Bureaucracy, Ballads, and the Backroads of Sant Boi de Llobregat
Today’s adventure took me deep into the industrial flanks of greater Barcelona—Sant Boi de Llobregat—where the metro fears to tread and taxi drivers apparently don’t know a Policía Nacional from a local precinct. All in service of that glamorous expat ritual: fingerprinting for my TIE card, Spain’s version of a national identity document for foreign residents. It’s a rite of passage that sounds simple, but rarely is.
My cab deposited me at the wrong police station—a charming local comisaría that looked like it hadn’t processed a foreigner since the Franco years. With no time to lose and no cab in sight, I did the only thing a stranded autonomo with a ticking bureaucratic clock could do: I walked. Two uphill kilometers—sprinting in the way only a fat, middle-aged man pretends he can—across Parc de la Muntanyeta, a forested knoll that watches over Sant Boi with quiet authority.
Sant Boi isn’t on most tourist maps, but it should be. Early 20th century archaeological digs reveal Sant Boi was a thriving villa district in Roman times—its private baths rank among the best-preserved in Catalonia—though whatever name the Romans used has been lost.
The Muntanyeta—which means "little mountain"—is now a green lung in the middle of it all, a former quarry rewilded in the 1980s into a pine-draped civic park with cycling trails and panoramic views over the Llobregat basin. If you squint through the smog, you can even make out the cranes of the port and the tail fins of El Prat-bound jets. Civilization in every direction, and still somehow, you feel like you’re in a forgotten grove on the edge of an empire.
I arrived at the Policía Nacional – Sant Boi de Llobregat office with two minutes to spare. It’s tucked beside the Mercat de la Muntanyeta, a local food market with a surprisingly decent gourmet cafeteria on a plaza named, with some irony, Plaça de la República. This part of town carries the fingerprints of Spain’s fractured 20th century: postwar migration, industrial expansion, and Catalonia’s quiet rebellion embedded in the municipal street names.
Inside, it was the usual bureaucratic ballet. I fumbled through my documents, and when I told them I was here on an autonomo visa, the officers raised their eyebrows. “Ah, un empresario... ¿millonario, no?” one quipped. “Escritor,” I said, rolling my eyes harder than I was about to roll my index fingers. “Solo un escritor.”
The fingerprint scanner glowed green like some alien artifact from a noir sci-fi film, and I tried my best to comply as the officer instructed: “De un lado a otro, hazlo rodar.” From side to side–roll it. I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Roll it,” his female supervisor—sharper, with a dry wit—giggled in English, repeating: “Rollin', rollin', rollin’…”
I joined in, singing. “Rollin', rollin', rollin’…Rawhide!”
Somewhere in the archives of the Spanish Ministry of the Interior, there now exists biometric proof that an American writer got serenaded while being processed for state residency. I couldn’t help but think of my first fingerprinting appointment, years ago, in Saudi Arabia. That was all scanners and silence. This one was musical. A little absurd. But very human.
Spain has a way of doing that—of wrapping even its paperwork in laughter, place, and history. I walked back through the park with an ice-cold matcha latte in 32 °C heat. The Free Now taxi app stopped working as I drifted amid the pines atop the little mountain. I wasn’t worried. I knew I’d find my way back to the Gothic Quarter, but in this moment, I was grateful that even bureaucratic errands here feel like a chapter that somehow already knows it’s part of a future book.
This wasn’t my first resident-visa rodeo—fingerprints in Riyadh, iris scans in Tabuk and Dammam, consular stamps in stranger places. I’ve made peace with the bureaucracy of becoming legible to a new nation-state, even when the journey’s absurd, inconvenient, or quietly surreal.
But today, there was also a quiet sadness settled in behind the joy of my newfound freedom and status. A sense—maybe even a certainty—that the country I came from has been holding its breath for far too long. I feel it every time I show my American passport, wondering what it stands for now. I feel it more acutely when I think of those I love still there, bracing themselves under a system so rigged it can’t stop devouring its own children.
I’m here filing paperwork for a future I’ve had to build abroad—again—while back home, human rights are being peeled off like stickers from old luggage.
That contrast—that ache—is something I carry with me, even on days like this. Especially on days like this. Where I laugh with a couple of Spanish cops about Rawhide while my fingerprints are taken by a government that still believes in some kind of civil contract. Where the absurdity and sweetness of the moment can’t fully mask the feeling of exile that lingers beneath.
Maybe that’s the cost of wandering. Maybe that’s what being a citizen of more than one story really means. To belong nowhere fully, but to carry every place with you. To know that even a fingerprint is a flag.