In this week’s Boletín discover more about the Spanish way of life (including family, food, culture and lots more!) with James Blick from Spain Revealed. If you’re an A Level student or teacher then you can’t miss it!

👋Welcome to Boletín, an English-language newsletter covering historical, cultural and topical stories related to the A Level Spanish course. These newsletters accompany a student worksheet which can be downloaded here. This week:

1. Introduction to issue 132 of Boletín

2. A Q&A with James Blick

3. Student-friendly PDF download with “ten takeaways” section

🫶If you haven’t already then subscribe to make sure future editions arrive straight to your inbox. If you enjoy this week’s edition then please give it a like or a share!

📌Edition 132.

It’s March 2025 and students up and down the UK are gearing up for their upcoming exams. A Level students are still covering topics in class, learning grammar, writing essays for the film and trying to broaden their understanding and knowledge of Spain and the Spanish speaking world. The latter is a must as they have to:

Show very good knowledge and understanding of the culture and society of Spain and Spanish-speaking countries and communities. Share ideas and points of view which are well supported by evidence. Draw conclusions based on an understanding and appreciation of the country's culture and society.

To do all of that is no mean feat especially with so much else going on!

Enter, James Blick.

James, alongside his wife Yoly, run a super popular YouTube channel called Spain Revealed which needs no introduction. Together they’ve been making videos for years about Spanish food, lifestyle and culture and have amassed 37 million views on YouTube alone. As of September, James will also be accepting new students onto his 8-week Move to Spain Masterclass course covering location, property, timelines, taxes, banking, working in Spain, healthcare, thriving as a local and much more!

Move to Spain Masterclass

I asked James if he wouldn’t mind answering some questions about his experiences in Spain to help students gain a better understanding of the largely unexplored cultural/societal side of Spain, which students are expected to show an understanding of in writing and speech during exam season. He gladly obliged!

🎤An interview with James Blick.

I wonder if you could introduce yourself to our readership with a little background on yourself.

Hey, everyone, so my name's James Blick. I was born in New Zealand, but I've been living in Madrid for the last 14 years. I came to Spain in a roundabout route. I moved to France for a year when I was in my mid-20s because I was just in love with the idea of living in Europe. When I was in France, I met a Spanish woman who's now my wife. So, we lived in New Zealand together a little while but finally settled here (Madrid) in 2011.

So yeah, now I've been here, now I feel more at home in Spain than I do in in New Zealand. We have a daughter here who's like you guys, learning Spanish. Well, she speaks Spanish, but she's bilingual, she's only three years old, so she's learning both English and Spanish at the same time, which is a pretty fascinating thing to watch.

Favourite Spanish word or idiomatic phrase?

There's one I really like, which is “de perdidos al río”, which literally translates as kind of “from lost to the river”. I was trying to figure out what the best way to translate this was and actually found a film which has terrible reviews, a comedy from 2004, an American comedy, which was called Without a Paddle. So, “up <insert expletive here> creek without a paddle”, translates as “de perdidos al río”. It's like when you've got a situation that's so bad, it couldn't be worse and then it does get worse.

How did you learn Spanish?

Well, I always answer this question by saying that I'm still learning Spanish, you know, learning a language when you weren't born into it. Like my daughter who's born into English and Spanish, you're never truly bilingual. So, for me, it's a continual process. I also have Spanish class once a week with a private tutor. We go over things that I've heard or struggled with during the week.

I would say I have a C2/1 level of Spanish, but throughout my whole life here, I'll still be acquiring language and learning things.

I actually made a mistake when I moved here. I didn't take Spanish classes right from the start because I figured that living in Spain and having a Spanish wife would be enough. But it's not.

You don't acquire a language just by being in the country. You certainly acquire some things, but you really need to make an effort to understand it. So, a lot of it in the early years was a bit slow-going just through living here and interacting with people and picking stuff up and then over time I realized I wanted to really reinforce that. So, now I have a Spanish tutor.

For the first time the other day, my daughter actually said a Spanish word I didn't understand. So, that was humbling, as I say, she's three years old.

An introduction to Spanish grammar (CEFR A1 - B2)

If you like what I’ve been doing with Boletín for the last four five years or like me, you like buying language books then consider checking out the book I released in July. It’s called Spanish grammar workbook: An ambitious, jam-packed introduction to Spanish grammar for complete beginners, intermediate learners and GCSE students.

The reviews are in!

How do you use languages in your day-to-day life?

A lot of my life is actually in English. It used to be more in Spanish, but we want our daughter to learn English and obviously she'll learn Spanish just by being in Spain. We speak English at home now, which we didn't previously. So, when I'm out and about, I use Spanish, but in my work due, to my audience, it's all in English. I would say that 60% of my day or even 70% sometimes is in English, which depresses me a little bit because I don't like living in Spain and speaking so much English, but it's just the reality right now.

One thing you’d teach an A Level Spanish class which you don’t think would be taught in a classroom.

So, I'm not sure if you guys learn this, but this is a very common expression that is used constantly in Spain when you screw up effectively. “Liarla”. If you screw up a situation, you would say “la lié” (I really screwed that up).

I think that's kind of a cool thing that I didn't know and wasn't super comfortable using and so I brought it up with my Spanish tutor and we went through it. It's very common in Spain.

If you could move to any other place in Spain, where would you go?

Ah, the eternal question. I love it in Madrid, but in the end, I would love to be near the water. It feels like living in Spain and not being right on the water is kind of a shame.

