Language Dance Act One: Español
What do I remember most from my day visit to Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México? The campus is beautiful, I gave a talk, met some good people. And then they dropped me off at Universum, a university-run museum with many rotating exhibitions. In the museum there was this one room on student protests, and a table with three iPads showing a slideshow of Mexican political memes. They were showing memes. In a museum. That was new.
It takes a day for my Spanish to wake up when I come back to a Spanish-speaking country. In early 2019, I was reading a scifi book in which the time suddenly stopped, the sun didn't rise anymore, temperature stalled just about zero Celcius, and oil and gas could not burn. The book was not in Spanish, but it was the one I was reading on the plane arriving into Mexico at the height of the gasoline crisis. The people meeting me in the airport were pleasantly surprised that I actually spoke Spanish if a bit stilted, I knew who AMLO was, and I knew the word huachicolero (a person stealing gasoline for resale). On a highway we drove by long lines of cars waiting for a truck to refill a gas station. It was eerie.
Spanish came to me from the blue sky. Growing up, never heard of the stuff. Other end of the world. When I moved to the US, I made a friend from Ecuador. One thing went to another, he invited me to spend a winter break with his family, I took a semester of Spanish, then an immersive class, and it took off. I remember distinctly the moment I "broke into fluency", on a technicality, in a percolation transition sense. I was drinking cheap booze in a cheap hostel in Madrid, I wasn't even staying there. The guy I was talking to for the first and last time must have been an Argentinian. But somehow, I was able to string together enough words to keep talking. It was crude and inelegant - but I didn't stop!
Spanish unlocks Latin America for you, sort of. But Latin America is a huge and very diverse region - both across many local languages and across many local Spanishes. Once, flying either along or across the Andes, I saw the movie La Cordillera (The Summit) about a mildly fictionalized version of the President of Argentina dealing with other Presidents and with his daughter's mental breakdown. The accent game of the movie was fascinating to my moderately trained ear. Each president of a Spanish-speaking country leans into their native pronunciation. The President of Brazil ceremonially speaks Portuguese during the official proceedings, but moments later he is giving a private interview to a journalist from Spain and sounds like the next table over in a touristy Buenos Aires steakhouse. Even a representative of the US Department of State drops by the summit with his un-rollable R's.
As you travel across Latin America, aguacate becomes palta, maíz becomes choclo and triples in size. It took me some contextual guessing and a belated internet search to realize that the Mexican word platicar doesn't mean anything malicious and can be very much used officially. It took getting a few funny stares and quite a bit of convincing for me to realize that calling a high school physics competition lucha física might not be the best idea (as opposed to lucha de física). People say my Spanish accent has a bizarre mix of Russian and American, but I can get by. Still beats looking for English speaking guides everywhere.
The diversity of languages and cultures is a result of a (thankfully) incomplete colonial project. Quechua, Aymara, Nahuatl, Mayan, Mapuche and many other languages coexist with Spanish in Latin America; Basque, Catalan, Galician and others in Spain. I met kids who only started learning Spanish in elementary school - the kind of school to which you need to hike 40 minutes uphill; yet by age 8, they readily point out their location on the globe. After that, the tourist promise of "beautiful colonial architecture" in some town's center gets a very different ring.
Several times in my life I felt the ecstatic feeling of free exploration, lasting several days at a time. Most of them happened in Latin America, as I was able to go around a new city, talk to people, find my way, and discover the random and awesome local specialties. It helps that my appearance is consistent with someone who would speak Spanish. Several years ago I attended an international conference on statistical physics in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which naturally had lots of Argentinians. Walking through the extensive and busy poster session, I found myself switching from English to Spanish and back at every next poster. It is a special feeling of fully dual-booting two foreign languages at a time, of mastering a cultural skill that I don't come equipped with through my upbringing.
I haven't been to the Spanish speaking world since Covid descended upon us. What keeps my connection and allows maintaining at least listening comprehension is the music. Music can offer a cosmopolitan perspective from a non-dominant point of view, from someone who doesn't sit at the heart of a colonial empire. It can unite the freedom movements of the Global South. Music can denounce the violence of borders, in both its lyrical content and the careful tuning of the choice accent used for just one song. At times, music can be a most direct accusation of those in power by those who dare.
I wanted to start this saga with Spanish, because it gives me a side view of language issues. I don't have a stake in debates around Spanish. My existence as a non-native Spanish speaker, one among millions, doesn't quite support or suppress anyone. I don't plan to make any sweeping claims about Spanish speaking people for I am not a 1920s anthropologist. Yet speaking it gives me a window into the culture, a chance to make an alien world fundamentally knowable. It broadens the range of entertainment available. And for those who ask me, in the earnest, how possibly two languages could be similar, I always have the example of Spanish and Portuguese. The relationship of those two is complicated - but so is the relationship for the pair that necessitates the metaphor.
I had a private wine tasting in Spanish. I discussed politics, space heaters, and Boltzmann weights. I watch movies. I listen to hip hop. I taught workshops. I read the news. Borges is a bit too hard.