jblawton
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- Apr 11, 2013
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You must have an amazing Latino detector.
Mariano, it happens everywhere! I lived in Spain for 6 years, and I saw so many people partying with small children past 1 a.m., that as a Latin American I felt uncomfortable as that is something I have never seen done by anyone I know back home in the past three decades (disclaimer: I'm Panamanian, we might have a 'less European' mentality for these things). I should say I've traveled my way around Latin America, and don't recall seeing it anywhere else.
And, no Mariano, they were not just 'eating tapas', but inside crowded bars pushing strollers and a few times carrying babys, and quite a few times with kids that had the looks of zombies from trying to stay awake. I asked a couple of Spanish friends, and they said that as 'going out for dinner' hours are so late there (just like here in BA!), people going out for dinner find it normal to stay for drinks, which evolves into more drinks, smoking and bad dancing, even if they carry an infant in their arms (also, nannies are expensive). It's one thing to stay for 1 drink, but strollers at 2 a.m. inside a bar pumping one of the 15 bad songs that every bar in Spain is required to play on a loop since Y2K (if I hear the Chipiron song, Miguel Bosé or Azucar Moreno in a disco one more time...) is not my idea of good parenting.
That said, they didn't 'look' or 'sound' like the typical Latin immigrant in Spain for you or anyone to make any generalizations on ethnicity and behavior. And I know by me saying they didn't 'look' the type, I'm making the same mistake you make of assuming I can detect them in a crowd, but unless the typical 'Latin American migrant' developed melanin shortage, an affection for awful-looking hairdos with straight bangs, danced with the rhythm of a chicken that just got their head cut off, and pronounced their 'z's like 'jzjzjz's with a strong Spanish accent, I would be pretty sure they were Spanish at least 90% of the time. And no, I'm not furthering any stereotypes here.
Isn't it equally possible these latin immigrants you detected, somehow saw that such behavior which was socially unacceptable in their home countries was more common and acceptable in Spain, and imitated the locals in doing so? Correlation need not imply causality. That you might have seen a few immigrants do it, doesn't mean they were the origin or the most common practitioners of the trend. The same for me, that almost all I saw looked/sounded Spanish, doesn't mean they are to blame. Recall that most latin cultures (ironically, less so for the Southern Cone, which happens to be the most 'European' part of the continent) are actually very conservative, especially when it comes to family, children, and social behavior. A lot of the recent liberalization (openly drinking and smoking/doing drugs, teenagers who speak publicly about sexuality, etc.) that people see as 'progressive', is actually considered to originate in the European way of doing things. In the age of Twitter, the origin of trends is almost impossible to track, but 'bad' trends are not particular of 'developing countries'. Also, I'm pretty sure all of the half-million teenagers in Spain "wearing the waist of their pants almost on their knees showing their fake CK underwear like an extra from a Fifty Cent video" are also Latin immigrants, because they have to be, am I right?
Saw it in Italy too. Maybe it's a Southern European thing? After all, I've met Porteños that feel more Italian than Berlusconi.
I guess it happens in most 'open' cultures. Let me be specific, in some cultures (*cough* a large chunk of Europe *cough*) they 'trust' good behavior on the individual, as opposed to the traditional way of having a social structure defining what 'correct behavior' is, as was traditionally done in LatAm. We call it 'openness', but it's just social empowerment. Also, the line between what constitutes a bar/club or what constitutes a restaurant is a bit blurrier in Europe than in LatAm, where the word bar has a negative stigma, making it gradually more acceptable to have children in places that traditionally would be perceived as 'alcohol-dominated locales' (also, can someone explain what the heck is a lounge these days). However, I would expect Northern Europeans, as objecting as they are to social misconduct, to draw the line somewhere and tell a person when they feel they are taking it too far. Spain/Italy/Greece have a more relaxed mentality where if you see it happen, people let it flow. More than attaching it to an ethnicity, Mariano could have attached it to a mentality that is more prevalent in younger generations (millenials, maybe?) regardless of ethnic or national background.