This is a hard question because I love the north, it's like New Zealand, where I'm from, but it's cool and cold in winter and I wouldn't mind that, but it could be a bit depressing, and I don't think my wife would like that. The South gets really hot and sometimes in the summer I would struggle.

If I could move anywhere, maybe somewhere in Andalusia, maybe in the south, somewhere on the Costa del Sol, or potentially the Costa Brava. Actually, yeah, maybe the Costa Brava, which is the coast between Barcelona and France. It’s a little cooler, I love the food and the culture there, beautiful beaches. That would be a nice spot to have a second home.

What is your favourite Spanish tradition or custom?

I love Christmas here. In New Zealand, and in the UK, I think Christmas day is the big day. Then there's obviously New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. But here, you celebrate those days, and there's a lot of festivities around that, but the Christmas season really is a season. It lasts from the 22nd of December, which is around when school breaks up, and they have the Christmas lottery, which is the largest lottery in the world and something really beautiful about this lottery is that the prizes are shared. When you buy a ticket, you only ever buy a piece of a ticket. And so often the people who buy them in the same place as you, in the newsstand in the village or in your neighbourhood, buy the same piece of the same number. So, when you win and when you see people winning on TV, often they're celebrating with their community because they've all won. I think that's really beautiful.

I love that tradition, but it's a part of this bigger tradition, which is Christmas. The 25th is Christmas Day. You have lunch, Father Christmas brings presents. Although that's not traditional in Spain. Then we have the 31st, which is New Eve's. A big deal, big dinner.

I also love Christmas Eve. Being out with your friends. It's a real family time as well. So, you have both the family aspect and the friends aspect. New Year's Day is quiet and then the 6th January is three kings (los reyes magos) and that's traditionally when presents are given in Spain, the three kings are the three wise men who in the Bible were the ones that, according to tradition, gave gifts to baby Jesus. So, it just goes on and on and on in a way that is wonderful. Having a daughter now, it's just even more magical.

What is the strangest Spanish tradition?

Well, there's a festival that I made a video about a couple of years ago called El Colacho and you could translate it as “the baby jumping festival”.

So, this is a village called Castrillo de Murcia, where men dress up as devils and leap over the babies that were born that year, who are laid out on mattresses on the street.

It dates to 400 years ago. Men dressed as devils jump over the babies which symbolises the cleansing of them from original sin and protection from evil spirits. It sounds insane and it is insane, but what’s amazing is when you're there, how seriously the locals take it. It’s serious stuff and it’s not a joke.

That’s the beauty of tradition, right? From the outside, some things look insane, but from within, it's very serious stuff. There's a pagan aspect to it, but also the church is involved. There's a religious, Catholic aspect. I kind of love that combination because it represents the richness of Spanish history and culture. I love that. It’s very Spanish. Men dressed up as devils, jumping over babies. It's a curious tradition.

Are there any values/characteristics you consider distinctly Spanish?

This is a hard one because inherently it asks for a generalization and I can only speak from my experience, but what I would say is that I've always found and always find Spanish people to be very easy-going, very welcoming, very friendly. I'm not saying that if you move here it's easy to make friends. That's a different thing. But if you're in a public environment, if you're in a Spanish cafe or a restaurant or a tapas bar or you're in a queue for something. People are very easy at speaking to each other and interacting. I find that really nice.

You know, there are studies that show that random brief conversations increase our happiness. So, there's an easygoingness that I love here. I find that really enriching.

I would say that it varies a little bit depending on where you are. Sometimes people are a little more closed off in the north, a little more open in the south. You know, there's generalizations like that. But across the board, if you show curiosity and interest in the culture, people are willing to share it with you.

Does religion still play a key role in modern Spanish life?

I think Catholicism, or traditional religion here doesn't play a key role in Spanish life as it did say 30, 40 years ago but it has shaped society. If you look at the statistics, church attendance drops every year. Young Spanish people by and large don't go to church. They may, however, still consider themselves, in some cases, Catholic.

I made a video about Semana Santa, about Easter Week and Seville a few years ago. Brotherhoods of men and some women will get together and carry floats of the crucifixion and dress up in these robes. And you would look at them and think, wow, they're really religious, but half of them don't go to church.

I think religion still plays a role in modern life given that it's still really intertwined with Spanish culture and traditions, but not in an organized way. People aren't going to church as much as before.

Is there a generational divide when it comes to values?

Yeah, I guess so. I mean, generations change, right? That always happens. I would say that those core aspects that I've noticed about Spain, friendliness, openness are still the same, whether you talk to older people or young people.

What are the issues affecting young Spanish people?

Well, I'm 46 and I'm not Spanish and my daughter is Spanish and she's three. I don't know a lot of 20-year-old Spaniards.

I would say a big issue right now, something that has always been a big issue, is employment and unemployment. There's big structural unemployment in Spain. Although, unemployment has dropped to its lowest in a number of years. Since about 2007, which was just before the economic crisis. So, it's doing better, but I think for young people, the idea of finding a job is tricky.

What do I study? Is there going to be work for me after that? Will I be able to afford to rent a home, have a family, buy a home? Housing is expensive here.

I think the average age at which Spaniards leave home, like stop living with their parents is quite high so I think that there is a big issue just starting your life. Emancipating from your parents and starting your life, financially and socially, I think, is a challenge for a lot of Spaniards.

Benji, asks “everybody says family is important in Spain but what does that mean or look like?”. For example, we may see our grandparents once a week in the UK.

