Stranger in Someone Else’s Home

 

Moving to a new place, whether in your own country or to a different country, usually bring joys, tensions, and downright shocks.  You navigate a way among them and create yourself afresh, although seldom from whole cloth.

As you know, I live now in Spain, on its White Coast, and have for a year and a third. I also just signed up for an additional two years with approval from the Spanish government.

I speak Spanish and have since my parents introduced me into a Spanish American town in New Mexico. Yes, we spoke English. mostly—I mean, I came from coastal South Georgia and in my English had that coast’s lilt. If you say my first name in English with two syllables and a glide between them, you have won some love from me. 

My Dad did speak Spanish from having lived in Argentina for three years as a Mormon missionary, though his grammar was far from the best and his accent always hurt my ear. But he had an amazing vocabulary, because he was always reading books in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.  

The latter because he had removed my first generation American mother from Utah and moved her to different worlds: first to Nashville and the different culture of Tennessee and then to São Paulo, Brazil where they both learned Paulista Portuguese. 

My Childhood was in Spanish speaking New Mexico and then on the edge of Chihuahua. 

I have lived in Bolivia, Peru, and Argentina as well as spent time in Mexico, Colombia, and, to a much lesser extent, in Chile. Mostly, I just lived in the old U.S. of A. in various English and Spanish speaking niches, 

Now I’m in Spain, in a dialect region whose sounds seemed to escape my ear. Although I could speak, I often did not understand what was said back and people often paused when I spoke to them, seeming not to understand me either. The sociolinguistics of this are complex—though I shall not go there; nonetheless, the experience set me back.  

I still threw myself into the society, although as I looked around for groups to participate in, I first found expat groups in English. When I applied for my NLV (retirement) visa initially, I was told: “you will love Alicante because the ex-pat community is so strong”. I took pause because I had never participated in the community of Americans or Europeans abroad. Now I do. 

Things have changed, not just for me, but for Spain. It is part of the European community meaning that even within it, English is the common lingua franca. Normally, I avoid English and speak Spanish, but I have become part of that group of anglophone expats and have met many Spaniards from here and elsewhere through it who speak English and wish to do so fluently. I have also met many Europeans, French, Germans, Italians, Romanians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Poles, Russians, Czechs, and especially Ukrainians who use English. At the same time I have made friends with people from this city and province as well as the country through Spanish, even in the Anglo-phone groups. 

People often try to guess my accent in Spanish—in English, it is obvious, Anglo American.  A couple of days ago, a clerk in the Mercadona Supermarket, told me about my speech. He is a slightly rotund man with an engaging personality and a scruff-beard. He said, “you sound Mexican but you are not Mexican”. 

Elsewhere, people pick up the massive influence of South America in my voice and grammar, but here in Spain they seem to clearly get my origins from when I open my mouth. 

Though I spend time with expats and have friends, most of the time I speak Spanish here, though I do read and write too much in English. Sometimes it feels schizophrenic. But that is my new reality. I’m an English-educated bilingual, retired, adjunct professor. I just have to deal with it.

The American expat places on social media are filled with people complaining about things like the siesta, the lack of American products, a different style of life and different floor plan of homes, etc.  

While I want to snicker at their complaints, I remember when I moved to St. Louis, Missouri, I was troubled legitimately by such things. I could not find decent tortillas anywhere, nor could I find chile peppers.  The day I discovered in South St. Louis a Puerto Rican store that carried Mexican products I quickly transitioned to heaven. After that, every week I made a visit there. 

May other things in the Midwest would surprise me and not infrequently bite a chuck out of my posterior.  

Nor do I feel here the nostalgia that seems to inflict immigrants, including ex-pats who I insist are immigrants though generally the two categories are separated. 

Nostalgia can be an important, a cultural form. In Argentina it is the stuff of Tango and in Brazil it even has its own word, saudades—though it is not quite the same as the English nostalgia. Saudades just floats off the tongue even if it often comes with a feeling of loss and pain, as well as joy for having memory and having had the reality it speaks to.

What I have found myself missing, now in my second year, is fall colors. 

Not halloween, pumpkins, costumes, and phony webs everywhere, but trees in gold and red. I also miss the sidewalks covered with leaves. It is so fun to slide your feet through them. 

