Reading Joseph Roth in Extremadura

It began, quite simply, with reading Joseph Roth. But as I kept reading, and watching the news here in Spain fill with talk of “national priority,” something shifted. The distance between then and now began to feel thinner than it should.

The phrase has been circulating in recent months, attached to new political agreements in regions like Extremadura, a vast, sparsely populated part of western Spain more often defined by absence than attention. The debate has been loud, familiar, and increasingly abstract.

This piece tries to look at something else: what that language feels like on the ground, before it fully becomes policy. In the lives of people who have left and returned, or arrived and stayed, in towns that are slowly emptying and quietly being held together at the same time by the very people that we are told are ‘invaders’.

Not an argument so much as an attempt to see clearly, to follow the way words begin to move through a place, and what they start to change.

Read the full piece in CounterPunch+. The piece was also published in Spanish in Nueva Tribuna.