I think one of the things to always be aware of when you're reading about countries is often people generalize about cultures, right? And so, it's easy to say that family is important in Spain because it fits with our image of what Spain is supposed to be as a Mediterranean country. You could say the same about Italy.

But the reality is always a little more mundane and not so cliché.

Having said that, young Spaniards probably also only see their grandparents once a week, but I would say that there is still a strong sense of the nuclear family in Spain and of sticking together and supporting one another.

The fact that there wasn't a revolution at 25% unemployment when you'd often have three generations living together. Intergenerational support is important. Grandparents supporting the kids. Part of that is also because of that strong tight family unit, right? So, I think family is important, but what does that look like?

The notion of cousins is very strong. People talk about their primos, their cousins. People hold on to those close family ties, maybe a little more and keep cousins and grandparents in their lives more than potentially say in the UK or in New Zealand. But not in a massively dramatic way, I wouldn't necessarily say. I think the image we have of Spain, of the whole family constantly seeing each other, is probably a little bit overplayed. Traditionally it was maybe more the case, but you know, now people are busy like in other parts of the world. I think the society we live in now is more individualistic and that plays out in Spain as well, but I still think that people are more connected to their aunts, their uncles, their cousins. They see them more and there's more a sense of going to visit your aunts and uncles.

How would you describe Spanish culture to someone who has never visited Spain?

First, I would say there's not one Spanish culture.

If you were dropped from another planet into Asturias or into Malaga, you might think they're different countries. They would look different. The accents are different. In the south, people are generally more open and friendly and easy going. In the north people are a little bit more insular.

If you saw a cultural festival in the north, you might think you were in Ireland at times. There's a strong Celtic aspect to a lot of the traditional culture, whereas in the South, it's more what you would say is kind of classically cliché Spanish.

I would say that beyond that in my experience, this is a country where people are friendly, open or welcoming, even if there's some difference in the way that they sort of play that out in the different regions.

I would also say that there are certain cultural and social rhythms that are common. You know, it's a cliche about Spain that people work to live and not live to work but if it's a holiday or if it's August, things slow down. People are less likely to hustle on a Sunday. People see value in having stronger emotional ties with friends. People keep their friendship groups. Despite living in a more individualistic society, there's elements of Spain that still hang on to that sense of community, which is important.

One of the things about Spain is we have quite a high average life expectancy and people talk about the Mediterranean diet, blah, blah, blah, Again, a little bit overplayed. People eat burgers here all the time.

But I wonder if one of the underappreciated aspects of life expectancy is more about social connection and community, which I think remains really strong here. I think if you came to Spain, you would find that people are more likely to take time off, to slow down, to enjoy life, to spend time around a table for a meal, to meet friends, to see value in that.

What are some of the most common misconceptions about Spain?

Well, I see a lot of confusing Spanish culture and traditions with Latin American traditions, with Mexican traditions. The imagery that people expect. They think that it's all kind of one big mix.

Just the other day I was writing a document about Spanish traditions, and I found a freelancer on fiverr.com to do a design and make it look nice for me and some of the images he put in were from Mexico. Some people think they’re the same thing but they’re not.

Another common misconception is the whole idea of the siesta.

There is some tradition behind the siesta which goes way back throughout humanity, back to more agricultural ways of living when people had a nap during the day. People then didn’t necessarily have these driving kinds of rhythms that we have today where it’s all go, go, go.

People will say the heat is a reason for the siesta. Yeah, okay in the south. I live in Madrid, obviously, in Madrid, some things close at midday, the traditional market opens from 09:00 until 14:00 and then it'll close from 14:00 to 17:00 and then reopens from 17:00 till 20:00.

And you'll see that in smaller towns, but people aren't going off and having a sleep. That's just the traditional lunch break. Because it’s true that people have big lunches. Like when I met my wife, I would have a sandwich for lunch and the idea, to her, of having a lunch that is not a hot meal was really depressing.

So, lunch has to be something cooked which I love today and nowadays we still have sandwiches, but we also have something cooked, but Spaniards will very often have something cooked for lunch. The idea of having a sandwich at your desk is very depressing. So, I think the biggest misconception is the siesta, there is an element of that in the Spanish culture, but it's not like people are just sleeping during the middle of the day. That's not true.

There was an article about working hours and siestas on the BBC a few years ago and they had a photo of a guy on a building site, just sleeping in the middle of the day. It was very misrepresentative of the culture.

I think also there's a perception that Spaniards are lazy, which is not true. Spaniards actually work more hours than the European Union average. There are issues with efficiency and productivity at work. There's a concept here called presentismo, which means that if your boss is in the office, you also have to be in the office. This is not an efficient way to work. If you've done your work, you should go home and be with your family and your boss should trust you. But if the boss is here, I've got to be here. So, there are issues with people staying in work long hours which impacts their productivity.

What is Spain’s relationship with food like?

People are very proud of the food of their region. There's a great pride around local produce and local meals and the local culture.

People talk about where they're from, like, “mi pueblo” (my village). “My village is in Burgos” and what that means is that’s where your grandparents were born or maybe your parents, but then in the 50s and 60s, a lot of people moved to Madrid and Barcelona because it was really hard in the villages. This happened to my wife's family.

My wife’s grandparents and her parents were born in small towns, but in the 60s and 70s, the families moved to Madrid because it was literally living like an agricultural medieval life in the village. It was really hard. So, there was a big urban drift to the cities for work.