That takes me back to childhood in New Mexico.  (I suspect in coastal South Georgia we did not have much fall color either.)  

Nor do I go to the grocery store anymore and get frustrated with what I cannot find to make my food. That was the first few weeks, until I pulled myself up by the ears and turned myself around to look positively at what they have and to cook with that.  

Ok, Ok, I still miss the ease of finding Mexican products. It has been almos 400 days since last I had cotija cheese, for example. I have learned to find some stuff, work with what I have, make things I want—such as flour tortillas, for example.  I should write an ode to chorizo con papas, o chorizo with eggs.  I hare figured out how to make a reasonable version with Spanish products. did find some decent though dry, corn tortillas that have started appearing in the upscale El Corte Inglés near my home, or in a little Mexican store a little further away where I can find chile peppers now. 

I have pretty much given up on finding Mexican food I will like in restaurants here or even less in the streets, though the taquería in the central market is not bad. 

There just is not a very large Mexican population here. Sigh. 

Still I have become a sailor, well attuned to local currents and winds, while still piloting a vessel formed by almost seventy years elsewhere. 

What is the result, god only knows, because I do not. I am just enjoying the sailing.  

  

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. 

Frustration--Shame, Relief--Joy, Bolivia and Spanish in My Life

 Tomorrow, August 6, Bolivia will break into celebration.  In 1825 Upper Peru’s congress, meeting in the viceregal capital of Sucre, declared independence and named the country after Simon Bolivar.

The day will be one of speeches and parades, as well as politicking since the country is preparing for a national election. 

Today, the majority of Bolivians speak Castilian, as they call it, elsewhere it is more generally known as Spanish. At the time of the declaration, only a small but powerful elite and people close to them spoke the language of Castile. 

In the twentieth century it has spread, taking speakers from indigenous languages such as Quechua and Aymara in this land that was central to the Incas and to pre-Inca. civilizations such as Tiwanaku, as well as to lowland polities such as those among the Guarayo and Guarani. The country has been living an indigenous revival, but the place of Spanish is well established in government and society.  Spanish is the majority and the most powerful language

In the centuries since the Extremaduran Pizarro’s troupes snatched rule from Atahuallpa and his bothers and sisters, noticeable varieties of Spanish have developed within Bolivia  that are distinctive and yet are still poorly studied, though valiant efforts are underway. 

While one can try to follow the genealogy of various features back to regions in Spain, immediately one becomes aware of the language’s hybridity. It grew for hundreds of years in the cradle of the amazing Aymara (Jaqi-aru) and the also grand Quechua (Runasimi) worlds.

Though Bolivians insist Aymara is an original language of their land, linguists increasingly point to a relative lack of diversity in this language within Bolivia, certainly when compared with the mountains above Lima, Peru. They note that even today, despite its use among farmer’s in Bolivia and altiplano Peru, across the southern Andes, the language is associated with llama herders of the highlands and argue it came to Bolivia relatively recently becoming one of the two main indigenous languages, along with Quechua, associated with mining and valleys. It also came fairly recently.

There was an earlier language that probably was the first language of the Incas and probably of Tiwanaku, an Arawak tongue Variously called Puquina or Uru that probably came up from the lowlands. It has relatives spoken even today in the Caribbean—Arawak 

While Bolivia has made these languages official and requires officials to demonstrate competency in one of them, Bolivia’s Castellano is fascinating. It has a distinctive grammar and phonology, although teachers in Bolivia may insist on the Royal Spanish Academy’s version.

The highlands of Bolivia and similar areas of Peru, are almost the only areas of the Spanish world—itself a set of distinctive versions organized in some sort of political relationship with the Royal Spanish Academy version of the formal language—where ll retains its pronunciation as ly rather than simply y. (I must note that the last few times I was in La Paz, the seat of national government, i heard y where ll would have been.) 

Curiously, the other place where this ponunciation of ll is maintained is where I now live, in Valencia, as well as in Catalonia although not in Castellá, as Spanish is called, but in Valencian-Catelan. Nonetheless Spanish speakers here tend not to use it and hence simplifyy vowel clusters where the ll or a forceful y, as spelled, would tend to separate them.  

