A Celebration, a Storm, and Memory

 At midnight, the city rocked with explosions.  

Not to worry, although for a moment I did. It was a large fireworks show, I assume in honor of the día festivo, holiday, declared for today and tomorrow which gives people four days off, essentially, 

Spain values celebrations and the resultant time off from work. 

Last evening, when I went to the supermarket to buy raw ingredients for at least today, the clerk—a lovely man named José, told me he couldn’t wait. He looked forward to kicking back and relaxing, he said. 

While the main businesses take the holiday some smaller ones do not, especially those providing necessary servicies such as many cafes. That was fortunate for me.

I left home shortly after sunrise—no I did not get up that early. The noise last night kept me stimulated and awake. And, anyway, it does not turn light until around 8 AM. As I left my place, I saw the homeless man across the street putting on his shoes and carefully arranging his things to stow them somewhere. 

Spain does indeed value celebrations and so, the fireworks as well as many official acts, just not the massive thunder storm that has also cut loose today.

The day is an intriguing one of keeping historical memory alive and tying it to the present, It is a celebration of when the King of Aragon and duke of Barcelona, the young Jaume I (Jaime 1), after failing in his endeavors to acquire land by conquest north of the Pyranees in what is now France, turned south and conquered Valencia. 

The festivo remembers that event, something also marked in street names and other events in this dependency of Valencia, by linking it to a celebration of the Community of Valencia, of which Alicante is a part. 

Communities in Spain, roughly equivalent to US States, also mark historical, economic, and cultural units. 

In the present, the memory is tied to a political effort to rid the Community of its president, Mazón, who happens to be from Alicante, for his abysmal failure of leadership a year ago when a different massive storm hit, caused extensive flooding, and the death of more than 200 people due to government inaction. The poll released today says 70% of the Community’s population demands he resign. As that number has grown he drops his eyes and toughs it out. 

Today, this may be about poll results, marches and court actions, but it is notably not supported by the movement of troops and sword or cannon battles. 

While the image is one of a day in which there was a clean break; Valencia changed from being Arabic and became Valencian and Spanish, although that is a hot topic these days and many, especially in other parts of Spain say it is OK if they keep their language related to Catalan, but they should officially speak Spanish and just be Spanish.  

In days in which the airwaves and internet are filled with images of Israelis trying to destroy Arabic Hamas in Gaza, and perhaps “cleanse” the area for Israeli settlement, a bit of attention to the notion of ethnic and religious replacement here is a question worth reflecting on.

The moment of the reconquest is ostensibly memorialized in the battles between Christians and Moors celebrated here in almost every town and neighborhood though on different dates. I say ostensibly because, they have come more to represent the little invasions of slavers from North Africa who would strike almost at random along the coast and even a bit inland to take merchandise and perhaps even more important humans as slaves to sell in the markets of Algiers and perhaps elsewhere.  

Those moments of invaders from the sea—a brief entrance and not a long lasting one with a population replacement—came to be the material for the celebratory representations and popular memory.

In them, we note the population has already been Christianized, They unite against the invaders, the Islamic moors who come from the sea. 

I do not know the history of this transformation, although it is an important one. The whole Mediterranean coast of Spain has stone watch towers, look outs and castles on hill tops to see and give early warning of the invaders as well as to serve to defend against them. When the invaders could they would sneak up and catch people unawares, working in the fields or elsewhere, even mending their fishing nets, to capture them and take them to North Africa. 

That moment in history changed almost two centuries ago with the destruction of the regimes in Tangiers and Algeria. Yet the memory remains, codified, and annually performed. People come of age playing roles in these dramas in the streets.

Today, though, Valencia has a new Moorish population, as the rightwing Vox would call them, the Moroccans and Algerians who have come to work, especially in agriculture and construction. That relationship has tension in historical memory and gets activated every year when people dress up as Moorish pirates and Moorish women to have sword fights with Christians in the streets. I am told contemporary North African immigrants do not participate in this and, I imagine, many stay home those days. 

This day pretends a triumphal entry of Jaime I on horseback with his soldiers into the glorious and ancient city of Valencia. That may be fictitious, but one wonders how they were received, especially in the middle ages, i.e.October 9, 1237. 

These seem to have been changes of feudos, where the people became vassals of a new Lord. I imagen that moment was dramatic and emotional. But, there does not seem to have been a major exchange of population. Some of Muslim lords had supported Jaume for a time and Valencia had been paying an onerous tribute to the throne of Aragon, which had also been a major Muslim center. 