So, the idea of where you're from is very important. People talk about the food like “the best tapas are in my village”, “you should try the sardines from my town”, “there's an incredible bar in my village which does great food”. Remember when we say bars in Spain, we mean more like a pub, like a place you can eat, a place where the community gathers.

Also, Spain's relationship with food is not what we eat, but how we eat. Tapas is the act of sharing food. At tapas bars we stand and share our food. There's also a verb in Spanish which is tapear (to go for tapas), which I think reflects the fact that the way we eat when we're out and about, is “tapeando”, and involves sharing food and dishes.

And at home we share dishes. I always remember moving to Spain. In the first six weeks we were living with my in-laws. My mother-in-law would serve the meal and there would just be a bunch of plates in the middle of the table, each of us would just share them. The idea of sharing food, sharing common plates is very Spanish. I love that sharing aspect. In the UK and New Zealand, we've moved away from that. I think people think of tapas as just pieces of food but it’s more the sharing of food.

In Spain, the idea of sharing food holds on, which I think is why tapas and eating in Spain is so fun.

If you could only eat three Spanish meals for the rest of your life, what would they be?

Obviously, this is like asking someone their favourite film. It'll change depending on the season. I would say:

1. Gambas al ajillo. Shrimp (gambas) that are fried in a little bit of olive oil, lots of garlic and some chili pepper. So good. There's a place around the corner where we often go for a menú del día, which is the daily three course fixed price lunch, like 12 euros and you get three courses.

2. Gazpacho. There they also make a great gazpacho, which is the cold tomato soup. I love it. The guy who makes it puts chopped up onion and pepper in it. He also adds cumin to it, which I love. I'm obsessed with it.

3. I don't eat a lot of red meat, but when I do and it's good, the steaks in Spain are some of the best I've ever had. In the north of Spain, at a cider house where they make apple cider, you can go and have these big kind of wonderful meals. One of the things they give you is a chuletón, which is a big steak cooked on the grill. Some of the most incredible steak I've ever had.

Is there a genuine difference between city and pueblo life/lifestyle in Spain?

There is a big difference between city and pueblo life and lifestyle in Spain. City life feels much more like what you would experience in London, or you know, a big city in the UK or in New Zealand or wherever.

Whereas in village life, you'll see a lot more of the traditional Spanish rhythms. Places will close for the three-hour lunch break. I avoid calling it “the siesta” because it’s not called that in Spain, it’s just lunch and the opening hours. You'll see much more slowdown in August and on Sundays in Spain.

Things do often close on a Sunday in the city, but not as much as in the village. You'll see a lot more of how Spain used to be. Those traditional times and how things, I imagine, used to be in the villages.

What is a bar de barrio and why are they important to a neighbourhood?

So, a bar de barrio is a place where you can experience Spanish community.

When we say a bar in Spanish, I think the British equivalent would be like the pub. It's all things to all people. You could go in the morning and have a cup of coffee and breakfast. You could go at lunch and have a three-course meal, and you could go for dinner and have wine. We often have gin and tonics after dinner.

I think the bar de barrio or bar de pueblo, where there’s sort of one local bar, is like the inside version of the village square. You'll see groups of men playing cards or playing dominoes. You'll see someone having a cup of coffee. You'll see a family. You see kids running around. There's a kind of a chaos to it. The lottery seller will come in and try to sell lottery tickets.

There's no division between inside and outside. It's kind of like a public space. I think in the neighbourhoods they still exist, although less so. This is a change which has happened. People are less likely to go to the village bar because people order using Uber eats and people watch Netflix and, you know, all those things. The pandemic particularly shifted this, so a lot of the neighbourhood bars now struggle.

Also, there's a lot of variety. If people want to go out to eat in a place like Madrid, they can eat Indian food or Thai food. There's a lot more of that compared to even 13, 14 years ago when I moved here. So, you have more choice and maybe younger people are less likely to go to the village bar.

People also drink less than they used to.

But still, the bar de barrio or the neighbourhood bar is still busy.

I mean, the place I was talking about where I get my three-course lunch with my wife once a week, you could go in the morning (sometimes I do for work) to get a cup of coffee. You can go for lunch; you could go for dinner. It's just always open and it always has a different rhythm at each moment in the day and people there do different things. I might be having a cup of coffee and working. Someone next to me is having a beer, you know, or standing at the bar and having a bite to eat. They’re meeting places. I love going to them because, you know, when we go, we went the other day and the guy who runs it, we're not close to him or anything, but he recognizes us and that's nice, right? You feel a sense of the community. He asked ¿qué tal Lucía? How’s Lucia? It’s nice. He knows my daughter’s name. That's community.

Are there any traditions which are fading away in an increasingly globalised Spain?

I think a lot of things I've sort of spoken about have touched on this in a lot of ways such as the bares de barrio. It's changing. Spanish culture isn’t a monoculture as it was 15 years ago.

I remember 10 years ago in Madrid in the Puerta de Sol (one of the main squares and tourist centres of Madrid) on the corner of the square there was what we call “an old man bar”, a bar de barrio. But things are changing so, you know, the idea that there would still be a neighbourhood bar in the tourist centre of Madrid was just wild.

Imagine that. Your equivalent would be in London, for example, like a little family run English pub in the centre of London. So that's less likely to see now that cities have become more globalized with tourism, with immigration.

