The Spaniards – John Hooper

When I arrived in Madrid in 1991, this little book was a useful introduction to the world which would become my home. It was a good time and place for a youngish Englishman to try out a new start.
 
I barely had the Spanish to ask for box of matches, but managed perfectly. I found the people that much more open and accommodating than in England. There was an optimism to the city back then. That the so-called “Transition” to democracy after Franco was largely a theatre, and the powers that be broadly unchanged, hadn’t really registered. There was a strong sense of a right to individual freedoms and to anti-establishmentarian protest. I found genuine barrio life, honest young people sin complejos, sexual freedom and joints in bars. Life was cheaper with the peseta, money was coming in from the European Community and there were jobs. If bureaucracy was sluggish and inefficient, the upside was that they didn’t check up on you much or have your number. As a foreigner, I found a welcome. Spain was still in the process of opening to the world and immigration was not a concern. A generalized friendliness was to be found in Madrid.
 
Hooper’s book charted recent political and social change and explained aspects of my new world in a very approachable and well-informed style. The church, the army, education and the media, Catalonia and the Basque Country were all covered, providing a helpful background to my everyday experience.
 
The book, like my snapshot of the early nineties above, is very dated now. Hooper has since written “The New Spaniards” which may well reflect a rapidly changing society. Madrid is another, unhappier city today. If there is no longer the threat of a military coup or the atrocities of ETA, something even grimmer has happened to the place: the death of hope. Like many a modern city, Madrid has fallen prey to a homogenized commercialization. A corrupt, reactionary, money-obsessed mindset rules its local government and on the streets today, I find cynical disillusionment, social fragmentation and fakery.
 
Nothing lasts forever. The gentle phase of confident convivencia that I lived through didn’t. Maybe the monetized misery will pass away, also.