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.

 

   

  

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. 

The More Things Change: Celebration and Partying

 

Monday evening, a friend of my age insisted in a street cafe while traffic circled close to us, that he and I are of a generation raised to be more selfless and with a sense of responsibility to future generations. He contrasted that to today’s adults and younger who live more for themselves.

Maybe. I think my generation was pretty selfish, but that aside, his observation made me think of the French phrase: the more things change the more they stay the same. (et plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose). 

Both change and kinds of continuity are all around us; they constitute us and our lives. 

There is no denying that roundabout on whose sides we met under umbrellas on a drizzly evening was not always there. We have photos with time marked that witness the changes to us. We can see how Alicante expanded and how city planners laid out that space and the streets that met there, seizing it from fields, gulleys, and more rustic constructions than the mid rises today.

Yet people were there. They ate fish and rice, as people do today. My friend had a beer. Chances are that people then rarely if ever drank beer. I had a “mineral water” and I doubt glass bottles of water ever appeared then on tables even if there was a cafe or bar near there.

Of course, there are many traps in this. For one, it is all a matter of what you focus on. Looking at physical objects—tables, drinks, streets, people—is one thing.  Looking at something like moral qualities, especially when spoken as defining characteristics is so much harder. They are mostly invisible unless attached to physical qualities we can see. 

OK, Knowlton. Stop. You are waxing professorial and terribly abstract. Take a sip of that acqua and get back to something easier. 

In June, this roundabout looked very different. The monument in the middle was blocked away by protective boards, while chain link fences seemed to be everywhere. Fantastic sculptures in bright fantasy colors and themes punctuated the scenery, as did ephemeral bars, and cafes. You could smell grilling meat everywhere, along with the redolence of urine. 

Alicante was living its month long celebration called Hogueras o Fogueres, named for how the sculptures would erupt in flames at the celebration’s end on the vispera, the night before the Day of St. John an ancient night of burning stuff in this part of Europe and in the Andes—La Paz, Bolivia—where I have lived.

Saying that is fine. It is a broad connection and pattern but the history of Fogueres/Hogueras insists it was created at the beginning of the twentieth century on the model of Valencia’s Fallas for the sake of tourism and city pride. 

That is a nice statement though I am not convinced since I have not gone to the archives to see the loss of earlier forms and the appearance of Fogueres full grown from Valencia. What happened to San Juan’s feast with its bonfires and such?  It was not simply folded into Fogueres.  

Every midday, the roundabout hosted the mascletá,  competition and show of fireworks and explosive sounds. During the rest of the day and into the nigh the area of this roundabout, called Luceros, was a staging ground for parades that left here and marched down the Alfonso el Sabio Avenue before turning downtown towards the coast by the old city.

Many events, a huge chronology of formal goings on, moved the city during this period.  Along with the sound of music from the ephemeral (just for this month) bars and cafes) as well as marching bands in parades and just processing seemingly seemingly at random through the streets, the city filled with noise from people talking, shouting, singing, fighting as the days continued. 

It was intense, huge, and overwhelming. The calm afterwards was almost as loud and intense in its silence and calm. 

There you have it.  Change in time. While living it, you are there immersed and only in reflection can pull yourself from it. 

This all came back to me when I read an article involving a different meaning of change and a different kind of turning back, reflecting. 

The Barcelona version of El Nacional published on September 7 under the byline of Marc Valle the following. “The Catalan word in Danger of Extinction that AI considers a symbol of Barcelona, An Expression Rooted in ordinary Barcelona that AI Claims is at Risk of Disappearing.”

Like Snail Darters, little fish in the US West declared at risk of extinction, and then delisted as new populations were found far away from the Western Rivers of the original declaration, all under a regime of US environmental law and politics, statements of this nature should be taken seriously and also be seen as suspect even if we do not have soace here to fully consider it. 

The word is Xerinola. It describes a good part of that crazy month in Alicante. Valle defines the term as “Traditionally connected to collective joy, the noise of fiestas, and the environment an uninhibited celebration.”

Valle also contrasts it with the spontaneous, sui generis partying of fiestas when he says the word “is not just an expression of fiesta, but a means of understanding the relationship between neighborhood and community.” It is when peopple take over the space of the neighborhood—the town, city—and make it their own. By implication, Valle contrasts that with governmentally or commercially organized celebration. 

He is critiquing the formality of top down nature of the official fiesta such as Fogueres. To be sure this level of organization is often more formal and structured on paper than in its realization. At even moment, people intervene and celebrate. The feast itself tries to contain this in fenced-in spaces, many by invitation only, though all that falls apart as people experience xerinola.

Very quickly, since I am out of space, this reminds me of a common word in Peru to describe fiestas. That is algarrabía. It is most easily translated as noise but as a symbol of fiesta it begins to encompass so many more meanings. 

The word is from the same one as flamenco and is Iberian Arabic in origin. It point is to pick up the sonorous and sensory aspects of celebration and especially celebration as worship as people come together and legitimate themselves even in the absence of official recognition and acceptance. 

Valle suggests change—the loss of that, while I see both change and continuity. 

Valle must locate a potentially catastrophic loss in order to revalidate the words as a symbol, a new name for celebration in Barcelona not too far north of here and in a language close related to the Valencian of Fogueres. 

In parting, let me—the professor—just say that, though unmentioned, Durkheim is somewhere haunting this for me with his notion of collective effervescence.  

Ok.  Enough.  Good by and cheers.