a social reality with salsa. Cali is salsa and salsa Cali. And so this somewhat heavy-set man built like a box, began gliding on the floor as he worked, hips churning the air.
We talked about Cali’s salsa culture, about its neighborhoods, about the violence he knew around him when he was a school boy there, about how cheap it is to hire an assassin but how you can’t trust them, because they will sell you to the police or to your enemies. About the lack of security of the city’s streets due to muggings, although he says Bogotá is worse. And, anyway, in his words, all of Latin America is violent.
I disagreed with him a bit. My country, the Gringo behemouth and paradise north of the Rio Grande, is extremely violent and kids grow up now with school shootings, shootings at malls, drive-bys, and so on, to which we must now add ICE-violence. I also argued that while Colombia has had an ongoing kind of shifting civil war for more than a century that varies year to year in intensity and actors that has not been true for most of the south. There, government violence was the big deal in the seventies and eighties, though Peru did start a horrible civil war in that latter decade. Now it is more gang violence.
We agreed that a common problem across Latin America is the spread of the drug trade and the violence associated with it.
He, Santi, shifted topic and said “you know, the Colombian public health system is better than the Spanish, Here it takes forever to get an appointment. There it takes time too, but at least you get one and get treated.
As his eyes bounced back and forth with his hips to the rhythm of music and of conversation, Santi molded bread.
Next time we will talk more. As I paid at the register and left, I thanked him for always remembering my order. “Just a small thing,” he replied.
What a beautiful “small thing”, better than coffee and coffee culture, to put you on dancing feet and send you into a bright day,
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