Spain’s Streets Are Named After Immigrants
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I live my life surrounded by dead Middle Eastern men. They loom over my mornings from enamel street signs, glower from building façades and squat in the middle of traffic circles with stone hands raised in permanent theological objection. Every day I drink my coffee under the marble gaze of Syrian ascetics, Palestinian prophets, Egyptian hermits, Anatolian bishops—desert mystics who wandered out of the furnace of the Roman East preaching salvation and were eventually hacked to pieces for their trouble.
One might imagine I am describing Tehran: a capital draped in banners of martyrs, highways lined with portraits of sanctified youth dispatched into minefields by the devout fantasies of their elders. But no. This is modern Europe: tapas, wine bars, high-speed rail, gluten-free croissants—and entire municipal districts named after men who would today be detained at the airport for having the wrong birthplace and an alarming beard.
Mid-morning finds me drinking a caña in San Blas, staring at yet another plaque dedicated to a long-dead holy import from somewhere east of Athens. Here in Cáceres, like every city in Spain, the map reads like an immigration record from Late Antiquity: San Juan, San Francisco, Santiago, San Pedro—men who never saw Extremadura, never tasted jamón, never argued about parking permits, yet now preside eternally over the traffic lights.
Walk a few blocks farther—again San Juan and San Francisco—and the city begins to feel less like a municipality and more like a stone reliquary. Everywhere the same pattern: European towns stitched together with the names of Levantine mystics, Palestinian apostles, Anatolian bishops, Egyptian hermits… Foreigners all of them, desert theologians whose biographies usually end in dismemberment, burning, or flaying, now repackaged as decorative wayfinding devices for tourists looking for tapas.
The numbers whisper the same story. Tens of thousands of Spanish streets bear the names of saints, virgins, and religious figures, vastly outnumbering scientists, secular thinkers, or ordinary citizens; only a small fraction are named after women, and most of those commemorate saints rather than historical figures who actually walked the earth in shoes.
So there you sit, beer sweating in your hand in San Blas, contemplating the geography of European identity: a continent that is now loudly proclaiming its “Christian roots” while quietly forgetting that nearly every one of those roots grew in Middle Eastern soil, under Middle Eastern suns, attached to Middle Eastern bodies that today’s chest-thumping guardians of civilization would likely demand to see a visa for.
And that is when the dizziness sets in. Because the same people who pound their chests about the “Christian roots of Europe” develop a sudden, theatrical nausea at the mention of the Middle East— the region that produced every prophet, apostle, saint, and carpenter their civilization claims as its founding shareholders.
Spain has always been a country named after foreigners; it just forgets that they were once migrants too. And just as the hangover of history begins to clear, the noise now spills far beyond Spain’s borders. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez writes in The New York Times defending Spain’s regularization policy, and within hours the familiar outrage machine roars to life: British tabloids predicting civilizational collapse, American MAGA pundits warning that Europe is committing demographic suicide, and Elon Musk broadcasting alarmist commentary to millions with the casual certainty of a man who has never had to harvest strawberries in Huelva.
The same ritual panic appears again: invasión, efecto llamada—the old mythology that recognizing the migrants already picking the fruit, pouring the concrete, caring for the elderly, and paying rent will somehow summon an unstoppable human tide. In the fever dreams of the professional alarmists, bank accounts become Trojan horses, residence permits open wormholes in the Mediterranean, and the mere act of allowing strawberry pickers to sign legal contracts will apparently trigger the immediate architectural transformation of the Sagrada Familia into a mosque, minarets erupting overnight like fundamentalist mushrooms. All of this despite the inconvenient historical detail that the unfinished cathedral in Barcelona was designed by a man who died after being hit by a tram, reportedly because he was too absorbed in thinking about Jesus of Nazareth — a Middle Eastern refugee — to look both ways before crossing the street.
At this point the streets begin to feel almost satirical. The same politicians warning that immigration will erase “Spanish identity” deliver their press conferences beneath statues of those same Syrian saints and Palestinian apostles. They thunder about mythical ‘pull effects’ while economists quietly note that previous regularizations produced tax revenue, strengthened Social Security systems, and did what functioning states are supposed to do—turn the shadow economy into something visible enough to tax. None of which stops the patriots from shouting that the nation is about to dissolve like aspirin in a glass of warm Rioja.
The contradiction is not subtle; it is geological. For two thousand years Spain has paved its cities, christened its children, and organized its calendar around immigrants from the eastern provinces of a long-dead empire—Aramaic-speaking laborers, Levantine preachers and wandering desert theologians who today would arrive stamped with the same passports now treated as civilizational threats. Yet when flesh-and-blood people from those same latitudes appear at the borders—alive, inconveniently modern, and requiring housing rather than incense—the applause stops and the hysteria begins.
The guardians of “Christian Europe” discover that their attachment to Middle Eastern heritage extends only to the statues. The saints may enter freely, provided they are safely dead, preferably carved in stone, and incapable of applying for residency. Everyone else is declared an existential crisis. Strip away the theatrical language about culture, security, and identity, and what remains is not philosophy, not economics, not even history—it is the oldest reflex in politics: the insistence that the mythologized foreigners built the civilization, while the living ones are accused of destroying it.
In the far right’s Europe, immigrants are welcome—provided they have been dead for at least two thousand years. But the irony is hardly confined to the old world. Even as reactionary pundits rage about civilizational borders, the most quintessentially American spectacle—the Super Bowl—just unfolded in Santa Clara, beside the Guadalupe River, a short drive from San José and San Francisco, in a state whose very name, California, is itself a monument to layered migrations, conquests, and borrowed languages.
The same civilization that treats migration as an existential crisis gathers each year in stadiums bearing Spanish names, in cities founded by missionaries from Mexico and settlers from across the globe, cheering beneath place names that quietly record the very history modern politics pretends to fear.
From Cáceres to California, the landscape itself tells the truth: our civilizations were built by foreigners whose names we now pronounce with patriotic ease.
The only immigrants modern politics truly fears are the ones who are still alive.
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