I’ve been trying to get fluent in Spanish since I was pretty young. The problem is, I don’t talk much. Not even in English. So I don’t practice. So I don’t learn.
Then Money Heist became a big deal on Netflix. And Money Heist is a Spanish TV show called La Casa de Papel.
(I have to go on this tangent. I have never heard a worse translation of a better title. The House of Paper, the story of a group of thieves who decide to rob the mint, the house where paper currency is printed, in an attempt to show that capitalism, while it looks strong, is actually very weak. Like, say, a paper house. Anyway…)
I started watching La Casa de Papel in Spanish with English subtitles. And I can’t believe how much I learned. Mostly how to swear.
All that is just to say that I recently watched a new show on Netflix called Erase Una Vez, Pero Ya No, which is a Spanish musical. It’s weird. It’s woke. And I enjoyed it.
Wokeness is like most things: good in moderation. There are people who can’t wait to beat you over the head with the pronouns and the diversity quotas. And there are people who wish things could just go back to the way they were in 1855.
Then there’s the rest of us. Normal, everyday people who think that transgender people deserve equal rights, but also that there is such thing as male and female.
What I like about this show is that it doesn’t take wokism too seriously most of the time. Take the character Goya, the animal rights activist/ reincarnated princess, for example. She keeps insisting on gender neutral words for groups of people, because in Spanish the word for groups of only men is the same as the word for groups of both men and women, which is obviously deeply personally insulting and sexist. And everybody else in the show ignores her.
In one scene, a character starts talking about the townspeople, los del pueblo, and Goya insists on gender neutral “town” and gender neutral “people”, before realizing that she only needed the “people” part to be gender neutral. Les del pueble! No, les del pueblo.
Transcribing humor doesn’t have quite the same effect, but just take my word for it that part made me chuckle.
Humor is the perfect medium for working out these philosophical, political and social tensions. Humor allows us to bring difficult things to attention without making others defensive and to take responsibility for our shortcomings without losing face.
For some people, the more you bash them, the more they’ll give in. But for many people, the more you bash them, the more stubbornly they will resist you. However, the more space you give for people who disagree with you to laugh and, if they choose, ignore you, the less they’ll fight.
Maybe someday in Spain, the neuter “e” will replace the reflexive masculine “o” in standard parlance. Maybe it won’t. Either way, most Spanish speakers don’t care. The only way they’re even going to have that conversation is if it’s fun.
