Some symbols refuse to stay in the past. Fifty years after Franco’s death—and after a dictatorship that ended with political prisoners still being executed—Spain is once again arguing over monuments, memory and the meaning of symbols inherited from authoritarianism. But this is not only a Spanish story. From Europe to the United States and beyond,…
A few weeks ago, I found myself following yet another local controversy in Cáceres, the small Spanish city where I live. At the centre of it was the Cruz de los Caídos (“Cross of the Fallen”), a Franco-era monument that has become the latest battleground in Spain’s never-ending wars over history, memory, religion, and identity.…
The thing outsiders (and some insiders) often misunderstand about Spain is that Francoism did not end the way Nazism ended. There was no Nuremberg. No national reckoning. No purge of institutions. Franco died peacefully in bed in 1975, and much of the state simply rolled forward carrying his fingerprints into democracy. Judges remained judges. Powerful…
Cáceres undergoes a curious transformation every spring. For one weekend, the medieval city fills with African percussion, NGO stalls, craft beer, dreadlocks and the language of global citizenship as WOMAD, the travelling world music festival founded by Peter Gabriel, arrives in town. Officially, it is a celebration of multicultural openness and artistic exchange. In reality,…
There are few things stranger than watching former colonial powers attempt to market conquest as a feel-good cultural product in the twenty-first century. This month, a taxpayer-funded delegation led by Isabel Díaz Ayuso and accompanied by 80s pop-zero, Nacho Cano travelled to Mexico to stage an event titled Celebración por la Evangelización y el Mestizaje…
At the beginning of my book Stories Left in Stone: Trails and Tales in Cáceres, Spain, my friend Carlos Blay takes me deep into the Cueva de Maltravieso. There, in the dark, is the oldest known expressions of art in Europe (it was in the world until a recent discovery in Asia): a handprint on…
A new long-form essay published in El Salto Diario Extremadura traces an unlikely line from the Pentagon to a roundabout in Cáceres. Beginning with the spectacle of religion in contemporary American politics — where faith, media, and military power increasingly blur — the piece follows a broader transformation: Christianity repurposed as political identity, its symbols…
There’s a certain kind of art that appears whenever politics gets too involved in culture. It’s grand, symbolic, completely certain of itself — and often, unintentionally, a bit absurd. You see it in Stalinist skylines, Soviet statues, gold-plated presidential monuments. Different countries, same instinct: culture not as something messy and alive, but something to simplify,…
It begins with a simple observation: across Spain—and much of Europe—the streets, plazas, and churches are named after immigrants, or at least migrant ideas, from the Middle East who arrived two thousand years ago and helped shape what is now called “Christian civilization.” Yet in today’s political climate, migrants from many of the same regions…
My brother was named after a cowboy. That detail says a lot about my father, his generation, and the way America once looked from the outside: big, confident, morally certain, the man in the white hat who did ugly things for noble reasons. My dad loved Shane (Raices Profundas), and I grew up with that…