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. 

Return of Mammon in a Changed Form: Ideology of Gender in Spain’s Congress

Sitting in a coffee house above the main Plaza in Cusco, Peru, more thirteen or so years ago, I heard the chants of a demonstration marching around the square. 

That in itself was far from weird. The Plaza is a ceremonial center of the region, province, and city of Cusco. Demonstrations, parades, marches, processions, vuvuzeles, bands, loudspeakers, speeches, masses, saints; they all appear at one time or another. 

This made the plaza a fascinating place to hang out and the coffee house, Cappuchino, on the upper floor, a delight—when not overwhelmed with a mix of German, Dutch, English, Chinese and God knows what else from the tourists who throng the city for a day or two. They also intrigued me but Cusco held my focus. 

This day, there was just something in the marchers’ voices, though I could not hear them clearly with my late middle-aged ears. 

I crept to one of the balconies and edged the tourists there to peer out. I saw a small and a bit ragged group of working class Evangelicals with signs decrying educational criteria for their children and especially the obscure, apparently simple, while horribly baroque. and faulty combination “ideology of gender”.

Later, that duo would appear in massive marches in Lima in support of overturning a democratically elected president and as part of an international jeremiad, that now is embodied in Trump’s regime within the US and its attacks on transgender people, and on the notions of DEI. 

Well, this morning, when I was shuffling online through Spain’s daily of record, El País, I saw that the mime of international right wing memes in search of power, Spain’s Ultras, VOX, will hold hearings on the ideology of gender in Spain’s Congress today. They wish to attach it, whatever it is, to “false accusations”, I assume of sexual and gendered violence.  

Since I first came across this then new yet bedraggled term like a raggedy doll all stitched all together from pieces of cloth that did not fit well. 

Two of those rags torn from other dresses and shirts were ideology and gender. 

So simple, apparently, yet what a moth bitten mess. 

My immediate reaction was, wait a minute gender is not, per se, an ideology but is a scientific term, a heuristic (to be way too academic), in short an intellectual tool that, borrowed from notions of genre and grammar, was useful in showing and explaining problems in the idea of sex (as a human kind)—i.e. female and male. 

It also allowed us to look at configurations of sex historically and show subtleties and changes.

It seemed a confusion of dominant ideas, i.e. sex is natural and unchanging, eternal, a given of human kind, i.e. a culture and an ideology, with intellectual tools for showing their less than given reality.

Ideology is such a tired and troubled word which I struggled with for my dissertation. In one way it can be a kind of Marxist and specifically French structuralist thought. It also is a tool of parties and their organization like sects around credos. 

In its simplest sense, for me, lay the simple notion that culture and more precisely idea have some relationship with their social usage, and the groups that generate and maintain them. Yes, in the final instance, to quote a somewhat demented Frenchman, the infrastructure (the economic, social , and political order) sets boundaries and formative pressures on ideas and their organization. 

This is all just nightmarishly complex, because it is hard to wrestle to the ground something so ephemeral as an idea or organization of ideas, an ideology. Like a greased pig, it will slip out of your words (your hands) the minute you think you have snared it and hold it. Nonetheless, it did, does, serve, as a useful intellectual tool. 

But for those creating ex nihilo, I mean naming like God or Adam, an ideology there seems to be a stable order of things outside of words, that words label and make visible.  

Oh my—too much nominalism and realism—difficult philosophy—before breakfast. I can feel the milk in my coffee curdling as I sip it. 

In the usage of the demonstrators, ideology presumed a set of ideas that were false and sinful, i.e. against the real, natural stable order derived from God, the absolute, the ending and the beginning.  

This sets out a theological and political battle not a scholarly one, though it snags terms from scholarship and mangles them. 

The second term, gender, is also complex but for now at its root is a similar notion that the term misuses language to deny the obvious and the godly, that there are only two sexes—as the Orange dictator wannabe declared in Washington—although Vatican documents and those of natural law scholars are already filled with such assertions about reality.  

Unlike, academic terms in the strict sense, they come with powers that discipline them, keep the apparent reality stable and connected to a word, sex, despite all the ice-dancing scholars and philosophers have pointed out in any attempt to seize a reality and label it while keeping both the reality and the label stable. 

Well, it turns out this mish mash of two troubled terms became useful to French and Italian right wing Catholics to name a heresy and a political/religious/academic movement they wished to work against. So they did, along with fellow travelers among Evangelicals, Mormons, and others,; as well as with a big-little man trying to reclaim and rebuild a nationalist Church and identity in Mother Russia.

Over maybe thirty years, the dyad has moved from the margins to the front lines of Ultra Right Wing politics on an increasingly global basis. 

It has become a frontal attack on feminism, Gay and Trans thought and realities. It also is a desperate hope to re-stage and re-claim a Patriarchal, Western family all the while fewer and fewer people see its value. 

Power to challenge, declare heresy, and burn at the stake is the goal. Yes, power. 

The pulling of levers by the Great Oz—them—that we are not supposed to see, while they tell us up is down, right is left, man is man and has god given natures, while woman is woman similarly with a god given nature.  

Forgive me, I must run to the bathroom behind the espresso machine and puke.