Where are the anthems of repression? If reactionary movements claim cultural dominance, mass followings, and moral certainty, one might reasonably expect a soundtrack to match. Where are the rousing MAGA and far-right hymns that people will still be singing in fifty years? Where are the unforgettable choruses celebrating racial division, exclusion, or the romance of…
I just published two versions of the same essay: one in Spanish, from Europe, and one in English, for Canadian and anglophone readers. They’re siblings rather than twins—similar in structure, different in inflection, each shaped by its imagined audience. The piece reflects on Canada, on Mark Carney’s Davos speech, and on that peculiar comfort of…
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…
Some wars last years, flatten countries, and leave entire generations trying to remember what normal life used to feel like. And then there was the Whiskey War. Yes — a real territorial dispute between Canada and Denmark, carried out for decades with flags, polite notes, and strategically placed bottles of whisky and schnapps left on…
You know that glass cabinet in your grandmother’s living room that nobody was allowed to touch — the one full of “very important” things that were, in fact, spectacularly useless? Cáceres is about to build one. Only this one costs €18 million. A gleaming new museum. A cathedral of vitrines.Stuff from everywhere — except here.…
A Bible Made to Measure Every writer has had that moment when reality starts behaving like a badly edited novel. The characters contradict themselves, the plot swerves without warning, and someone in the audience is clearly reading a completely different book from everyone else. My latest article was born from that feeling. We tend to…
I’ve just published a new opinion piece in El Cuaderno Digital titled “Elegir al verdugo: manual extremeño de autodestrucción electoral” (Choosing the Executioner: an Extremaduran Manual of Electoral Self-Destruction). The article is not about a single party or a single election. It’s about a recurring political gesture: the moment when frustration, abandonment, and long-term neglect…
Gin fumes in the hotel foyer. Shotguns of hair lacquer. Sideburns sharp enough to draw blood. On one side, tweed-and-testosterone conservatives sloshing G&Ts like it’s the Siege of Granada. On the other, flamenco devotees with ozone-destroying bouffants and eyes fixed on an imaginary stage. And wedged between them all: the exam candidates—browner, nervous, clutching documents…
My latest article—and my debut in the Spanish publication El Salto—has just gone live. 🎉 The piece focuses on Torrejón, a town whose healthcare “situation” is so dramatic it could be mistaken for satire… if it weren’t also happening across the entire Spanish public health system. But wait—before anyone abroad feels too smug—this isn’t just…
Why nostalgia for ’the good old days’ can be dangerous — and what’s really behind the revival circus Spain seems to be caught in a weird collective daydream lately — a growing number of young people claiming: “Under Franco, we lived better.” In my latest piece for the Camino de Ítaca column, I dig into…