The number of immigrants, you know, speaking as an immigrant, the number of people living in Spain who are not born in Spain has shot up and in recent years, it's about 15% percent now, and it was a lot lower, even 10, 15 years ago. So, some things are fading away, but I guess culture changes, right? Culture is always in flux. I would say rather than fading away, it's changing.

And so, some of those traditional things that we think of as Spanish are evolving, my wife was telling me the other day about how her cousin's kids, they’re about 18 and they’re having this kind of fiesta, this sort of party where you dress up and you go out on the town. It's kind of like this coming-of-age thing that actually comes from Latin American culture. So, that's not Spanish, that’s from a different culture and they’re practising that. So, culture evolves.

There's a lot more Latin American immigrants here than there were, say, 20, 30 years ago.

I think some people lament the loss of traditional culture and I understand because globalization leads to a new culture, but also maybe a more homogenized culture where places start to seem sort of similar. But I think it's just part of the globalized world we live in. I think there’s value also in going and holding on to those things that are traditional, not necessarily because Spain must be as we always thought Spain was, but because richness comes from variety.

So, I think, you know, going to villages is a great place to, you know, the baby jumping festival. That holds on, right? And I think a lot of traditional things do hold on now because people of my generation, say in their in their forties, have also seen a world growing more globalized and we actually want to hold on to those things that our parents had.

So, you'll see a lot of people in their 30s and 40s and even their 20s, going back to their village and holding onto it because they want to hold on to these things. I think that there is also an attempt by younger people to hold on to traditional Spanish values.

I realize I'm saying two different things. The children of my wife's cousin are celebrating this Latin American tradition and other people, a little older, are wanting to go to a really traditional Spanish bar to experience Spain as their parents knew it. That's a globalized world, right? All things coexist. It's not a monoculture.

So, I think some things are fading away, but some really traditional Spanish things are still being reinforced and celebrated and other things are being pulled in from other parts of the world.

📁Download the student Boletín worksheet here and a student-friendly printout of this newsletter below.

Boletín 132 Newsletter

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That’s all this week!

Ollie

❤️

In this week’s Boletín discover more about la narcocultura and its impact on society from a journalist and author who has been in the thick of it, reporting from Mexico City, for over twenty years. If your IRP is about Escobar or El Chapo you won’t want to miss it!

👋Welcome to Boletín, an English-language newsletter covering historical, cultural and topical stories related to the A Level Spanish course. These newsletters accompany a student worksheet which can be downloaded here. This week:

1. Introduction to issue 123 of Boletín

2. A Q&A with Ioan Grillo

3. Tier 2 & 3 vocabulary and grammar search for students

4. Boletín update and download links

🫶If you haven’t already then subscribe to make sure future editions arrive straight to your inbox. If you enjoy this week’s edition then please give it a like or a share!

📌Edition 123.

Pop-culture narco figures like Pablo Escobar and El Chapo still remain extremely popular as Independent Research Project (IRP) titles on the A Level course. Escobar alone was mentioned in the 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2023 WJEC examiner reports.

In 2023 the Welsh exam board advised future A Level Spanish candidates that:

Candidates should be aware that a superficial or generalised approach is not appropriate here; some topics, such as Pablo Escobar, based only on watching the Netflix series Narcos, or topics based around singers such as Bad Bunny or Rosalía alone, do not allow for an evaluative approach and are therefore unlikely to score high marks for A04.

This issue features an interview with . Ioan is an experienced journalist and a writer known for his books which shed light on the rise of drug cartels. He is based in Mexico City and has been covering Latin America since 2001 for news media such as Time Magazine, Esquire, CNN, Reuters, Al Jazeera, The Houston Chronicle, The Associated Press, GlobalPost, France 24 and The Sunday Telegraph. Ioan first appeared on my radar when he went on the Joe Rogan show a few years ago. I decided to email him out the blue to see if he’d be interested in helping me out with this issue and thankfully, he was more than cooperative.

Check out Ioan's books hee

🎤An interview with Ioan Grillo.

Can you provide a brief overview of what your job entails and how you ended up in Mexico City given your upbringing in England?

I first came to Mexico City with the dream of being a journalist. Not thinking so much about drug traffickers but thinking more about my illusions of guerilla warfare against military dictatorships of the 20th century and then found myself covering drug traffickers which then escalated in both importance and violence, I have been covering it ever since. You know, I’m a journalist not just a narco journalist and I cover various things, from immigration to elections to natural disasters. But I have been, a lot of my career, focused on drug traffickers, cartels, drugs, organised crime, and gangs. I've been pursuing these things, writing stories, writing books, making documentaries about these organisations, about the effects, about the violence, about wherever it leads.

How did you become involved in journalism and what inspired you to focus on the cartel/crime side of things?

I was inspired to focus on the cartel crimes side of things when I arrived in Mexico because I think I immediately saw, back in 2001 when I first started reporting, that this was a big story. It would get much bigger over the years, but also growing up in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s I was around a lot of people taking drugs, I knew people who died of drug heroin overdoses, and so it's kind of interesting to me this kind of linking of worlds. Of a place where there's a lot of drug consumption and places which produce and traffic drugs.

In what ways do drug cartels impact the cultural/societal fabric of Latin American countries?

So, talking specifically about Mexico there is an enormous impact of drug traffickers and drug cartels on society. Something that people call narco culture or narcocultura which kind of encompasses elements of music, particularly the narco corridos (the drug ballads) but also elements of slang, of fashion, of attitude.