In the highland speech of Bolivia, where the majority of the population lives, the s is never dropped or turned into an aspirant, although in the lowlands that happens. Dropping the s after vowels is extremely common here in southern Spain—as it js in lowland Latin America—though not in the north. 

Highland Bolivian speech never drops consonants, unlike almost every other Spanish dialect. Instead they can elide vowels between consonants, following the practice of Aymara creating rather complex consonant clusters, e.g. toditos becomes tdits.

I could write more about the phonology of Bolivian speech in which I was inserted for two intense years as a nineteen year old and to which I returned many times up until recently. The pressure of Bolivian weakened my native northern Mexican pronunciation and, now that I have reengaged with Mexico, my speech is an unconscious or semiconscious hybrid of the two regions.

As someone formed in a New Mexican town (Las Vegas) and then in El Paso-Ciudad Juarez, with that intense Bolivian experience I am grounded in what is often called the Highland set of dialects, those of the old colonial capitals and surrounding regions. Only recently have I come to spend more time in what are called the lowland or coastal dialects whose features of pronunciation are quite different. 

I recognize their importance and have spent time in Cali, Colombian studying their phonology. I wish I knew more of their history. I am amazed by them, but they frustrate me day in and day out as language does to someone who starts to learn it in their sixties. 

In Colombia, and now in Spain, I have been told that my pronunciation is like that of the persons who dub movies into Spanish, i.e. neutral. This latter is a highly arguable form speaking to a created, artificial Spanish more related to elite norms than to those of the ordinary people of the Caribbean basin. 

After having had my native New Mexican and then my Bolivian pronunciation heavily criticized in the University, I may have subconsciously adopted that norm as I tried to learn the prestige code of University life in Spanish, when I never studied in a Spanish speaking institution of Higher Education, though I have lectured and even taught in a few. 

From that experience of speaking non-normative dialects of Spanish and suffering criticism and then struggling to pass comes part of my feelings around living here in Mediterranean Spain. I am challenged daily by dialects I only partially, although increasingly understand (Colombian Venezuelan as well as ones from Southern Spain) dialects whose very legitimate treatment of consonants makes understanding difficult for me.

The daily frustrations (though not the daily successes and joys) came to ground  in the poem I posted yesterday (In the Green Grocers) in the image of mud, something that is neither earth nor water, or ni chicha ni limonada in my Spanish, something. I could no easily make sense of. 

I apologize for how that image offends people who may have had their Spanish criticized by the  armed guardians of the proper or the official.

For me this is a lesson in the difficulty of writing precisely and concisely in a space filled with arguments and power about what is acceptable and what not. 

I am perhaps slowly. learning the Spanishes of the region in which I live. But that does not take away they immense feeling of relief when conversing with someone whose speech is clear and understandable with no effort to me. Such as when I return to the US Southwest or northern Mexico, or to Bolivia-Peru.

Those two sensations, frustration-shame and relief-joy are part of my experience of living in Spain as a Spanish speaker.  Jallalla Bolivia, Qué viva Bolivia.  Long live Bolivia. 

Alicante Merengue

 In the evening of July 1, I arrived in Alicante’s airport on a flight from Paris, and before that from Los Angeles, and Salt Lake. It is so hard these days to find direct flights almost anywhere. We hop like toads from lilypad to lilypad in the vast ocean of this world. 

With my backpack and carryon, I walked through the baggage claim looking for the police. Because I had first arrived in Paris, I needed to have my arrival formally registered by Spanish police. Finding them involved questioning a lot of people, walking in different directions, knocking on strange doors, and so on. When I finally found the right door, the person, who answered denied any knowledge of what I needed. 

After a transatlantic and transcontinental flight I was barely able to stand up from exhaustion. Expressing myself in English would have been hard but in Spanish I faced the difficulty that my Spanish was not theirs’ and that Spain has its own bureaucratic vocabulary, and others as well, that simply are not shared. It almost reminded me of arriving in Brazil and fighting with its Portuguese.

In any case, I got myself registered and worked through the bureaucracy of immigration (thanks to a company of lawyers I hired) and now am an official resident of this Iberian land and its Mediterranean Coast. Like Romans, Berbers, Jews, Goths, and Roma before me, and now Arabs, Slavs, Latinos, and increasingly, Americans I am here to reside. In my case, officially and with permission.

