Adventures in Second Person Fog

 

With sharp edged, “excuse-me’s” we sliced through the crowds of tourists blocking aisles in the meat section of Alicante’s city market. In a back corner, fortunately only people from town grabbed numbers and waited in front of the two sides of a stand. 

We were attended surprisingly quickly. The man removed chicken legs and chopped them into two: thighs and legs.  “We just want thighs,  my friend said.” 

His reply? “You have to buy both!”

My friend hefted the package and paid, saying “muchas gracias” as she turned to leave. 

He quickly responded “a usted” (to you). 

Oh language. Even simple exchanges like this can call an ethnographers attention, especially when connected with other issues that speak to social change, or that are unexpected. 

I would have thought, being Spain, he would have said ”a vosotros”, since there were two of us, and Spaniards seem to seldom use usted, and usually not ustedes, even in formal circumstances where I would expect it. 

Since the stand is Argentine, I would have expected an “a vos”, but not an “a usted”.

I am also hearing Spaniards around here use vosotros to replace the singular usted, or tú” as vos already did, to a large extent in Argentina. 

Despite what they teach in Spanish classes, second person pronouns are a scary fog filled with fast moving semi-trucks and annoying sports cars all zooming around you while you have to quickly decide which lane (pronoun) to use.  Should you choose the wrong one, it feels like conversation can quickly snarl or even collapse.  

What they teach in classes is generally true. Ud.—the abbreviation for usted—is the more formal pronoun used tor older people and more formal people as a sign of respect, while tú is used with people your own age and status and to those younger or lower in status than you. 

These are “pronouns of power and solidarity”, as Brown and Gilman named them in a seminal paper from 1960 that still seems to hold for discussions of Romance language pronouns. 

While that classic discussion lays out a useful grid in the background, it does not necessarily identify which pronouns you should use in every Spanish speaking country or in every situation.  

To speak is to risk using the wrong pronoun or to make a social and political stance vis a vis pronouns, even if you are a native. 

I recently saw a Reel where a Mexican and a Costa Rican, I believe, laughed at a Spaniard when he produced the word vosotros for the second person plural pronoun.

That is how it sounds to Latin ears attuned to hearing vosotros in the rarified world of the Church or among snobs who are putting on pretentious airs in their home countries. Yet in Spain it is in common usage and, even more, it seems to have shaken off the constraints of that web of power and status to a great extent. Vosotros now is the standard second person plural pronoun at the same time it has stalked and snared the singular Ud. or Tú in much daily conversation. 

This came home to me last weekend when I, in a social gathering, conversed with a couple of Spaniards in their fifties, I think.  The group also consisted of some Colombians.  

I mentioned how people in Cali, Colombia seem to be taking the opposite tack. They appear to be losing tú and even their regional vos for second person singular. They replace it with a universal usted. 

I commented I was hearing the use of vosotros here in Spain for that pesky second person pronoun.  

They said they grew up using usted, and liked it, but that people here in Alicante especially of a younger generation get offended when you use it or tu with them; they demand vosotros. They spoke of a language shift in their experience to which they have conformed. 

You can see why my ears perked up with surprise when the butcher said usted. It made me wonder if he was Latin American, but as I replayed his conversation over meat in my mind, the accent was not the Argentine of his mates in the stand.  I do not know where he is from, but when I go back I will ask. 

In the meantime, his usted, was casually lobbed into parting in response to our volley without a pronoun.

While I could extend this small essay with an extensive set of thoughts on the Argentine vos, for the second person singular, I shall avoid it. 

Nonetheless, I will say that it is used in many other parts of Latin America besides Argentina. I fell in love with it in Bolivia as more intimate and warm that the dry and formal sounding tú which was less that the very distant usted in terms of pronouns of solidarity. Mexico along with its own set of conjugations. 

One final comment: It seems to me that the second person set of pronouns in Spanish has been under heavy historical and contemporary pressure to change. It has and probably will shift.

I suspect this has to do with the complex set of relationships in which it is used within that vortex of power and social differences and needs to express similarity and solidarity. 

Spanish teachers and texts tend to present this set of pronouns as set. As someone who has been using this language daily for more than fifty years, in a range of Latin American countries and now Spain, I do not see it as stable nor set in concrete. Instead it is changing in different ways and at different rates all over the Spanish-speaking world I think. 

Unfortunately I did not hear the Argentines in that meat stand speak vos—maybe they do not use it as much when in Spain.

In any case the chicken we bought to make a pollo negro turned out to be unusually delicious. 

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.