In some very big narco cities, an extreme example being Culiacán in Sinaloa, the narco culture is extremely present and you see it very visibly. In other places like say Mexico City it’s a bit less visible but you still see it around. You might go to the grocery store and the guy there could be wearing a baseball cap with JGL (Joaquín Guzmán Loera) or something like that. You see this influence of people listening to the drug ballads (narco corridos) on the street and so forth. So, it’s very present.

How has cartel journalism led you to a deeper understanding of the social and cultural dynamics in the region?

As well as covering narcos, I’d like to just cover Latin America, to cover Mexico and to cover the extremely rich culture here. I've been here for 23 years. You soak it up and you see it everywhere and there's just so much fascinating culture, completely independently of the drug cartels. But the drug cartels are coming out of this society and of this culture. So, if you go to the countryside where a lot of drug traffickers come from, if you spend time in some of these big drug trafficking areas, then there's a very distinct country culture which is different from the city culture. Country culture is family orientated but a bit clannish with feuds and traditional ways of having parties and meals and so forth. You see all of that entwined within the cartels and within the drug traffickers.  

What challenges do journalists face when reporting on drug cartels, and how do these challenges influence the narratives presented to the public?

So, there's obviously the threat or violence. These are very violent organisations and there are many violent individuals. There's mass murder committed against each other, against civilians, against journalists. There's been more than 150 journalists murdered in Mexico in the time that I've been here. So there's always the pressure that reporting could end in violence. There’s the pressure of what can be written, what names can be included and to that effect there’s a certain form of censorship in the reporting. But a second challenge, I think, is trying to understand this information when you’re dealing with this weird clandestine world which is very, very big and is present in many aspects of life including the economy and politics. But, at the same time it's kind of hidden. It's organised crime. It's mafia and it’s more open than organised crime in other countries. A lot of these figures are quite visible and fairly easy to find in some senses. So, the challenge is to make sense of this information and to find the good information because there's a lot of bad information out there.

How does the portrayal of drug cartel figures in popular media differ from the reality you've encountered in your reporting?

The TV series Narcos, which I think a lot of people will have seen, focuses a lot on the top 1%. In the same way that in the real world you have a top 1% of rich people and then a lot of people below that in the upper middle class, middle class, working class and then underclass you get the same in the Narco world. It’s the same as in a legitimate company like Coca-Cola. You've got the very top people who earn lots of money and then there are mid-managers, and then lower people in the same company. So, really when you get into the narco world there’s a big world of people. Some of them are living with a lot of money, as per the image of drug traffickers with money, but then some of them are low down and are getting paid quite low amounts of money to go out and commit murders, move drugs over the border, watch safe houses or watch after soldiers, all these many, many jobs that are involved in this industry.

The second thing is it's TV, so you've got good looking people and that kind of glamour. In the real world you've got, you know, real people. What you don’t get from the TV series is the real pain and impact of the violence. Now, I don't know how popular a TV series will be showing this, it would be very harrowing, but the real nasty brutality and the effect there's been on regular society, regular civilians. People losing sons, fathers, brothers, husbands, wives, daughters because of this open violence. You can start to appreciate that in somewhere like the UK, when there's violence it’s on a completely different level. You start to appreciate how important and good it is to live with that kind of security.

Can you share a particularly challenging or memorable experience you've had as a journalist working in close proximity to cartels?

There's been many. But one which I described in one of my books happened back in 2014 when I was covering an uprising of vigilante squads of gunmen fighting the cartel in Michoacán. Later on in the year a lot of these vigilantes became gangsters themselves or gangsters basically just pretending to be vigilantes.

So, I went out with a group of about 50 guys who were pretty heavily armed. They had AK47s, grenade launchers and even 50 calibre rifles. I was getting on OK with them, taking photographs and kind of joking about with them on an OK level and then one of these guys came out and said “you know he's DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), this guy’s DEA. Why you letting him take your photograph? He’s DEA pretending to be to be a journalist”. It all changed very, very fast and I said “look, I'm not American, I'm English”, I showed them my website and they chilled a bit, but this guy said to me “if I see you again, I'm going to put a bullet in your head. I'm gonna throw a grenade at you”. I left after that but at the time, due to the adrenaline, I was more annoyed with myself that I'd missed out being with them when they went off and got into a big gun fight.  

What broader societal implications do you see arising from the glorification of figures like El Chapo or Pablo Escobar?

It's a tough question and I want to write a further essay about the glorification of narcos. So, on one side there is an influence on Latin Americans who see this glorification of narcos through music and through so many things which is one of the factors that influences them to go into the drug trade.

At the same time, loads of people around the world watch movies about gangsters and don’t go into the trade. It’s the same here (in Mexico). A lot of these gangsters are influenced by American movies like Scarface or The Godfather. So, it is a tricky one in in terms of the morality or the ethics of this thing. I do think you have to try and find ways of creating peace and reducing the violence here, but I don't know if waging a fight over culture is the way to do it even though it does have an impact. You have to change real things on the ground, give real opportunities to people, have real social work programmes and this kind of thing.

For students researching figures like El Chapo or Escobar, what advice do you have to ensure their projects go beyond superficial stereotypes?

I think you should try to find some good writers. Check out some of my books or reported pieces. I hope I try to go into some more context and depth. Try to read longer pieces and you know, maybe not just watch Narcos. Although, Narcos is a decent series which does have something in there as does the Mexican El Chapo series. Read up a bit more on the broader impacts on society.