The newness of it all has mostly worn off, now that six months have passed. It feels normal and it just feels like my life. 

Nonetheless, I am a questioning sort. I want to know why things are the way they are and the wrinkles of their history, Tourist narratives of history or reality simply do not satisfy me. I love to pull back the rug of ordinariness, to see what is beneath it. 

For example, everywhere I have read that though the Valencian language is official in Alicante, it is a Spanish speaking city. 

Yes, those arguments are right. Alicante has had enormous in-migration from people from elsewhere in Spanish speaking Spain, for example, nearby Murcia, Andalucía, and La Mancha. Lots to say about those places, because they each have their own assemblage of Romance descendants, including different varieties of Spanish.  

My ear is now getting attuned and I am learning to distinguish a Manchego from a Murciano. But in terms of Spanish speakers, where it gets harder, is to distinguish them from Valencian Spanish speakers and those who are from Valenciano-speaking communities but speak in Castellá, as they call Spanish. 

Historically, there are numbers of paired towns where one is Valenciano and the other is Castellano, there also are forms of speech from solid Valencian speaking communities and of Spanish speaking ones, often called Churros, that drop down in the mountains, valleys, and coasts from the area of the regions capital, the city of Valencia. 

To this you must add different variants of Valenciano. 

Foreigners—ex pats, Latinos, Arabs, and Ukranian refugees—have come in and brought their own linguistic lives. 

Already, I can outline a long paper on this topic, building on what I have read and on my conversations with local people. Even though retired, I can’t stop exploring, learning, and organizing knowledge. 

All that aside, I have wondered about the use of Valenciano in the city of Alicante. I was told the long-time dictator Franco’s repression killed it, that immigrants overwhelmed it, and, that if people speak it, they only do so in the privacy of their own homes and with trusted networks. 

Being from a bilingual city, El Paso, this did not satisfy me because I could almost feel the language here and so, delicately, began to look.  I am beginning to find it in many places, even in my own apartment building where it showed up in our chat.

The language is one thing. I also started hearing what I thought might be an accent, a variety of Spanish that is interlingual and maybe an old form, not unlike the marriages between Spanish and English that fill the South Western US. 

When people said “hasta luego” when taking leave and how they said it, seemed to me an index. 

One issue is that many just say “adiós” which is hard on my ears, with its sense of a permanent good-bye. When conjoined with other features of the speech, it seemed it was people from the Castellano speaking places that had replaced “hasta luego” with “Adiós”. 

I also noticed a distinctive feature of many of the “hasta luegos. The dipthong ue in luego was simplified to an “O” which was given a long duration and intriguing tone. “The statement became “ha’ta looogo”. (I may write about the s another time, I should). 

So I looked and it seems Valencian does not have this ue dipthong and so this may indeed be a distinguishing feature. 

Furthermore the timbre of voice and the precise sound ot the oooo may mark people as being from Valencian speaking worlds, or as being Valencian -speakers themselves. 

Am I right? I think so but this is imply a preliminary hypothesis for testing. Such things keep my mind active and fascinated with this place as I build my new life. 

I am about to say hasta luego to you all, my way with the dipthong, but first I want to say something else. It is easy to simply accept the appearance of the present without asking about its historical depth and changes.

  

On a major street nearby, in which there are newish Argentine, Italian, Greek, and so on cafes and bars, there is one that just looks like an old Spanish bar, like you would find throughout Spain,Today, while having breakfast, I asked about the meaning and history of its name Merengue. That could be meringue like in the pies. It could be a Dominican music and slang for fans of Real Madrid. I wondered, especially since the cafe's logo was of a fish like is used on the tiled walks of Alicante city but merengue does not refer to anything pescatarian according to the Royal Academy dictionary I find myself using a lot. 

The head waiter and maybe manager lit up when I asked.  (Of course, months have gone by of building a relationship.) He said, it was from the grandfather of the current owner. They are from a small town nearby and the grandfather was well known for selling meringues on a cart through town, shouting out “merengue, merengue” to announce his wares. 

The name honors him, a local sweet, the city, and possibly Valenciano. The answer made me think of the social and economic capital that comes together in individuals and families here that is behind the businesses. 

Alicante is rich and complex, far from just a place with a castle and a cute beach. 

Hasta luego y'all.