I feel like a total fool for not reading Cristina Fallarás’s A la puta calle earlier. After Rafael Chirbes’s On the Edge, it’s the strongest Spanish crisis book.
When the working classes were devastated by deindustrialization and moving jobs overseas, workers suffered in silence. Deaths of desperation, opioids, collapse of family structures – this was all an object of study for the intellectual classes but not a personal, visceral experience.
In 2008-12 in Spain, the intellectual classes were hit by the same kind of dispossession. But unlike manufacturing workers, they can speak. They have a voice, an audience, and a skill to express themselves instead of self-destructing in silence.
Spain is ahead of the US or Canada in terms of neoliberalization. We haven’t yet experienced what the Spaniards have. We need to read Fallarás’s book and memorize it if we don’t want the same to happen to us. It hasn’t been translated, unfortunately. Probably because it’s too dark and disturbing.
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