Storm and Spain on its National Day

The rain cut loose with drama. Lightning was striking close by and lakes of water fell, almost at once on the narrow street of tables. 

When I got here to enjoy my pain au chocolate (what they call here a napoleón de chocolate), fight off the pigeons, and write. I had wanted to sit outside, but all the tables were occupied. 

As a result I sat inside, in the darkish and narrow confines that included a row of maybe four or five tables and a counter-display case filled with luscious pastries. If you went further inside this narrow space you found the working bakery and maybe its owner / baker, a dry bread stick of an aging French man.

When it started to rain with the fervor of Evangelicals preaching on a street corner, drenching with sound and wet, suddenly the space overflowed with people. At first confused, I then realized these were the occupants of the tables outside. They carried their plates and cups of coffee and tried to figure out how to accommodate themselves into a much smaller space. 

A woman asked if she could take a chair from my table and, as a result, ice was broken. We talked briefly. I found out they were a group of visiting Rumanians, all women. Alicante has had relatively large numbers of Rumanians, though with rising prices in Spain without corresponding increases in income, the numbers have dropped. But these were visitors. 

One of them asked the server if there was grocery store open on this holiday morning. She had already been defending herself from customer demands in good Argentine sense—“Wait your turn. There is only me today and I cannot work any faster.” At that break i demands she lifted her thermos of hot water and refilled her gourd of yerba maté before taking a few pulls. 

While she drank, almost in unison, I and the similarly aged man sitting next to me in the dark corner, told them almost nothing was open because it was a major holiday.  

This led him and me to speak. Turns out, he is from Paris though his family is Andaluz and his new wife is from Alicante. We had a lovely conversation. At one point, he insisted Spain would be much better off it had cultural unity and just a single language.  I looked at him, with a slight smile and said “Oh I disagree”.  Well we were off, not arguing as you might expect, but dialoguing, two sides in a conversation. And we shall continue that conversation when next we see each other, and we shall, since both he and I live here and frequent that local French bakery. 

That passionate encounter took place on Thursday, the Day of Valencia which also celebrates its language, Valencian. Today is a bigger holiday and when I awoke, my patio was wet from substantial rain in the night .

Today is Spain’s National holiday, the Day of Spain, though there is conflict over its name. It has variously been called the Day of Columbus, the Day of HIspanidad (Hispanicity to coin an awkward term in English), and now the National Day. 

Spain is a lovely word with an ancient history that goes back at least to the Romans, though it probably predates them and may have origins in the Phoenecians who inhabited Much of Spain’s coastal areas (including Alicante). However, the word did not refer to what we today call Spain, but to the entire Peninsula though, in reality, the Romans who dominated the peninsula long enough to leave their language firmly entrenched—we speak a version of it today—made their word Hispania plural to refer to the peninsula. They called it effectively “The Spains”. 

Then Arab and Berber armies came from the same north Africa that had hosted large Phoenecian settlement of relevance to our peninsula, including the amazing city of Carthage. At that point the Roman unity broke and the peninsula became a set of Christian Kingdoms in the fringe of the north and an encyclopedia of Taifas, Moorish “kingdoms” with resultant instabilities. 

You can easily see the history of conflict written on the land in the vertiginous number of castles and watch towers throughout the land, many of them still in reasonably good shape.   

Once Castile and Aragon, the two most powerful Christian kingdoms, had joined forces in the symbolic and dynastic union of Ferdinand and Isabella and conquered the remaining Taifas, including the final one of Cordoba, there was a political union though, as the great historian Benedict Anderson noted, feudal states did not rely on a common language to unify them, but on political fealty which also included kinds of religious celebrations sponsored by kings and lords though the situation was far from one of a single religion, They did create widely shared bureaucratic and educational practices. 

Aragon and Castile had different though closely related languages. Numerous others were spoken in Hispania.

With the crown, now of Spain, taking over American lands and even a small part of Asia (the Philippines), Castilian as a formal written language now called Spanish (although not without argument) was born as an instrument of state. It pulled elites toward it, pushing their Iberian and indigenous tongues to become more and more like Castilian though there is still substantial diversity in the Hispanic world within what is glibly called the Spanish language and supported by the Royal Spanish Academy and the Cervantes Institute (meeting in Peru these days).  

The Romans were probably wise to make Hispania plural. Even today it is plural, although there are areas of unity if not undisputed and many efforts at creating unity.

On this Day of the Nation, one should not forget that about half of the twentieth century left it fractured as Franco and a Fascist wing including the Church performed a coup and drove out the clearly internationalist left that had won elections yet was fractured among itself. The conflict left a landscape saturated with blood and memories of horror.

Only now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century are intellectuals and people really grappling with that past and researching it.

On this day in 2025, nonetheless, Spain leads the European Union—of which it is a part giving it a wannabe nation state without full sovereignty. It tops the Community in terms of economic growth and, to a degree, even in political stability. 

Even if it does not have linguistic or cultural unity,  Spain is worth celebrating for its amazing, if troubled, history and its current, if troubled, success. 

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.