On fleeing and homecoming

There's no easy last entry for this blog...

I'm glad to be home, and glad that Spain has shown its best side in the last weeks.  But for my blog-reading peeps who can, stay in the streets.

So, my Fulbright grant is officially over.  I'll be back and forth to Spain over the summer, but I've made a quick trip home (the first since last September, and the first time I've left Spain this year).  I kept reassuring all my friends and neighbors in Carabanchel, "it's just for a couple of weeks.  I'll be back soon" and it's true...but I can feel the beginning of being uprooted, and I'm sad, because I've been mostly very generously welcomed...in Carabanchel, in Madrid, and in Spain.  (I know perfectly well from other Fulbrighters that the welcome extended so generously might be more ambivalent and unpleasant if I weren't white.  This hurts me because I love Spain and want it to be better, but I can still acknowledge the grace with which I have been received and made at home in my immigrant neighborhood, even as other people remind me that the glory of New York is that you can become a New Yorker, and the problem with Europe is that you and your children remain forever foreigners.)

I'm also being generously welcomed home in New York (it turns out I have friends), and I must say that from the moment of landing at JFK I felt the same relief and happiness about being home as always, and the same recognition that New York really is unlike any other place I've been, not only because of my personal associations, but because yes, the cross-section of people you get on a subway car here is more diverse than the (very beautiful) metro in Madrid, even in my neighborhood.  And yes, you can speak English if you want to, but it's really optional.  (I met up with Spanish friends in New York on my first day back, and kept being surprised when the children playing around us in the park spoke such good English.  My instinct is to speak Spanish with children and English with adults now, and I kind of had to reverse it.)

At one of my farewell dinners during my last week in Madrid a concerned Spaniard (considering visiting New York) asked me whether speaking Spanish was "stigmatized" in the city, and I could hardly help laughing as I assured her that it most emphatically was not.  And yet...this is a painful time to come home.



"Oh, how nice, you're a Fulbrighter," commented the immigration officer at JFK, after I told him what I had been doing in Spain for the last year.  "They come here, you go there...and then we all learn to understand each other."  He also wanted to know if I had "seen any soccer games" while I was in Madrid.  Compassion for the people on the line behind me made me glad that I could honestly answer that I had only heard the roar from cafes as World Cup goals were scored, since I suspect a positive answer would have led to a long and friendly - and mildly envious - chat.  As it was he laughed and waved me through.

All in all, it was a charming (and fast) entry to the US, that didn't belie too badly the video they showed us on the airplane about how we should print out our entry forms at the automatic kiosks and "then hand them to a friendly customs and border patrol agent."  But I almost choked when the video said that, and might have murmured (a bit loudly) "and also possibly your toddler" a piece of indignation largely lost of the passengers around me, since they were mostly foreigners, and therefore haven't been following the shame of family separation and indefinite illegal detentions as closely as Americans have.  (The Spanish and English papers eventually picked up the thing about family separations at the border.  But it took them several days, and given that they are normally anything but shy about critiques of the Trump administration, I can't help feeling this relative lack of reporting is ominous.  The EU may disapprove of family separations, but they'd like to keep their options open.)

Spaniards have been transfixed (and electrified) first by their own unexpected change of government over the last month, and then by their new prime minister's decisive and symbolic acceptance of the refugee ship Aquarius, stranded at sea by the equally new Italian government, about which the less said the better.  In fact, Spain's socialist party enjoyed a sudden bounce in the polls after Sánchez reached power, and the welcoming of the Aquarius, along with the serious reports of the difficulties facing over-stretched organizations welcoming refugees who cross the straits of Gibraltar with considerably less international press coverage, have left the Spaniards I know in the unusual (not to say completely unprecedented) position of being proud of their country.  (Spaniards are usually the first to criticize Spain.  Their current attitude somewhat recalls an old line from The Simpsons "I feel...what's that word that's the opposite of shame?"  "Less shame?")

Casual (and probably well hidden structural) racism is unquestionably an issue in Spain, something clearly demonstrated by a few well meaning conversations I've had about my research, which generally begin and end with Spaniards explaining how Spain has no culture of "political correctness" and that there are lots of things that they say that they know Americans would probably find offensive but it's not really offensive because there's no racist intention.  (What's quite impressive is how much Spaniards are able to argue both sides of this question themselves without me saying a word.  They clearly know their arguments are weak, which is why they barely let me get a word in edgewise.)  The latest discussion involved the famous question of calling the bazaars and alimentaciones "los chinos" and included the anxious rider that it's not racism to call a place "el chino" but what would be racist would be refusing to buy from the store because it was operated by un chino.  I didn't point out that the alimentaciones and bazaars make their money because they're open seven days a week, until ten o'clock at night or later, and that they're actually providing a service, so I didn't think that exploiting someone else's economic vulnerability showed particular anti-racist virtue, just a willingness to be exploitative for the sake of convenience.  But I did say (courtesy of another Fulbrighter who earnestly asked us to mention this at the orientation) that one Chinese-American student found the term annoying since she had spoken to many shop owners, and found that mostly they were Filipino or Malaysian not Chinese.  "We don't distinguish," replied the Spaniard who would probably be offended for being mistaken for Galician or Asturian, as if that were a proof of further good faith.

It's conversations like those that make me really glad to be back in New York where incidentally the children of immigrant shopkeepers make up a significant portion of university students, as opposed to the round about 0% they comprise at the Complutense, as far as I can tell.  And yet...one can't fake the generosity of the response to the Aquarius, or indeed to many of the refugees who arrive desperate and drenched on Spanish shores.  At a time when the United States has done worse than turn its back on refugees, Spain is stepping up.  These are two news photos, both taken in the last two weeks, both of refugees being met by law enforcement at the border, in one case in the US, and in one case in Motril, in the province of Granada.  Photos can only capture an instant, and they don't tell the whole story, but sometimes instants matter:

Refugees arriving at the southern border of Spain

Refugees arriving at southern border of the United States

Neither is precisely a pretty picture.  But I'm privileged to have spent a year in the country where the first one was taken, where at least there's an attempt to care for the most vulnerable of the society.  I'm probably going to end up at a demonstration this afternoon to protest the shameful supreme court decision upholding this administration's Muslim Ban.  I'm relieved to at least be home for a little while so I can take to the streets to protest against the way my country is treating refugees.  (For the well meaning Europeans who read this, I should say that this is not the first time the US has done this, and probably is sadly far from the last.  But it doesn't mean we shouldn't keep fighting.)  In the meantime, whether in the EU or the US, we all keep struggling against the forces of evil.  Because they are most certainly international, so all of us of good faith have got to stay in the streets, to protect each other.  Pa'lante.