Alicante still was not in Jaume’s hands. It ended up attached to Castilla and Alfonso el Sabio, its great monarch.  

In 1264 the Muslims of Alicante and near by down to Murcia, rose up. They were still numerous, but slowly the pressure was on to convert such that by the nineteenth century there were few if any Muslims in Alicante or Valencia. 

That story of change of religion, language, and perhaps of people is one I shall study a bit and write about later. 

For today we will celebrate with the rain fall and waters running in the region’s exotic streams and rivers the existence of a Valencian Community, now perhaps the most diverse in Spain even if fraught with politics over language and perhaps, if Vox has its way, over ethnicity and race.   

Meanwhile lightning explodes in the sky and rain beats a tattoo on the awnings and side walks of the city. 

Where a Geranium Blooms

 Miles are a measure of distance in space; they do not accurately measure connections of the heart or the soul. 

I’m perched, having migrated to retire, on the edge of the Mediterranean, very close to Africa though within Europe.  Large ferries depart from the port near my flat several times a week for Algeria. Everyday, I cross paths with Algerians and Moroccans; often women in beautiful scarves, although there are also men with families and men alone, as well as numerous sylph-like youths who show great soul. I also see and hear Europeans of every type on the streets around me, many tourists, others refugees, and some retirees like myself.  The majority of people, like the National Police having breakfast across from me, are from here, Spain, a rich and varied country with its own terrors as well as rich political traditions and joys. 

Still my heart and soul are tied to people on the other side of the Atlantic, and to the vast country that used to uphold vast ideals and dreams to humanity, It saw itself as a torch lighting the way, a vision of hope for humanity. Now most everyone shakes there head and wonders what happened. 

Those things tear at me. More so, the recent assassination at Utah Valley University. It has filled me with a generalized anxiety, interrupting sleep and demanding my days, and I am across the world, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and Iberia. 

This morning, the television news is filled with images of police attacking protestors who interfered with a major, international bicycle event’s final in Madrid. Yet my heart cannot escape what happened, the faces of my students, and a governor’s tears when he realized his state and people were not a safe haven but a part of a vast and cruel world. He would reduce it to the influence of social media and the dark web, but it is so much more. 

My questions here are not what happened. We know the bullet and the name of the assassin and the fallen. We know their backgrounds and we even know what is engraved on the bullet’s companions.

My desire is to find peace, for myself and others, and move past this event. I wonder how to strengthen and cultivate that peace in my soul and among those with whom I associate. 

My name is not Polyanna—far from it. I have never been an optimist. Storm clouds are simply storm clouds and a riot a riot.   

For self preservation, I need that peace inside. 

I think of people that to me are images of peace and how it accompanies them like robes moving in the air.  It also emanates from them like a wonderful and fragrant perfume where, when you walk by, you smell it for a moment just feel good. 

Were I a religious leader or a guru I could propose a path to it for other people, a kind of nirvana. I cannot, That is not my path nor my reality. 

However, to find it, I turn both outward and inward. Though the TV blasts images of violence in Madrid and in Gaza, I see green plants and flowers around me. I look into the heart of the flowers to see the multiplicity of colors inside and dream of the bees that may have visited them. 

I lift a basil leaf or a mint leaf, rub it and smell it.  Its redolence fills me and calms me as I focus on it.. 

I see the beauty of the sky—though I am also aware of how quickly that can turn. Still I see it and let it inside, where I also hold to the majestic sea with its calm waves lapping at the beach and the feet of children and their elders. 

But I also turn inward to create peace.  For me that involves writing. But, according to a conversation I had yesterday afternoon, it also involves cooking: the satisfaction of preparing ingredients—even pungent onions that make me cry, seeing the cook and smelling them on the stove, and then serving homemade food to my friends. 

In the conversation it also came out that many people crochet or knit, mostly women but increasingly men. Manual arts like that focus the body and can also calm themind and the heart. 

I go out and walk. While moving I focus on what I am seeing, including something out of the ordinary to photograph and perhaps post on my social media. 

And, I pay attention to my breathing, the how the oxygen enters my body and flows through my blood relaxing tension inside me. 

This is no manual. It is simply a list of practices and desires. Though anger and anxiety may visit, I shall do little more than greet them, hear them, and bid them farewell. 

Today, I shall work to cultivate peace and till my garden where it is planted and grows next to bougainvillea and geraniums as well as hot peppers. 

Super Villains and Ultra-Right Protectors, a Nightmare

 

True confession:  I am in a tourist cafe owned by an American whose mother is Spanish eating bacon, eggs, hashbrowns and sausage. I just felt a need for traditional American heart attack food.  So sue me. 

