I wanted to ask a question this week because I’ve been thinking about this recently with the rise of the Far Right (Ahem… Nazis) around the World. When do you stop being an expat/immigrant and just become someone who lives here?
This important question also leads into whether you are truly ever accepted in a place or whether you will forever just be a convenient scapegoat for those disappointed with their lives and falling into the welcoming social media arms of your local friendly Nazi party as both an excuse for any of their own failings and the failings of society as a whole. But today let’s look at self-acceptance.
Now I’ll admit my privilege here in Spain, my skin colour doesn’t mark me out as an immigrant except perhaps when I go Guiri red after little more than ten minutes on the beach. I speak the language and despite a bit of an accent I speak it well. I have brought jobs, investment and money into the society where I live and I work with Spanish people every day at the banks, notaries, and estate agencies all over Valencia. I have lived large parts of my life in two different parts of Spain, I have travelled widely and actually studied Spanish history and culture meaning I have had it easier than most. I am what I suppose the Far Right calls “the type of immigrant we want”. (But I realise that this is only until I’m not because for them there is only ever grievance and convenient scapegoats)
But do I feel Spanish after spending much more than half of my life here?
The answer to that is a resounding no. I’m still an immigrant and I actually relish that description. I even pointed this out when I was interviewed on Times Radio and they introduced me as an expat. I’m not an expat, Calling yourself an expat while bemoaning immigration is exceptionalism, Us Brits do exceptionalism well. I’m an economic migrant, the type the far right hate in many countries of course, “coming over here, taking our jobs blah blah blah”.
My self-identity is clear. I’m still British but I always saw myself as European and wanted to live in Europe. Brexit was hell for this identity but I still maintain it. So I’m British and at the same time I’m European.
I don’t think I’ll ever be Spanish even if I eventually decide to “become” Spanish. I’m just another European living in Spain.
However…
As I’ve been thinking about this question of identity for over twenty five years it probably tells you something about how long it takes to answer it satisfactorily.
When I arrived in Valencia in 1998 I was absolutely, unambiguously British and European. I had a van full of stuff, a rough idea of where the city centre was from L’Eliana having visited a few times, and the kind of misplaced confidence that only comes from not yet knowing what you don’t know (even though I knew more than most arriving here having studied, having visited before and having a plan to live here permanantly).
I converted everything from pesetas to pounds (My God this place was cheap!). I compared every restaurant meal to what it would have cost “back home” (More on this later). I rang my family on Sundays. I watched English football in English and Irish bars until I managed to get it at home (I still do this as a LFC fan of course) and I felt virtuous about it because at least I was watching it in Spain.
I was, in other words, a Brit who happened to be living in Valencia. Not a person who lived in Valencia. There’s a difference, and it took me longer than I’d like to admit to understand what it was.
The expat identity is a strange and surprisingly comfortable thing to inhabit unlike considering yourself an immigrant. The expat identity comes with a ready-made community, a shared set of reference points, a collective understanding that you’re all in the same boat. The Facebook groups, the WhatsApp threads, even in some areas of Spain the Sunday roast at the pub that shall remain nameless… it’s not exactly bad, it’s just not my thing. In the early months however it’s genuinely comforting. You need people around you who understand why you’re confused, who’ve already figured out how the padrón works, who won’t look at you blankly when you say you’re homesick for Marks and Spencer’s biscuits.
But it can also become a holding pattern. A way of being in Valencia and Spain without quite committing to it. A life lived in translation, permanently orientated toward somewhere else. This is what you still see in those who move to the Costas and live in the Red Lion. They will never call themselves immigrants. The Expat identity is real there, wrong imho but real.
I’ve watched hundreds of people arrive here over nearly three decades and I’ve noticed that the ones who stay here, not just physically but mentally, are the ones who at some point make a quiet, almost imperceptible decision to stop treating Spain as a place they’ve moved to and start treating it as a place they live. These are not the same thing.
They no longer use the term “Back home” Valencia is back home.
So when does that shift happen? This is where it gets interesting, because it’s never a moment. It’s always an accumulation of small things that you might only recognise later.
For me, the first sign was the day I stopped converting prices. I can still do it but these days I’m comfortable doing it from Euros to pounds, dollars or even pesetas depending on the context. It wasn’t a conscious decision, it’s just that I noticed one afternoon when I’d been shopping that I had paid and walked out without doing the mental arithmetic. The pesetas had become Euros which had become real money rather than a puzzle to be solved. It sounds trivial. It wasn’t.
