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Troy Nahumko
Friday, 19 December 2025, 10:34
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 far right party's conclave, no doubt convened to defend Spain from foreigners, blue jeans and the encroaching threat of recycling. A third arrow advertised the Festival Flamenco. 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 - puffer vest, 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, catechised 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-cum-American 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 recognised 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 kilometres 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.