My Spanish-American kids

My wife and I are not from Spain, but our kids think so.

We’re wrapping up our second year in Spain and getting ready to move back to California. Not an easy decision: the kids adapted, they have cute Andaluz accents, they have loads of locals as friends, and they’re thriving. Whenever that happens—the kids being happy—it’s hard to argue with the lizard-parent brain that commands you not to mess with a good thing.

But this was always meant to be temporary, and we’ve already extended it a year.

That doesn’t stop the kids from running their own campaign: They’re pleading to stay in Seville and insisting on good reasons for why we have to go back. They don’t understand anything about the ins and outs of the US-Spanish income tax treaty, so I just leave it at It’s Time.

One morning at the breakfast counter, we discussed the move home. My 8yo wondered aloud to no one in particular, “When we go back, do I tell people I’m Spanish-American? Or European-Californian?”

The simple innocence of his question struck me. He knows nothing about the documentation required for such a dual-citizen arrangement. He just wants to know how to describe his experiences and what’s makes him him.

When you consider that most kids don’t form permanent memories until they’re two, and the haze of COVID that obscured the first half of my kid’s childhood, it’s reasonable that he would have a complicated sense of identity. Half of his lucid memories are in Spain, in Spanish.

Coincidentally at that same breakfast counter, the 10yo was using Seterra to study for a geography test. A few hours later, she would have to prove that she memorized all of Spain’s 50 provinces and their capitals. She noticed me notice her high score and seized the opportunity to show off some more. She tapped over to the Europe quiz to demonstrate that she could also place every country in the EU.

Out of curiosity, I asked her to try the USA quiz.

32%.

I expected something a little better since we had driven through 24 states together over the span of one summer a few years back. Plus, I’ve always encouraged the joy of geography, supplying atlases and maps of all kinds, and playing up the moment whenever we cross a border. I love places, and ever since both of them were capable of conversation, I’ve tried to inspire their pride in their place and to be aware of the pride of others, too. I hoped my passion was infectious.

Still, while the mastery of Spanish provinces is drilled into her, her recall of states remains casual and limited to where her grandparents, aunts, and uncles live.

I think her sense of being American and all that it contains wasn’t as important in the Bay Area as it was in my childhood in a Rust Belt hockey town on the Canadian border. When the Sabres played the Leafs, it might as well have been a pitched battle and I was a patriot. I had to know all our facts, our stat lines. And for some reason, for me, this extended to having to know our primary agricultural exports. It went that deep.

I suppose the politics of the last decade have had a chilling effect. It feels like there’s a back and forth between who gets to be American, and this has trickled down to the kids. It’s sad, but it can’t be denied that depending on who’s in power, an American flag on the front porch means something different. Was it always that way?

It’s possible I’m overthinking it. It could be that my kids’ awareness of America is stunted just because it’s usually too foggy in San Francisco to have a decent fireworks display on the Fourth of July.

The irony is that their self-identification as American—and their urgency to know more about their country—began when we moved to Spain. Their teachers often call on them to share trivia about the National Parks and our version of football. And their classmates beg them to bring back Prime from our trips to the States, convincing them that they’re lucky to come from a land of milk and honey, or overhyped fad beverages and Crumbl Cookies, I guess?

Their status as Californians also adds a layer of prestige (“Have you met Steph Curry?”), though not without its burdens (“Why are there so many fires and homeless people?”). All of this while they’re rapidly adopting the customs of their host country (a three hour dinner starting at 9pm is A-OK in their book).

Naturally it’s provoking a lot of searching for an answer to What Are We? Spaniards? Americans? Californians? Golden State Warriors?

The latest iteration of my explanation is something like this: We’re Americans. In America, there are 50 different experiments about what it means to be an American. Each state has its own special advantages and disadvantages to run those experiments. And we’re in Spain to gather ideas to bring back to the Californian experiment.

The 8yo stares at me blankly. “OK, so we can still watch F1 in California?”

“Of course.”

The answer to the Bigger Question my kids ask—Why Do We Have to Go Back? – is more complex and does have something to do with the tricky bureaucracy of a foreigner with foreign income, but it has a lot more to do with this: good and bad, I’m American. I need to be in a place where I can be both the place’s biggest fan and its legitimate critic. I need to know its history and stand a chance at being part of it. I need to speak its language really well and persuade, and argue, and create with it. I need to be a local.

Our time in Spain has been splendid, life-giving, and life-changing. We’ve made great friends, and we’ve had an adventure that the four of us will always consider pivotal. But this is not my home. An exciting possibility, though, is that my kids might have a choice: to be locals in both. They know the languages, they have the friends, and most importantly they know the agricultural exports; I just hope they have pride in their place.

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P.S. On that cross-country camper van trip I mentioned above, we shoved off in August 2020 when California was relaxing its strictest lockdown policies. The second day, we pulled into a small town on the Nevada side of the Sierras—we must have looked like aliens when we slid open the door and descended to the street in our masks—and without skipping a beat, a passerby noticed our license plate and greeted us, “Welcome to America!”

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Appendix

Some things my kids and I stared at together this week

Believed to be the earliest map to locate missions in Alta California, as well as El Camino Real that connects the missions. The map also shows the four Presidios located at San Diego, Santa Barbara, Monterey and San Francisco. The map is thought to be the first map to depict the administrative borderline between the two Californias in 1774.