I promise, Mediterranean for lunch at home, ‘cause I’ll make it. Lentil salad and merluza fish fillets.

As I was sipping my latté, six or so too-blond young women with perfect English and very pale skin sauntered in. If I heard right when they were speaking to each other, they were Scandinavian of some sort and looked for all the world like a set of coeds on the East sides of Salt Lake City or Provo, Utah. 

Of course, I was as blond—now gray, and am very pale, although the sun has probably left me tinted with a distinct shade of shrimp-over-a-hot-fire.

Foreigners in someone else’s country at a time when immigration, rising rents and supermarket inflation is all a theme, as is Putin’s and Trump’s meeting in the former Russian colony of Alaska tomorrow. I hear the ultra nationalist right in Russia is all a twitter, demanding that state, with its oil and minerals be returned to the once Tsarist State with its onion domes restored. 

Tourists and foreigners abound here.  Alicante may well be the large city with the highest relative parentage of foreign born residents in Spain, although we are next to the beer-sun-and doom British enclave of Benidorm, as well as just south of Russian and Dutch colonies. 

The conservative press reminds us that Franco, the brutal or great dictator of the mid twentieth century did all kinds of good things for Spain. In fact, according to them, everything good has its roots in Franco. In a fit of development he organized the Mediterranean coast for the massive building of hotels and beaches and then marketed it heavily to northern Europeans and the British for their holidays. 

Of course, that created a demand for labor—while Spaniards were working and sneaking chocolate and beer in Switzerland and in many other countries. 

To meet that new demand for hands, shoulders, and arms, Franco and then the later post-Franco governments coordinated the emptying of rural areas of men and women. In Alicante, they came from local areas, and then from La Mancha, Murcia and further away. 

One can hear their varied accents and dialects still in workers bars where they have their morning café con leche and have a morning smoke while laughing and arguing loudly. 

The city is tearing down Franco period public housing, which later government sold to people, since they are in desperate need of upkeep and modernization. Mid-rise towers are appearing like mushrooms in their place.

Immigrants from North Africa, Latin American and subSaharan Africa are filling the need for workers while we expats (sigh--a rant for another time) increase pricess and demand.

Spain is Spain and has its own ways. But it is also Europe and the rules of the European community have impacted urban design and government processes. Although not from the community’s governance per se, the European ultra right is also changing Spain while claiming to protect a vision of traditional Spain, you know bull fights and women in lace mantillas behind fans next to their adoring husband.

Without the bulls, lace, or mantillas similar things are appearing throughout Europe and even in the neo-Putin US. After all, the Russian Macho Maximus is a promoter of a Christian, nationalist, racist, Europe, and Euro-America. He has helped the existing, Ultra right, post WWII, groups of neo-Nazis, religious traditionalists and nationalists, anti feminists, and, God-knows, anti-Queers. 

To that list, I should add, anti-asylum seekers, anti-immigrants, and anti-Muslims.

Why this rant? First of all, I am in a café which in Spain they can call a bar and people often rant in bars. Maybe i shall take up the habit. 

Second, the Pumpkin clone who has become Maximus for a time—a painful multi-season reality show, has sent the Guard into the streets of Washington DC where they are using telescopes and sometimes magnifying glasses to find the relatively rare crime they are supposed to stop. Military guards, claiming to protect the people from enemies the right imagines and propagates  wide and far on screens large and tiny, like Lex Luthors and Jokers. 

There is more. The morning paper tells of Ultras in Iceland, many of them former criminals, who are patrolling their Island as vigilantes to stop a crime-wave by asylum seekers that no mainstream analyst can find, and to protect their social welfare system from the horrible drain these new-comers represent, though again, evidence of this must ride icebergs in the arctic sea. No one, outside of dreams of whaling or catching walruses and seals for the winter, can find it.

The article mentions that this is not simply an Icelandic phenomenon, but like Hollywood movies of super heroes (ok I added that), it is found throughout Europe including Spain. To that I add, including the US.

I wish I could just change the channel or even better cancel this survivalist nonsense, but alas, TikTok and X have not given me that super power.  

Done with my breakfast and my rant—for now—I’m gonna go out walking and look at gulls and pigeons as the day’s heat grows.  

Ciao.

Conversation While a Front Approaches

 

The air is cooler this morning, as I sit on my terrace above the street. Not much, just a few degrees. But it makes a difference.  My plants seem more relaxed. 

