Crashes, Bars, and People

When I walked out my building’s door this morning, I saw a motorcycle parked there, perpendicular to the cars,  had been knocked over. It smashed its handlebars into the back of a small car decorated with warm and loving stickers. The panel was crunched. It’s fiber glass could not resist the falling bike

I do not know who the car or the bike belonged to. Nor do I know who knocked it down. 

Parking places are scarce in this older part of town, El Centro. People drive around to look for one on the streets or they search the underground parking the city and private businesses provide. My neighbors who have cars (some do and some do not) have contracts  at some distance.

Once in Sugar House, Utah, I came out of a coffee house to find my sedan I’d parked on the busy Highland Drive with its side smashed. No vehicle stuck around to claim responsibility. No driver left a note. I was panicked for a minute about what to do and decided I had to call the police to make a report.

Fortunately there were witnesses. As I calmed down, they showed up and stayed to tell the cops. It turned out a public bus side swiped my car.  At least that was now officially registered. 

They bureaucracy of the agency tried denying it, but the police report made all the difference. I do not even know if the bus driver filled out an incident report which he should have. In any case, the bus company and I  entered a period of struggle. Finally, they had no choice but to pay: my insurance went after them. And they had to give me a rental car, though they tried to give me one with advertising for them on it.

Screech,  I do not know how this fits together, such is the way of accidents. I can only imagine locked brakes sounding like the shrill breaks and squawks of a beginner on a tin whistle. 

Tonight, November 2, I, a beginner, spent a couple of hours in a bar playing Celtic music on that tin whistle in a pick-up group. Odd encounters from earlier times pushed me into athis different reality. 

I’m a bassoon player and do not know how to play the tin whistle but I can figure it out with a little work. A student from Ireland gave me a token of himself when he presented me with one. As I had to get rid of almost all my belongings before coming to Spain, in a split second, I put the whistle in the to keep pile. And here I am with it as the only instrument this former musician brought to Spain and it's my entry fee into a new world. 

Over the years, I have spent little time in bars.  As someone raised Mormon, the culture of such places was foreign. When I ceased to care so much about the religious issues of identity, I just did not have the custom of going

The learning curve of the culture left me with little desire to cross those boundaries unless I was with a group of people who were going there. I have done my duty, to be sure, serving people from a pitcher of beer when I have gone without me drinking any, though I am not a rigorous tea-totaler. 

Once upon a time I got caught not drinking while serving by a significant Peruvian anthropologist who was twelve years older than I, Juan Ossio. His. formative studies of historic messianism—resistance through ritual—in the Western Peruvian Andes had already caught my attention. 

He visited the University of Texas Austin where I was a graduate student. After his talk, we Andeanists went to an outdoor bar. Pitchers of beer were ordered and I did my thing. Ossio interrogated me as to why I was not drinking. 

I had to tell him about my background as a Mormon. He dismissively told me that with that and my refusal to drink I could never make it as an anthropologist in the Andes.

But I did and oddly, it was my Church that killed that career path when they took away my funding and my job. Without those, I could not afford to do field work nor travel to professional meetings, though I kept trying.

Once ensconced in Utah Valley University, I was able to recover a bit, but those key missing years were a gap that hurt and was ultimately unfillable.

That accident of being crushed by power in a community invoked a collective response much larger than a single individual. I raised my fist and resisted, sometimes with others, but at times alone. (A poem written and read in the Salt Lake First Unitarian Church during the depth of those days can be found here: https://avoidingentropy.blogspot.com/2025/11/it-happens.html )

Ossio accompanied lMario Vargas Llosa, Peru’s great novelist, in an important if controversial 1983 commission to the community of Uchuraccay, during Peru’s years of internal war, to investigate the killing of journalists. Later, Ossio became Peru’s Minister of Culture.

His writing has been informative. Beyond that, I learned from him what a snake pit the professional world is in Peru. Unfortunately, our paths never crossed again after Austin.

In a wrenching transition, let’s go Back to the bar today. I had a great time. Though I did not play anywhere near my former standards, I enjoyed playing jigs and reels with two violinists and two guitarists, the violinists from opposite ends of the US and the guitarists from Scotland and Wales, the Celtic fringes.  When I could not play because of key or because they had no sheet music, I sang.  

I walked away and thought now, as I get ready to turn 71, it is time to get over myself and learn to enjoy bars. I do not have to drink, because I really do not enjoy that although I no longer have a religious prohibition against it. 

Bars are about so much more than drink.  They are social places where people gather to hang out. 

So here we go, on the day the motorcycle destroyed the rear of the car in front of my house, I crossed to a different part of life, in a sequence of random associations that somehow seems significant. I now accept having bars as part of my life and enjoying them. While I could still reminisce with Juan Ossio, sadly, it is too late for me to meet Vargas Llosa. He died some six months ago.

 

   

  

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.

The Right and the Church, a Very Spanish Challenge

Catholicism, the historical rock of Spain, showed cracks and breaks this last few weeks. In this it displays some of the challenges faced by Churches during these years of a resurgent Ultra Right.

The Spanish Bishops’ Conference publicly criticized the efforts of the Ultra party VOX in Murcia to ban Muslims from celebrating public prayers or ceremonies in order to protect the heritage and traditions of Spain. 

