Me and Don Quixote

A calm and quiet Saturday morning finds me on one of my favorite coffee houses, sipping an Americano and feeling the need to write. 

This has not been the easiest of weeks: at times panicked with lots of running around. I have been dealing with a problem with my visa renewal and an impending deadline 

Whether in the US, where I am from, or here, hitting the bureaucracy cold, with little idea of where you go or why, is hard, confusing, and frustrating. 

Yet this experience has been strangely pleasing.  

Towards the end, while speaking with one of those “nameless”, “faceless” bureaucrats, in this case named Roberto. I know because I asked. It suddenly occurred to me I did not have to go through all this. 

I could have hired someone, a lawyer—what in common Latin American Spanish is called, often despectively, a tintorillo. 

These are people who make their living helping people with government processes, whether scribing, negotiating, processing, or other. You used to, and maybe still can see, them gathered around the doors of government offices on little benches and at small desks, typewriter and carbon paper before them.

I would have gone high to a good lawyer who specializes in these processes as I did to get my initial visa. That process was smooth and a dream. I did learn, however, how many mistakes I would have likely made between what I thought the instructions and the wisdom on line—some of it garbage—said and how I operationalized it, put it into action. 

It was expensive to work with my attorney in California and her helper attorney in Madrid. But the process was clean and smooth. For a beginner, that was helpful. 

After a year, in part to save money and more to learn, I decided to forego that this time. Furthermore, a friend I made here in the community of Americans in Alicante told me in a coffee house where we had just met while waiting for a performance, to avoid spending the money and just do it myself.  

So I did.  Have I made mistakes, yes, and fortunately not fatal ones, although this week I wondered. In any case, this was my choice, and despite feeling often like someone taking a doctoral exam without having ever attended a class, it was worth it. 

I had to study hard, in a language I have spoken all my life but whose official variant in documents I do not know. I am learning this bureaucracy’s terminology and how they apply it to processes. Furthermore, as the ethnographer in me should know, I am learning the organization behind the terminology is simply not the same as in my  grasp of bureaucracy from my life experience. 

Duh, I am in a different country. This one may even have invented modern Bureaucracy, according to some scholars, back in the days of Charles the V of the Holy Roman Empire, when Spain ruled much of the globe and galleons navigated the oceans carrying legal documents, from Spain to its overseas territories, now called colonies often, and from them to it. 

Historians have field days—intellectual picnics—in the archives that hold this legal correspondence that still remains. Around five hundred years of it. 

How naĩve of me, when facing the modern rendition of this ancient organization of state to think it would simply be like what I knew. 

Of course, it also was not radically different. Max Weber, brilliantly grasped many of the fundamentals of bureaucracy in his early twentieth century sociology.

I spent hours, nay days, if not more, reading the complex and confusing instructions on line written to meet the needs of the bureaucracy, while also to instruct petitioners, as well as going deeper and reading the laws,. It was not just reading, but studying: back and forth and cross-correlating.

Then I had to put it into practice without even fully knowing if I had ti all right. 

The rudest moment of last week was when I took a document I figured was the right one, along with the form showing I had paid the tax required to present it. I found the right place to present it—after a few miles of walking from building to building in the hot August sun. This time, a nameless, somewhat stern but bemused man (I could see that in his eyes) looked at my passport and told me I had left Spain in March and had never re-entered though there I was sitting before him. 

I felt like all was a loss. I had gone to Turkey, but had flown back through Prague and Vienna, though none of those border posts had checked my documents or stamped my passport. I realized the document showed a lack and I could not prove otherwise. Fortunately Europe came to my rescue. 

I looked at him calmly and narrated briefly how I had returned and that I had no control over how Schengen authorities handled passports. 

He stayed stern, asked me a few more questions, returned my passport, and then said to my confusion and relief. “You do not need this document. Your procedure is going properly.”

There were more problems, of course. 

I had a program online to transmit documents to my file in Extranjería fail to authenticate the certificate on my laptop. I struggled with it, and after a good while realized I was being neurotic: doing the same thing over and over while hoping for a different reaction. 

Roberto, mentioned above, said “no worries. I’ll fix it for you.” and he did though he did not have to. 

He also submitted my documents. 

I learned in this that Extranjería can ask for documents but cannot upload them past the initial application. For that you must go elsewhere I now know where.   

A different bureaucrat—a delightful man named Jesús (breaking frame I told him in El Paso he would be called Chuy)—took time to tell me where and how I should go about submitting the documents and that otherwise my file was complete and there should be no problems. 

I felt like I was leaving both buildings having made friends.

Despite the difficult learning curve, I have found the Spanish bureaucracy to be filled with people who are interesting in themselves and live good, human lives, even if the institution is a bit disconcerting. 

Guess what, it is so in my country as well. 

I remember when Motor Vehicles refused to renew my driver’s license and the gruff agent at the desk would not tell me why. It turns out that somehow I had improperly been put on an offenders list. Once the confusion was resolved, requiring me to spend considerable time on the phone with different people, the same man unsmilingly and with no sense of irony gave me my license. 

So, although in a fit of frustration some time, I may eat my words, for now, I can only say that I continue to find Spain to be a delight and its bureaucracy to be no worse than mine though I am fidning the agents to be friendly and helpful. 

And, more importantly, I am learning much even if there is no degree certificate at the end of this schooling, just a greater appreciation for Don Quixote and Cervantes’ wisdom.

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.