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What does it mean to be Spanish?

2021-03-09T01:34:25.726Z


After living 12 years in Spain, the author decides to apply for nationality. but you have to study to pass the mandatory official exam. This is the account of his journey and the questions that arose.


In which province is the Rocío pilgrimage celebrated?

How many autonomous communities are there in Spain?

What are the governing bodies of the provinces called?

What is the highest peak in the country?

How many members does the Congress of Deputies consist of?

Over the past few months I have been asking questions like the ones above, often without prompting.

To several friends, in bars.

To a taxi driver especially interested in government affairs, during a traffic jam.

To my wife, at lunch.

To several writing friends and one who works at a foreign university.

Naturally, none of them were very interested in my questions, and only a handful were able to answer them.

But I couldn't have answered them either until a few months ago, when I started studying to take the Constitutional and Sociocultural Knowledge Test of Spain (CCSE), the exam that the Spanish Ministry of Justice introduced in September 2016 as a requirement for the granting of the Spanish nationality by residence: for years I believed that traveling from Madrid to Barcelona meant “going down” to Barcelona (I was absolutely convinced that the Mediterranean Sea was to the south of the Peninsula);

on several occasions I found myself telling myself that the river in front of me was the Ebro, only to discover later that it was the Tormes, the Miño or the Tajo, and on one occasion I publicly attributed Santander the capital of Castilla y León, something that could and perhaps should have cost me the expulsion of the country, or (at least) that of that Cantabrian city.

One afternoon in October last year, however, I was faced with an exam in which I had to show that I knew those things and others of equal importance, no matter what relevance I gave them.

The Constitutional and Sociocultural Knowledge Test of Spain was created by the Cervantes Institute, which provides candidates with a 90-page manual for their preparation and a list of private centers where it can be done after payment of 85 euros, a significant amount for many immigrants, particularly if they must also obtain, for the same amount, the Diploma of Spanish as a Foreign Language (DELE) of level A2 or higher that is required to start the nationalization procedures, from which we are exempt from the Spanish speakers.

A certain opacity of these procedures makes it practically impossible to carry them out without resorting to lawyers and various facilitators, and it is not surprising that there are private academies that prepare for both tests.

  • Would you pass the compulsory test to obtain Spanish nationality?

I have been living in Spain for 12 years, but I don't remember asking myself frequently during that period what it means to be Spanish.

I suppose that the fact that my main interlocutors were, that I had no intention of becoming one and that, naturally, I did not see my partners and my Spanish friends as national types, invalidated the question, although not the curiosity, that I it led again and again to somewhat disturbing discoveries.

The "faces of Bélmez".

The Chorbos.

The roundabouts.

The expression "fuck the sow."

An exercise in politics based on personal disqualification and not on the exchange of proposals.

The meaning of the acronym EGB.

And the saying "either we all fuck, or we throw the whore into the river."

Although there are also some other things that are much more useful, apart from the obvious usefulness of knowing the name of Chanquete's ship, especially if alcohol has been drunk and after certain hours of the night.

None of these things served, however, for the examination.

As soon as I began to study the “manual”, during the coronavirus crisis, I had the impression that it responded in a very unique way to the question of what it means to be Spanish and to what knowledge, practices, habits, hopes and obligations do they have Spaniards: divided into five sections ("Government, legislation and citizen participation", "Fundamental rights and duties", "Territorial organization of Spain and physical and political geography", "Culture and history of Spain" and "Spanish society").

The CCSE Test requires practically esoteric knowledge, such as what is the function of Turespaña, what are the governing bodies of the autonomous community of the Balearic Islands called, what flags should the autonomous communities use in their public buildings and if Murcia is a co-official language ;

also how many times has Spain chaired the European Council, why can you call 060, what autonomous community is Castellón part of, what rivers flow into the Atlantic, what is the climate of the Canary Islands called.

To pass the exam you must know that

El camino

y

Nada

were not written by Camilo José Cela, that Penélope Cruz is an actress and not a singer, that the National Ballet of Spain "performs different styles of dance", that Severo Ochoa won the Nobel Prize of Physiology and Medicine in 1959, that in bars “a person can choose a portion, a combined dish, a daily menu or eat à la carte” and that “in each case the price and presentation vary”;

also that Spain is "one of the most mountainous countries in Europe", that its economy ranks fifth in the European Union (actually, fourth after Brexit) and that at the Seville April Fair the tradition is to dance in the booths and that in Sanfermines the scarf and sash are red.

Of course, saying something is equivalent to not saying something else;

and the Test left dozens of questions unanswered.

What differentiates a “non-denominational” state like Spain from a “secular” one?

For what reason “the members of the councils are chosen by the representatives of the Town Halls, except in the case of the Basque Country, where they are elected through direct elections”?

What criteria were decisive in the conformation of the autonomous communities?

Why do some of them only consist of one province and another has two capitals?

What criterion was imposed in each of the cases where, as is evident, the “common historical, cultural and economic characteristics” that served as their basis were antithetical?

What kind of history do Spaniards have in common and what consensuses are the product of it?

What is it really to be Spanish, and how do the linguistic, cultural and political differences that exist in the country determine the many ways of being it that exist?

Bouvard and Pécuchet were created by the French writer Gustave Flaubert to ridicule the encyclopedic zeal of their time: both are given the task of summarizing all universal knowledge, but they cannot achieve their purpose;

in fact, the novel is unfinished, Flaubert died without being able to finish it.

I decided to nationalize because I thought it was time to have some of the rights of my Spanish hosts, in addition to their obligations, and because I thought that doing so would lead me to better understand Spain, but in the months prior to the completion of the Test I felt in many times like Flaubert's characters, whose passion for accumulating mostly useless knowledge distracts them from a life in which they could have acquired only what is necessary.

I was not sure that the people who were taking the exam with me that afternoon, and with whom I had spoken a few minutes before, would understand me if I spoke to them about Flaubert.

They were almost all women;

the majority, Colombians, Venezuelans and Dominicans.

There was one called Disolute.

A Romanian marriage.

A

rider

who arrived with his bicycle and had to leave quickly to continue working.

A Brazilian who never took off her down coat despite the fact that it wasn't cold.

I finally knew the answers to all those questions that I was supposed to know how to answer in order to become Spanish (for example, the ones I asked myself at the beginning of this text, and which were the following: in the province of Huelva, 17 plus 2 autonomous cities, councils; Mulhacén, with 3,718 meters of altitude; 350 deputies), but when I finished the exam I was not sure that I was even a little closer to understanding this country and its inhabitants, not to mention become Spanish.

How many Spaniards does it take to change a light bulb? I wondered.

I had no idea, but I thought that maybe I could spend the next few years trying to learn what I didn't know yet, and that taking that exam was the first step towards it: maybe Spain was changing too, and starting to have a place for people like me, with private lives and pasts in other countries, that made Spain an even more diverse and plural place.

As I was about to get up to take the exam, I saw that a young Chinese woman who was sitting across from me had Converse shoes the same as mine, and that, visibly, hers were also fake.

I thought that perhaps we too were going to be "false" Spaniards, for some, but that "false" has the potential to disprove the idea that there is something "true" or "natural" in the conceptions of country and nation.

After all, every country is a story;

hope at best.

And for that reason I turned in my exam and left the room.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-03-09

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