The Foreign Menace: Now Available in the Hotel Lobby

Gin fumes in the hotel foyer. Shotguns of hair lacquer. Sideburns sharp enough to draw blood. On one side, tweed-and-testosterone conservatives sloshing G&Ts like it’s the Siege of Granada. On the other, flamenco devotees with ozone-destroying bouffants and eyes fixed on an imaginary stage. And wedged between them all: the exam candidates—browner, nervous, clutching documents like rosaries—waiting to be told whether they qualify as properly Spanish today.

This really happened.
And it’s funnier, uglier, and more hallucinatory than it sounds.

I went in for a citizenship exam and wandered into a surreal carnival of nationalism, folklore, fear, and hairspray. What followed was less bureaucracy and more Raul Duke in Cáceres.

Read the piece in my Camino a Ítaca in the HOY in Spanish here. Have your drink at the ready. https://archive.ph/Wzaio (PDF en castellano)
English version was also published in the SUR in English or can be read below:

The irony, as usual, required no midwife. It sat there fully formed in the hotel foyer, grinning at me from a plastic stand announcing the evening’s events. One arrow pointed to a club taurino—because well… Another pointed toward the Party’s conclave, no doubt convened to defend Spain from foreigners, jeans and the encroaching threat of recycling. A third arrow advertised the Festival Flamencos Cacereños. And then there was us, the supplicants of the Spanish citizenship test, left without so much as a Post-it note to guide us.

The anthropological clues came from the clusters outside each conference room. The flamenco crowd was easy to spot: a jubilant mixture of enough hairspray to repuncture the ozone layer. Outside the political gathering, however, stood a different species entirely—fachalecos, Barbour jackets and a conspicuous surplus of testosterone. A row of interchangeable action figures, wound up to denounce anything south of Algeciras.

Some were about to ask the browner exam candidates for a gin and tonic when we were summoned one by one for the exam. The roll call sounded overwhelmingly Spanish—or at least Spanish by historical accident, the sort bestowed upon you when your great-great-grandparents were conquered, catechized, and upgraded from “savages” to “souls.” As far as I could tell, mine was the only surname not traceable to a former Spanish virreinato.

These, then, were the hordes, if one listens to the gentlemen next door, storming the gates of Hispanidad, poised to dismantle the sacred raza armed with nothing more dangerous than a passport application and a desire for registered employment. I glanced at the passports on the tables: Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras, Ecuador, and, for reasons that would amuse any historian, Portugal. Former colonies, old protectorates, places Spain once insisted were not colonies at all but rather fraternal dependencies blessed to receive the gift of salvation. A generosity, I might add, notably absent in the British tradition, where the indigenous were treated less as potential Christians and more as inconvenient wildlife.

Next door, the ideological crusaders of the day no doubt saw themselves as heirs to the Reconquista—guardians of a peninsula forever menaced by foreigners, despite spending much of its history busily exporting itself to them. They clung to that Old Testament notion that humanity is born in sin, though this time the stain seems to be possessing a foreign passport more than a circumcised penis.

Perhaps, I thought, the candidates here today were the “acceptable” ones, the domesticated barbarians. The chosen ones permitted to bathe Grandma, iron the sheets, serve the gin and tonics, and, if providence smiles, ascend from criada to querida. A kind of upward mobility recognized since the Habsburgs.

What I did not see were the real objects of their panic: the practitioners of the other monotheism, the ones audacious enough to propose that prophecy did not, in fact, retire in the first century. A creed born scarcely 1,350 kilometers south of their own sacred geography (3,613 from Madrid), yet deemed somehow more foreign than a supermarket full of British retirees in Benidorm.

But then again, xenophobia, like irony, often writes itself. The only difference is that one is funny on purpose.