Check out Ioan's book 'El Narco'

How can students delve deeper into the cultural and historical context surrounding these figures? What would you suggest they read or watch?
If I may, I think my first book El Narco is quite an easy read which does look into the culture, the history, the religion, into all of these things around the whole narco culture in Mexico. Some movies that I think are good or interesting are the Brazilian ones, they’re a bit different. Both City of God and the Elite Squad films get quite a bit deeper into some of the history. Books like Killing Pablo are still quite good, but I think you can watch a lot of YouTube stuff too. A colleague of mine, Luis Chaparro, has some good journalism as well on this.

Are there specific aspects of these figures' lives or the cartel-culture that students often overlook?

Well, I’ve talked to various drug traffickers and many people in this world, some quite high up and some quite low down. When you get to know them, you see it's a mixed bag. A lot of them have quite harsh, bad lives, beyond the glamour, quite painful lives. They know they're dealing with death and prison and violence and all these kind of things. Sometimes, on a personal level, trying to get to the humanity behind them is a bit harder from a distance when you’re seeing these characters from afar. But they’re kind of complete people, I guess with all of these aspects.

When studying notorious figures, how can students approach their research ethically, avoiding the glamorization of criminal activities?

Pues, creo que se debería ver el impacto profundo a la sociedad, hay que considerar la cuestión de las víctimas, aunque también entender que las personas impactadas por la violencia son los inocentes además de los propios victimarios involucrados en el mundo la criminalidad.  

In your experience, have you observed any positive outcomes from studying these figures in a more nuanced manner?

Pues, es bueno buscar la verdad y tener un buen entendimiento sobre este fenómeno. Entonces investigarlo más profundamente, explorarlo desde todos los ángulos posibles, aunque es difícil ver realmente consecuencias positivas. Lo triste es que no hay solución fácil.

For students unfamiliar with narco-journalism, how would you describe its role in reporting on crime and culture?

Pues, si hablamos de narcoperiodismo hay diferentes cosas. Hay periodistas que vamos cubriendo mucho el narcotráfico para los periódicos, las revistas, escribimos libros o hacemos documentales. Creo que el narcoperiodismo es crucial para entender todo esto y ha sido un gran trabajo de muchos periodistas en México, en Colombia, en Centro y Sudamérica. Por toda la provincia, en los pueblitos, cubriendo, a veces con salarios muy bajos, la cuestión del narcotráfico. Aunque, hoy en día hay más narcoperiodismo realizado por youtuberos, aunque es un poco más amarillista y quizás es una cuestión de gente que está un poco más dentro del crimen que quieren contar sus historias.

What misconceptions do people commonly have about narco-journalism, and how can students approach it with an open mind?

La frase "narcoperiodismo" es algo nuevo. Hice una entrevista con Joe Rogan quien subió el video con el título de “narcoperiodismo”. No sé si hay malentendidos, creo que hay que saber que es un trabajo duro y difícil, hay que saber los límites y tener cuidado con lo que se ve en YouTube, los youtuberos suben videos que a veces contienen mala información sin fuentes.

How can students broaden their understanding of South American culture beyond the narratives typically associated with drug cartels?

Hay mil cosas que van más allá de la droga y la delincuencia. La religión es muy interesante, aunque no soy religioso es interesante ver las figuras religiosas desde la virgen de Guadalupe, los santos populares, la cultura prehispánica, los aztecas, las mayas, los Olmecas, todos eso es super interesante. La música. Ya llevo veintiséis años aquí y recientemente empecé a entender la música ranchera y otros cantantes que muestran el alma de América Latina. La comida es algo super especial.

🗝️Tier 2 & 3 vocabulary.

• Amarillista (adj) - sensationalist

• Profundo (adj) - deep

• Victimario (nms) - killer, murderer, assassin

• Cubrir (vb) - to cover

• Tener cuidado (vb) - to take care/be careful

• Fuente (nfs) - the source

• Más allá - beyond

• Alma (nms) - the soul

🔍Grammar to look out for.

1. Apocopated adjectives

2. Use of ser and estar

3. The use of se in the passive voice

4. The preterite tense

5. The imperfect tense

6. The gerund

7. Indirect object pronouns

8. The present perfect

9. Adjectival agreement

Update + Downloads

Now for a bit of a boring update. I am pausing indefinitely all paid subscriptions and removing the option to upgrade to a paid subscription.

The experiment certainly worked and it was lovely to see so many of you upgrade but the last 5-6 months I’ve noticed a change in my attitude to Boletín and I’ve felt a lot of pressure to deliver. It’s actually made me less productive! In pausing all paid subscriptions I already feel lighter and more relaxed.

If you still want to support Boletín then there are still various ways to do so.

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That’s all this week!

Ollie

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In this week’s Boletín author Giles Tremlett shares his insight on a range of A Level Spanish related topics including: the importance of family in Spain, young people’s worries, Spanish values, women in a “live and let live” liberalist society and Francoism.

👋Welcome to Boletín, an English-language newsletter covering historical, cultural and topical stories related to the A Level Spanish course. These newsletters accompany a student worksheet which can be downloaded here. This week:

1. Edition 111 of Boletín (the three texts)

2. Tier 2 & 3 vocabulary, grammar search for students and A Level structures.

3. An interview with Giles Tremlett.

4. Download links.

5. An upcoming teach meet in London.

🫶If you haven’t already then subscribe to make sure future editions arrive straight to your inbox. If you enjoy this week’s edition then please give it a like or a share!

📌Edition 111.

