This is my fourth blog post in the nearly three months I’ve been here. I initially considered my inability to frequently update a failure, but having read over what I’ve written so far, I realize now that this is a pretty accurate portrait of the high points in my life here in Europe this summer. If you’d like to imagine the complete picture, just throw in a lot some traveling, walking, homework and interpersonal relationships and you’ve pretty much got it.
Anyway, I’m going to Italy again this weekend (country name drop) and wanted to update at least one more time before maybe one more big update before I leave Europe. I have just over two weeks left here, which is absolutely ridiculous, so let’s hope something profound — perhaps a near-death experience? that’ll do — happens to me between now and my departure. Fingers crossed.
But yes. Hello there! I realize that all of my posts thus far have pretty much focused on culture and yogurt (which has cultures, incidentally), so let me now turn to the actual study part of my study abroad experience, yes?
Since arriving in May, I’ve been attending the Universidad de Cantabria. It’s a modest establishment that I was expecting to look something like this but instead kind of resembles my middle school, questionable interior color scheme and all. (I think here we’ve got red, green and orange all on the walls. All together at once. Pretty, no?) Bit of a letdown, but I suppose not everything here can be of Spanish yore. I love that word. Also not of the Spain of yore? Gay marriage!
Stay with me here. While most of my course schedule here thus far has been filled with Spanish history and literature, 10 or so of us are enrolled a journalism class for the second half of the summer in which we’re actually getting the opportunity to interact directly with Spanish history — by reclaiming lost stories of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath.
History lesson! Ready? (With all these Spanish lessons and such, you’re learning so much.)
If you didn’t know, following a bloody civil war during the 1930s that pitted leftists against nationalists and killed hundreds of thousands, Spain fell to a nice little dictator man by the name of Francisco Franco who ruled the country with an oppressive Catholic iron fist for nearly 40 years. Divorce was banned. Women were kept from positions of professional power and couldn’t, for instance, open bank accounts. Basically good times were had by all. You can imagine, then, that Franco wasn’t a big fan of the gays. While some were thrown into “deviant” prisons under laws criminalizing homosexuality, most lived lives of silent repression. The authoritarian regime didn’t relent until 1975, when Franco’s death cleared the way for a swift transition to democracy.
The Spanish Civil War and the 40 years of strife that followed haven’t found their place in Spanish history the way the American Civil War has ingrained itself for us as a defining, epic relic of U.S. history. In Spain, after all, the bad guys won, and only recently has the government initiated a process of exhuming mass graves left over from the war. A book that we’re reading in class characterizes the Civil War and the Franco years as Spain’s “silent past” — years that Spaniards look back on with fear, regret, disgust, shame and, above all, a general unwillingness to confront the atrocities of the past and instead forget them entirely. I feel silly characterizing a nation of people myself, but it does seem, at least, that these are years that Spaniards — at least those old enough to remember — view with unease.
Back to the gays. A couple days ago I was actually able to interview a man who grew up gay during the back end of the Franco years. While Franco died when he was 10 or so, the legacy of criminalization had left its mark on the nation, and homophobia, as you might expect, didn’t exactly die with the dictator. This interview, which primarily covered the history of homosexuality as a subculture during and after the Franco years, is something that I’ll be working on for class until the end of the summer, so hopefully I’ll have a complete text/audio/visual project for you to view later on. (I know you can’t contain yourselves. Please take this opportunity to voice your excitement in the comments, which have been a little sparse lately.)
What’s particularly interesting about Spanish LGBT (that’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, if you happen to have not gone to college in the last 10 years) stories like these is that in 2005, Spain legalized gay marriage. It was a surprising move at the time in for a country with deep historical ties to the Catholic Church and a not-even-40-year-old system of democracy. In some ways, though, it makes sense: As Europe bounded ahead during the 20th century as the world’s capital of culture and enlightened thought, it was only a matter of time before Spain started to leap-frog other European nations, including France, on such issues as gay rights as it clamored to play catch-up to the rest of the continent. Speaking of, isn’t it about time another New England state caved? Rhode Island, I’m looking at you.
But anyway, it’s with stories like these that we’re trying to piece together a tiny part of the portrait of 20th-century Spain. Me likes this a lot, if you couldn’t tell. Thanks for paying attention to that, by the way. As a reward, I’m leaving you with a picture I forgot I had of a Santander supermarket chain whose name is particularly ironic given the nation’s non-belief in fiber:
You can’t make this stuff up.
