It’s when you hear yourself saying things like, “En Nueva York, no somos de Trump” to your workout class—all Spaniards—that you realize how far you are from what’s happening back home.
By “you” I mean “I,” and by “when” I mean on November 3, when I explained to my fellow burpee-ers, mid-class, that my absentee ballot hadn’t arrived in time, but it was okay because I’m not from a swing state. (Even with a better translation than I came up with, “swing state” is a hard concept to parse in a parliamentary democracy.) It’s also when I got my first real taste of an exquisite expatriate loneliness that’s normally held at bay by long lunches, shockingly affordable wine, and universal healthcare—a.k.a. life in Spain.
We moved to Madrid in August 2025. Our move wasn’t an escape; we’d been working on visas and house rentals and school visits since long before the aforementioned’s second term. We moved for a change of pace, to expose our son and ourselves to a different culture, for Spanish immersion. But, as I don’t need to remind you, there was a lot—real or projected—to run away from. USAID had been dismantled. ICE had begun violent, government-sanctioned kidnappings. Our schools were rife with gun violence and vaccine hesitation. Eric Adams was the mayor of New York, Karoline Leavitt ruled the press podium. Remember Pam Bondi? How about Kristi Noem?
We didn’t run away. But we watched the American promise wither from our apartment in the Spanish capital with a mixture of shock, relief, and guilt. Our neighbors in New York were organizing against ICE. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was naturalizing 500,000 undocumented migrants in Spain. I wished to be nowhere but here–where, to my left-leaning sensibility, a kind of deep humanity seemed to prevail in both the social and political spheres.
It’s true that I also missed the magnificent symphony of Zohran Mamdani and the Knicks championship. (And the irony of the privileged nomad placed me in New York when Spain won the World Cup, so I missed that, too.) But neither absence touched the same strange depth in me as waking up hourly the night of November 3 as polls closed on the East Coast, then in the Midwest and on the West Coast, then falling asleep for an odd hour between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. (GMT +1) and awaking to the blue blue map, to news of the first Black female governor—in Georgia, no less—the first Native American governor, the first Native American female senator, the first openly gay senator, and to Texas. Texas!!!!
I felt…what? I was—I am—overjoyed. I’m more than overjoyed. I have hope. I sense a renewed truth to the American promise, one founded not on the erasure of Native Americans, Black people, and other groups, but on solidarity with them. I also felt a painful disbelonging. I did not help it happen. I did not lay the cornerstones for what we’ve built. I can’t rightfully share in the fullness of the celebration.
I can imagine a disbanding of ICE, a renewal of climate commitments. I let my mind entertain the possibility of our passing meaningful gun control. I do not resent having missed it, exactly. But I am bad at translating how much it all matters to the Spanish women with whom I have daily coffee. And I don’t have language, certainly not in Spanish and perhaps not in English, for the degree to which this election’s rebuke changes how I imagine my child’s future. And then, also, how to describe an unfamiliar sensation that came over me as I made my son’s daily bocadillo de jamon. Maybe no one can say it better than one woman whose wisdom has gone viral.
