Tag
Spain
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“Not So Ephemeral After All”: Talking Op-Eds, War, and Memory with Bécquer Seguín
“Why does the op-ed still hold sway over writers who want to be intellectuals or want to have some public presence?”
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B-Sides: George Eliot’s “The Spanish Gypsy”
If George Eliot was interested in religious coexistence, she was also interested in unbelief.
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Public Thinker: Sophie Gonick on Housing Justice and Mass Movements
“As often the most vulnerable in our cities, immigrants face struggles that reflect the wider landscape of housing precarity.”
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Cuba & the US: Necessary Mirrors
Exponentially more enslaved Africans were forced to the lands that now make up Latin America rather than the United States. Where is their story?
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Can We Repair the Past?
For the righting of historical wrongs, to simply transfer property continues to perpetuate violence. True reparations require far more work.
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Miguel de Unamuno in Spain’s Memory Battle
As fascist armies conquered much of Spain, a writer publicly and famously denounced high-ranking officers right to their faces. Or did he?
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Tending Orwell’s Garden
Orwell was free from doctrinaire sectarianism. At the same time, he firmly hated the exact bastards who deserve to be hated.
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Did Don Quixote Long for Muslim Spain?
Between the lines, Cervantes critiqued the Catholic church, and lamented over the systematic destruction of Islamic culture in Spain.
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Can Saving Soccer Save the World?
Despite its massive commercialization, the world of football has never been about making a profit.
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When Poetry Summons the Dead
The dead, the disappeared, and the forgotten—these Iberian poems make clear—can never be safely put away.
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Laboratory of Conversations: The 15M Movement
Ten years ago today, Spain’s “15M” movement burst on the scene. In short order, everything changed. Or has it?[none-for-homepage]
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Past Dictators Never Die
What happens when a regime founded upon exclusion, racism, nationalism, and an authoritarian leader ends? In Spain, such a regime never really ended.
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B-Sides: Carmen Laforet’s “Nada”
When freedom will not arrive to us, can we get nearer to it?
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Whose Spanish, Anyway?
Policing the borders of the Spanish language was a tool of religious and racial discrimination. Yet Spanish is not inherently imperial.
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Casa de Pueblo: Recovering Spain’s Rural Past
I wish I had an answer, but the truth is, I don’t know what I’m going to do with this dilapidated, 17th-century historic estate that has been vacant since the 1960s …
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Four Days in Catalonia: The Referendum in Pictures
By 9:30 a.m. on October 1, voting had only just begun at the Sanllehy medical center in the La Salut neighborhood of Barcelona. A large crowd had gathered outside the polling station…
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Catalonia Is Real. And Yet…
La gran ilusión is an original and penetrating take on the last decade of mounting tensions between Catalonia and Spain, tensions that have now culminated in Spain’s deepest political crisis since …
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Spanish Civil Wars
“Is this Barcelona?” The question sets the tone for the final scenes of Sebastià Alzamora’s novel Blood Crime. It comes from the thoughts of a young religious man, a member of the Catholic group …
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The Basque Novel Comes of Age
Ramon Saizarbitoria’s Martutene, hailed as the best novel ever written in Basque and now available in English translation, is, among other things, a moving …
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Benidorm After Brexit and the “Burbuja”
In the early 1950s, Mayor Pedro Zaragoza left Benidorm, the sleepy coastal town he governed, to make the 300-mile trip to Madrid by Vespa. He had an audience with General Franco …
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Comics versus Franquismo
In the late 1960s, dictator Francisco Franco slowly opened Spain to tourism while continuing to obliterate public memory of the retributions meted out after the Civil War (1936–9). I spent those years studying in Madrid, living for two semesters with a Spanish family. My professors were among the most distinguished of those who hadn’t sought…