The second sign was when I started having opinions about things that had nothing to do with being foreign. Not “this is different from the UK” but “this bakery is better than that one.” Preferences that were mine, not comparing with “Back home”. An inner life from belonging here.
The third, and this one takes years and may not ever truly fully happen, is when you stop finding bureaucracy exotic. In the early days, the queuing, the forms, the “you need a different form, this is the wrong colour”, the appointment that exists only in theory because in practicality they are already gone… all of this has a certain dark comedy to it, I’ve even written about it regularly for laughs and giggles. Initially you’re entertained by the absurdity when you are not frustrated. Much later, when you’ve been doing this for a decade, you’re still entertained but more often frustrated. You’re mildly irritated, like any normal Spanish person would be. That’s progress.
I’ve also noticed what I’d call the “homesickness inversion”. When you first arrive, you miss where you came from, at least a bit even if you hate the place you are coming from. That’s obvious. That’s expected. But there comes a point when you go for a visit to see your family and friends and find yourself missing here instead. Missing the light at seven in the evening. Missing the noise level of a Thursday night that would count as a Saturday in most of the UK. Missing the fact that you can eat a proper meal at ten at night and no one thinks you’re weird.
When that starts happening, something has changed. You don’t fully belong here yet, as I’ve said you probably never will in the way someone born here belongs, but you’ve stopped fully belonging there either. You’re inbetween, and instead of that feeling like loss it starts to feel like freedom.
The Americans we work with, and they make up almost half of our clients now, have an interesting version of this journey because they tend to arrive with the sharpest contrast between where they’ve come from and where they’re going. It’s so different here. The pace of Valencia vs the pace of wherever they left. Their relationship with time. Their idea that a two hour lunch is not an inefficiency but a feature. Their discovery that the neighbours actually talk to each other.
Some of them never quite make the adjustment. These are the people who loved the idea of Valencia more than the reality of it. They wanted the weather and the food and the cost of living but they also wanted the Amazon delivery infrastructure and the 24-hour gym and the email response or any response within an hour. Spain was always going to disappoint them because they were measuring it against somewhere else rather than accepting it as itself.
But the ones who make it, and the truth is that most do, go through something that I can only describe as a kind of unlocking. It usually happens in the second year, sometimes the third, at times it may take even longer. The city stops being a backdrop to their life and starts being their city. They have a preferred market stall, a preferred supermarket, a preferred cafe… a preferred everything really. They know where to go to get what they want instinctively. They know which queue at the ayuntamiento is quicker and that you maybe should go on a Tuesday as there are fewer people there on that day. They’ve been to a mascletá and now understand, viscerally, why Valencians are proud of their fireworks. And even though they still worry about their dog and its hate of the fireworks, they don’t go onto Facebook pages complaining about Valencians not caring about their dog. They’ve eaten paella that was made correctly and they understand why the rabbit matters rather than hatinjg the idea of the rabbit. They sometimes even understand the snails.
So back to that question I get occasionally. I find it quietly fascinating: “Do you consider yourself Spanish now?” Why do I find it so fascintating?
Because I don’t think it matters or at least I don’t think it matters to me.
So no. No, I don’t.
I’m not sure that’s the goal, or should be. I’m British, I’m European, and nothing about living here for over thirty years in two time periods has changed that particular fact about me. What I am is someone who lives in Valencia (Or rather just outside). Someone who has built a life here, whose children grew up here, whose understanding of how things work (really work, not tourist-guide work) comes from nearly three decades of showing up every day.
There’s a version of the expat/immigrant-to-resident/citizen journey that ends with complete assimilation and there’s a version that ends with something more honest than that: a deep, genuine, love for a place that you chose and that has, over time, chosen you back.
Not citizenship. Not belonging in the way someone born here belongs. But something real. Something that means when people ask where you’re from, you might not hesitate for a moment before you answer but you may just add “It’s complicated!”
I’m from here now, but I’m from there before.
That thought is the thing. When you have to think then that’s when you know that things have changed, at least mentally.
So now let’s do that substacky thing at the end
How long did it take you? Or if you’re still on your way then where are you up to? Tell me in the comments.