A front bludgeon’s its was across the peninsula bringing much cooler air. Most of the peninsula can expect thunderstorms and rain, sometimes heavy rain from its clubs and tackles.  Alicante’s capital city will miss out. It will be somewhat cooler but dry. I would love the rain.

I lived for years on the Mexican Border, in El Paso, when young, and grew up with the drama of monsoons in July. Very dry land and arroyos that fill up quickly bringing flash floods even into the city.  

This small corner of Spain, is that dry, perhaps even more so than my El Paso. 

Rain seldom visits us here, even though the spring was unusually rainy. We have days after days of intense, bright sunshine. 

Still, you can see water-carved gullies all over this desert land, just like in El Paso, only more so. 

We get clouds and cooler weather, but storms, no matter how much they bluster and bludgeon across the peninsula, tend to skip over us.  The ones that don’t carve the landscape.

I am sure the reasons are meteorologically complicated though the  obvious answer is that we are in the rain shadow of the mountains that rise on the coast and the uplift to the great Spanish plateau.. 

A few weeks ago, Alicante and water was a topic of conversation when I met a movie-star handsome Ph.D.student in a cafe who has lived here for years while studying in the university. He is Palestinian from Gaza. 

Instead of spending more than a few sentences on the genocide, he steered our conversation elsewhere, such as to Alicante City and his impressions as a Levantine Arab. 

To him, Alicante feels like an Arabic city. Everywhere he turns he finds styles, concepts, and words from the Arab world. 

He said the city’s name, Alicante, sounds to him like an Arabic phrase which means a place with no water, a very dry place.

Alicante was an Arabic town and the Arab castle still sits above the city (with Christian accretions) on Mount Benacantil). 

Over the centuries, Alicante has had much back and forth with Algeria and Tunisia, as well as with Morocco. 

Indeed, this city is one of two in Spain with the largest percentage of foreigners among its inhabitants, some 23%. This is the official number composed of people with residence permits. The actual number is much larger. 

In the Province of Alicante the largest number of immigrants is from the UK, mostly an older group of retirees and sunny-beach seekers from the land of green and rain, However, in the city, the largest group is from Morocco, followed ever more closely now by Colombians.

Before the Arabs, Alicante had an indigenous population. Then Phoenecians came here, probably to take advantage of its port. The Romans, built a small city here, called Lucentum, the place of light. A small set of its ruins can be visited north of Mount Benacantil. 

Spain as a whole was a very important Roman province and people still speak versions of its language. Iberia was a center of the empire. 

In fact, the first non Italian Emperor came from from Sevilla, then Hispalia. He was the very gay or bi emperor Trajan who was popular and had a huge impact on the entire empire. 

I devoured a book review this morning in El Pais for a new book about him by the historian David Soria (Trajano, el mejor emperador Desperta Ferro 2025).

Sevilla located on the Guadalquivir river was a Roman place. Then the Goths intervened and later Sevilla became an important city in Arab Spain. 

Arabic flourished here though much of the population retained versions of their Latin now Arabized. This is reflected in contemporary Spanish where even simple words like shirt (camisa) or cotton (algodón) are Arabic.

But there is an historical break when Alicante—like other places in Spain—carried out an ethnic cleansing.The Arabized and Islamic population was driven out and people from Catalonia and Aragon were brought in to repopulate the area. Centuries elapsed before Arabs again became a significant part of the population as they are today. It was in the nineties that Moroccans began here in numbers. 

In all of this one hears the fears of the right wing types who speak out against immigration as a threat to the Spanish nation and to ideas of population replacement. However, the majority of the non-immigrant population of Alicante favors immigrants and tries to embrace them and let them know they, like rain and cool air, are welcome. 

Another numerous group of immigrants that is growing perhaps faster than Moroccans is not Arabs, but is composed of Ukranians, most fleeing Russia’s devastating adventure. 

Monday morning, as I went into one of my favorite places, where the air conditioning was fortunately strong because it had not cooled off in the night, I was warmly greeted by a woman who works by the front window rolling shaping and forming dough.  This morning, she was cutting pieces of focaccia. 

She asked how I was and whether my eyes were better (I have had an infection in both eyes and a reaction to Ciprofoxin).  When she verified the swelling was gone and my lids had almost returned to their normal color, she said “I had my eye operated on last week.”

In Spain, she said, they do not do the operation and so she had to return to her home country, Ukraine. Her city, as she said is close to the Russian border.

I was doubly surprised because I had thought she was Argentine, as almost every other worker in this cafe and Italian food shop is. I was also surprised she returned to a war zone for her surgery. She said, in response: “When you live there you mostly just go on with your life. You can’t let the war stop you.”