Integrating Immigrants

There’s no doubt that being white immigrants into a European country whose language we speak, however badly, produces a profoundly different experience from that of non-whites trying to fit into countries speaking a language they don’t know. 

One US President, Theodore Roosevelt, was quite clear about those foreigners who turn up insisting on speaking a different language:

Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.

The most strident voice of the racist right of the British Conservative Party in my youth, Enoch Powell, made clear that belonging to a different faith or ‘community’ wasn’t acceptable in an immigrant either:

To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.

And here, typically in a tweet, is another US President who has made something of a specialty of denouncing nasty immigrants (he wrote off Mexicans as ‘drug dealers, criminals and rapists’, a curious choice of words, since drug dealing and rape are crimes themselves):

In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens, I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!

Immigrants, you see, import the Invisible Enemy with them. In this case, that means Covid, nasty foreign infection (in Trump’s view, specifically Chinese) that good American stock would never have developed. Foreigners aren’t just pesky, you see, they’re pest-ridden. 

US border with Mexico: hardly the most welcoming sight

The curious thing about Roosevelt’s statement and Trump’s, is that those men led a nation built by immigrants on top of the ruins of the cultures they found there before them. Native Americans weren’t asked whether they were happy with these new arrivals sticking to their own communal rights (or rites). They just had an alien culture inflicted on them.

As I said, we’re Europeans moving to another European country and with a basic knowledge of the language. So we’ve escaped the kind of welcome Roosevelt, Powell or Trump might have offered us. However, the issues they raise apply to our case too, if in a less acute form.

The key question is whether the immigrants remain separate or integrate with their new community. Our decision was clear: we were going to integrate. We’ve been working on our Spanish. We’ve been working on understanding the customs of our new country. That’s across the board, including the knotty problem understanding the eating habits of our new host community. 

The day’s meals start with desayuno which it’s easy to translate as breakfast, since that’s what the word literally means: breaking a fast (not the same as a fast break, which is the specialty of snooker players or escaping convicts).

Then, especially in our province of Valencia, there’s the almuerzo. This happens some time between 11:00 and midday, so I suppose we can call it elevenses, a meal that has rather dropped into disuse in Britain, as in other parts of Spain.

That’s followed by comida, clearly lunch though it literally just means meal (well, actually, just food), at around 2:00.

I think that merienda, served at around 5:00 or 6:00, rather like the old institution of tea or high tea in Britain, a relic of last-century middle class life, is mostly for children now. But not exclusively. I’ve seen adults enjoying their merienda too (often down with strong alcohol, but then that’s often true of breakfast too).

And the final meal of the day, served traditionally at the ungodly hour of 10:00 at night (though that’s slipping forward these days, perhaps to accommodate the few tourists still coming here since Covid), is the cena or dinner.

Since we see fewer obese people here than we did in Britain, I can only suppose that not everyone eats every one of those meals. It’s more of a pick and mix. You know, maybe skip one and make more of a meal, as it were, of the next.

Danielle, wanting to adapt to local customs, and enthusiastic about the kind of meal you can serve late in the morning, has taken to inviting neighbours to occasional almuerzos with us. This has mostly been well received, particularly after we took the gentle hint offered by people turning up with bottles and offered wine with the meal (not my previous practice, I have to admit, until rather later in the day).

What shocked our friends, however, was the sheer amount of food Danielle would lay out on the table.

“This isn’t an almuerzo,” they would cry, in shock mingled, I think, with some delight, “this is a comida.”

Well, maybe there was an element of our providing something more like lunch at that time of day, used as we were to having our midday meal at a time closer to midday. They pointed out to us than an almuerzo, to them, was much more of a light snack. Still, no one complained, and we noticed that everyone seemed perfectly happy to enjoy a substantial meal at our almuerzos.

So it was a pleasure to be invited back for an almuerzo at the house of a neighbouring couple. We were immediately struck by the large quantities of food, more like our idea of an almuerzo than the light snack we’d been told was normal.

“Ah, well,” they told us, “we’re trying to integrate.”

Our neighbours Santi and María José
and the immigrant-scale almuerzo they served us

Enoch Powell would not have been pleased. Here was the local community adapting its customs to ours. We’d tried to assimilate to theirs, but gone way over the top. However, instead of haughtily explaining to us that we were badly out of line, they were following us over the top themselves.

And the worst of it? Everyone enjoyed it.

Mr Trump and Teddy Roosevelt would not have been pleased.