Cover image: Graffiti art from Marseilles, photo by Pina Piccolo.
On our trip to Spain this spring, my wife and I and the couple we traveled with spent considerable time discussing the latest news from home, all of which was worrisome. During our four days in Barcelona, it happened that many of the stories on Google News concerned the Trump administration’s attempts to purge anyone from government who’d had a role in programs promoting diversity in the federal workforce – now known by the newly poisoned term “diversity, equity and inclusion..” or ”DEI.”
While Trump and his spokesmen and women never state directly what they think was wrong with these programs, it seems to be an article of faith within his movement that they were a bad thing for the country. The week prior, he had suggested – in his typically evidence-free and semi-coherent fashion – that diversity programs had played a role in the mid-air collision over the Potomac river that took the lives of 67 of our fellow citizens. At breakfast, we speculated about the misconceptions and prejudices that motivated Trump voters in last year’s election, and wondered grimly what kind of country we’d find on our return.
After a morning spent inspecting one of Gaudi’s astonishing apartment buildings and wandering through his unfinished masterpiece, La Sagrada Familia cathedral and a post-prandial nap, the four of us met for a drink at our hotel’s rooftop bar. We picked out the table with the best view, and my wife and I volunteered to inquire about a bubbly, cider-colored drink we’d noticed at the bar.
“Es Proseco?” she asked, pointing to a fluted glass of the beverage, its little bubbles rising one after another like pale fireworks inside the slender glass.
The barmaid swung her head emphatically side-to-side. “No! – Es Cava!” she said, sounding out each consonant and vowel for us carefully for our benefit, her eyes gleaming with an unexpected passion. Sensing that there was something important I needed to understand, I locked eyes with her and nodded along as she reeled off a string of words I couldn’t follow. I did want to understand.
“What did she say about the Cava?” I asked Cristina as we returned to our table with the four fluted glasses.
“Not sure – she might have been speaking Catalan.”
Soon enough, we were back to speaking my mother tongue with our friends, enjoying the Cava and watching the sun go down over the wildly heterogeneous skyline of Barcelona.
On our second day in Barcelona, Cristina and I went out for lunch together, and I elected to explore the city on my own after the meal rather than return to our hotel with Cristina. Now, I’d need to rely on my own Spanish to get directions or satisfy my curiosity about what I was seeing. In Spanish-speaking countries, where the locals expect Americans to be unable to speak anything but English, I like to show that I have at least a solid basic grasp of the language, and some instinct for its natural sounds and intonation.
I suppose that having some facility in a second language is part of the person I’d like to be: a pretty cosmopolitan guy, a citizen of the world who happens to live in the United States. In my mind, a cosmopolitan should travel easily in foreign countries, and in Spain, I expected my Spanish language skills would greatly facilitate this.
Which is why, I suppose, I found myself unexpectedly irritated to discover that the street signs in Barcelona were in Catalan, not Spanish. Instead of the reassuring “Calle” or “Camino,” the words for street were “Carreer” or “Passerig” – words that I could infer meant “street,” but didn’t how to pronounce. A slightly aggrieved voice in me began to ask, “What is it with ‘these people,’ these ‘Catalans’ – couldn’t they just agree to speak Spanish?”
Of course, the irritation I felt about the Catalans isn’t all that far removed from the fear of diversity, a key ingredient in the strategy that brought Trump to power for a second term. As much as I strive to be cosmopolitan, I’m also prone to a longing for the “easy” button. I’d even proven susceptible to resenting the complexity created by the Catalans’ insistence on speaking their own language. Recognizing this constituted a kind of conversion moment for me. On the ride home, I began earnestly quizzing my cab driver about how to pronounce “Carreer” and “Passerig.” One has to start somewhere.
In political terms, the central Spanish government via the 1978 constitution has embraced a policy of what might be called “inclusionary nationalism” as a strategy for dealing with the long-held aspirations of the regions for autonomy and independence. This has meant allowing a fair degree of cultural and linguistic autonomy to the various regions of the country while maintaining the political unity of the Spanish state. One manifestation of this policy was to declare Catalan a “co-official” language with Spanish within Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands.
Despite the central government’s policy, in 2017 over 90% of Catalans voted in favor of independence from Spain in a symbolic referendum. In remains to be seen whether “inclusionary nationalism” will succeed in keeping Spain intact.
After Barcelona, we separated from our friends and took a train to San Sebastian on Spain’s northwest coast to spend a few days with Cristina’s older sister. San Sebastian is in the heart of the semi-autonomous Basque region wedged between the Pyrenes mountains and the Bay of Biscay. Cristina’s great grandparents resided in this area of Spain before emigrating to Uruquay, and ancestry tells her that her DNA is about 45% Basque.
Our train from Barcelona arrived in San Sebastian sometime after 9pm and we found a cab to take us to Cristina’s sister’s apartment. The cabdriver was 40ish and spoke a thick, throaty Spanish. His heavy features and thick brows reminded me of Luis, my late father-in-law whose nickname for a time was “Il Basco”.
“Es dificil a aprender la idoma Basca?” (“Is it hard to learn the Basque language?”) I asked him, mostly because I could.
“No es dificil – es imposible!” he responded, his voice breaking up in a deep, phlegmy laughter. Again, something about the cab driver echoed my late father-in-law – perhaps, the ability to enjoy his own punchlines.
In San Sebastian, we learned that the local folks are reviving their relationship with the Basque language, which was forbidden during the long Franco dictatorship. (The Basque region, like Catalonia, was recognized in Spain’s 1978 constitution as a “historical nationality,” which led to Basque being declared as a “co-official” language with Spanish inside the region and spurred Basque language education in the area.)
Here, feelings about the use of a regional language seem a little more ambiguous. My sister-in-law reports that some locals associate use of the language with the violence of the Basque nationalist group ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna or ‘Basque Homeland and Freedom’) and are eager to turn the page. And, as our cabdriver’s joke attests, the language itself presents challenges, with its complex, agglutinative grammar. Nevertheless, many primary school students are now learning it, often turning to their grandparents for practice.
Standing in line at the pharmacy in San Sebastian, I listened to the flow of language around me, trying to separate Spanish from Basque. It wasn’t always easy, but it seemed that a fair number of customers greeted the pharmacist with the Basque commonplace greeting “Kaixo” (pronounced ‘kie-sho’), before switching to Spanish.
When we returned home to the U.S., we learned that Trump had issued an executive order designating English as the official language of the U.S. It goes without saying that no regional “co-official” language was designated, despite the widespread use of Spanish in California and south Texas.
We will have a long, tough fight on our hands for years to come to rid ourselves of Trumpism and to undo its worst effects. As quaint and impractical as it sounds, I still believe that the virtue of empathy has a role in that struggle. The ability to understand and sympathize with those feeling overwhelmed by unfamiliar languages will come in handy. God knows, we need every tool at our disposal.
Clark Bouwman is an essayist and poet who lives in Richmond, California. His work has appeared previously in The Dreaming Machine, The Antonym, Gargoyle, Minimus, The Tacoma Voice, and in the collection Music Gigs Gone Wrong, Paycock Press (2022). He maintains a blog which includes many of his essays at https://from-where-i-stand.com/