VOX then criticized the Church for its position on immigrants and accused it of timidity given how mired it is in the latest reports on sex abuse in the Church. 

Now, the Archbishop of Tarragona, and president of the important Tarraconense Bishops Council, Joan Planellas, is striving to build a nuanced wall between the Church and the claims of the Nationalists of VOX while also providing pastoral council to the Catholic base of VOX, a group opposed to abortion, gay marriage, and increasingly to the immigration of Muslims which VOX paints as antithetical to Spanish traditions.  

“A Xenophobe cannot be a true Christian,” Planellas strongly asserted.  A true Christian must “love. To love deeply is the message of the gospel. To love your neighbor is to try to make others happy” in evident contrast with hatred of Muslim immigrants.

While he hoped to draw the distinction between ideas and the changes they take on when they become political slogans, the line between love and xenophobic hatred became the headline. 

Within the Church the issue is not always so clear. El País reported that the Bishop of Asturias, for exsmple, called muslims “moritos”, a troubled and dismissive term. The Archbishop of Taragona insists this opinion is simply not in line with the majority of Spain’s Bishops. He asks political leaders to stop polarizing the issue of immigration lest it lead to problems such as in France.  

Yet, Santiago Abascall, the head of VOX, sees an opening and is likely to continue to pick at it it for political advantage even if that means disagreeing with and challenging publicly Spain’s clerical hierarchy although with certain gentleness. 

Behind this conflict is the old idea that Spain and Catholicism should fit together like hand and glove. In truth they never have, yet Spain has lived centuries of political and religious projects to make them so. 

In the Franco period, the Church was one of the main props of the dictator’s state marginalizing the religious left from power in the Church and to innoculate Spanisard against cultural modernism.  

After the coming of democracy. before the pederasty scandal, that alignment contributed to the Church’s loss of popular support. Within the Church, however, the political right and the support of the state have not always been accepted. The Church is a very complex and varied institution. 

I am learning about Spain given my background as a Latin Americanist. Let me give some examples from there—especially since the contemporary nationalists, the Hispanists, insist that Spain’s American domains were never colonies but part of Spain and given that Spain and Latin America are historically interconnected over and over again.  

In the sixteenth century, the Dominican Bishop of Chiapas, the Spaniard Bartolomé de las Casas, strongly and publicly criticized the colonial secular order and the exploitation of indigenous peoples. His suits ended up in the courts of Spain and have left a legacy, from within the Church of support for less privileged and non-Western people that still have an impact today. 

 Another more recent Dominican articulated the Theology of Liberation while a professor at Peru’s Catholic University, Gustavo Gutierrez. This movement took off, and not solely on the basis of his influential work, it gave a heart ache to the anti-Communist and hence anti-Left Pope John Paul and the Catholic right more generally including to Spain one of the major suppliers of clerics to Latin America.  

Specifically, the Cardinal of Lima, Juan Luís Cipriani of the very powerful and very Spanish Opus Dei, saw Liberation Theology as a barbarism and attempted to destroy it. Father Gutierrez proved untouchable, in part because of the institutional separation of the Catholic University from the ordinary hierarchy of the Church.  Gutierez survived until age took him, while Cipriani suffered a less fortunate demise. 

The much celebrated Cardenal of Opus Dei, Cipriani, supported a very right wing religious organization that caused his downfall, the Sodalitium of Christian Life. It grew up among privileged young people in Lima and spread to become very powerful and numerous. 

It was created by Luís Fernando Figari. among others, in 1971. Figari, though Peruvian, leaned strongly toward the Spanish Falange, the Fascists, and over the decades came to be taken as a charismatic and almost untouchable religious hero and political influence.  

In El País, sociologist Carlos Castillo Mattasoglio wrote last year  “My hypothesis is that the Sodlitium belongs to a political project. It is the resurrection of fascism in Latin America using the vertebral connections of the church.”

Figari’s power continued until the Vatican intervened and gave credit to reports of his sexual abuse of youths within the Sodalicio. Figari was not alone in this use of sexual power. Under Pope Francis, the Vatican did what had seemed impossible earlier. It closed Figari’s Sodalitium and excommunicated him. This was a double blow: both against pederasty and also against the powerful right wing of the Church. 

While Opus Dei, founded in Spain by José María Escrivá may indeed maintain some untouchability, its first Cardinal, Cipriani, was undone by Sodalicio, and his years of creating enemies from his rabid capitalism and more general opposition to popular movements in society and in the Church.

Indeed Francis moved to bring Opus more directly under Vatican authority and reform it. Still, it and its related groups, is very strong among the American Catholic Right Wing, including the Supreme court and members of the Administration and congress. The US Catholic right has been a strong force of opposition to the reformist Francis as well as one of the most important supports for the regime of Donald Trump.

The Church, as led now by the Agustinian Pope Leo, faces this difficult political terrain of a still powerful Right Wing in the Church in the Americas and in Spain, while also containing a progressive Church. 

VOX sees this and is, I believe, deliberately pounding crack lines in the Church it to see if it can splinter the left from the right and from Church legitimacy despite the Archbishop of Tarragona’s hasty denial of such a possibility. The hope for VOX would be for the right to gain ascendency within Spain and within the Church. 

After all, Spain and Catholicism should go together, I expect he feels, like hand and glove which unity is supposed to be a key of Spanish tradition.