Giles Tremlett is an author, historian and journalist. He is known for his writings on Spain with books such as Ghosts of Spain (not a ghost story as a lady in the gym once asked) and España: A Brief History of Spain. His most recent long read for The Guardian, an investigative piece trying to solve the 40-year-old mystery of three children abandoned at a train station, has clocked up close to 2 million reads. In Spain he is a regular current affairs commentator on the radio and on television. All of this is to say I was very lucky to be able to speak with him during half-term break. I hope you enjoy the interview!

In the interview Giles shares his thoughts on:

1. Languages in every day life.

2. Spanish traditions.

3. Transatlantic slavery in the 19th Century.

4. Spanish values.

5. What do young people in Spain care about?

6. The role of family in Spain.

7. Women in Spanish society.

8. Integrating into Madrid.

9. Franco/Primo de Rivera and the Falange.

10. Traces of Francoism in modern day Spain.

But first, for those who don’t download the student worksheet, here are the three texts based on the interview.

111 free student Boletín worksheets

Francoism and Falangism.

En 1936 hubo un golpe de estado militar liderado por el ejército y uno de los líderes fue Franco. Necesitaban contar con el apoyo de otros grupos de extrema derecha y les hacían falta una ideología porque eran simplemente reaccionarios en el sentido de que reaccionaban en contra de un gobierno democrático izquierdista que no les gustaba y que pensaban que llevaría el marxismo a España. Por lo tanto, en busca de sustentar ideológicamente su nuevo régimen recurrieron en gran medida a la Iglesia Católica, al nacionalismo y a la Falange, que era la versión española del fascismo.

La familia española.

Ahora estoy muy acostumbrado a una sociedad en la que todos cuidan y se preocupan por sus abuelos, primos, tíos, tías, etc. Hay muchas familias británicas así, pero en España es algo más general que ayuda a crear una estructura social más firme. La familia en España es una red de seguridad, ya que no tenemos un sistema de bienestar tan avanzado como el de Gran Bretaña u otras partes del norte de Europa, por lo que la familia en ese sentido también es vital en el sentido literal. Necesitas a tu familia para poder sobrevivir y superar tiempos difíciles y apuros. Todo el mundo lo sabe y les parece natural y normal.

La integración.

Puedo ver a mi alrededor que Madrid está cambiando. Se está volviendo mucho más internacional y hay cada vez más gente que habla inglés y que no se esfuerza en hablar español. Cualquiera que sea musulmán, negro o que provenga de una cultura muy diferente a la cultura española le costará a la hora de integrarse. En ese sentido, lo he tenido muy fácil. El racismo existe prácticamente en todas partes, y ciertamente existe en España. A menudo, los españoles suelen afirmar que no son racistas, pero eso se debe a que no se detienen a preguntarse cuáles son las diferentes manifestaciones del racismo.

🗝️Tier 2 & 3 vocabulary.

• Recurrir (vb) - to turn to, to resort to.

• El ejército (nms) - the army, the armed forces.

• Hacer falta (vb) - to need, to lack, to be missing.

• Sustentar (vb) - to underpin, support.

• Una red de seguridad (nfs) - a safety net.

• Sobrevivir (vb) - to survive.

• Superar (vb) - the overcome, get through.

• Apuros (nmp) - hard times, hardships, predicaments.

• Provenir (vb) - to come from.

• Costarse (vb) - to find difficult (to do something).

🔍Grammar to look out for.

1. The present continuous.

2. The present perfect.

3. The imperfect tense.

4. The preterite tense.

5. Relative pronoun que.

6. Intensifiers.

7. The present tense.

8. Adjectives.

9. Use of ser (characteristic) and estar (feeling/emotion).

🧠A Level structures.

The first A Level structure this week is to do with the verb volver which in most cases means to return or to come back. However, when followed by an adjective or if the verb includes the suffix -se (volverse) the meaning changes to to become or to turn. There are many nuanced ways to use it. The easiest thing is to check WordReference which lists them all.

Example:

1. Madrid se está volviendo más internacional (Madrid is becoming more international).

2. Me estaba volviendo impaciente (I was becoming impatient).

3. Recientemente me he estado volviendo más consciente del (Recently I've started to become more aware of)

The second structure is hay cada vez más/menos which is a lot easier to explain. This can be used to say there are more and more/less and less or there are increasingly more/less of something.

Example:

1. Hay cada vez menos gente que fuma (there are less and less people who smoke).

2. Hay cada vez más divorcios (there are more and more divorces).

3. Hay cada vez menos creyentes (there are less and less believers)

🎤An interview with Giles Tremlett.

I thought a good place to start would be introducing exactly who will be reading this. They’re most likely sat in a UK classroom, aged between 16-18 and studying A Level Spanish. They studied all the core grammar and topics at GCSE and are now faced with the, until now, largely unexplored cultural/societal side of Spanish. So, it’s unlikely to reach the 1.6 million+ reads your most recent long read Guardian piece achieved but I know your in-depth insight will be valuable to the readers. I wonder if you could introduce yourself to the readership with a little background on yourself.

My name is Giles Tremlett. I’m a writer and journalist. I’ve lived in Madrid since 1992 and now have Spanish nationality. I’ve worked as correspondent for the Guardian and correspondent for the Economist and more recently of the last ten years I basically write books mostly about Spanish history and write what they call long-form journalism which is pretty much what it says on the tin, very long pieces of journalism.

Do you have a favourite Spanish word or idiomatic phrase?

Well, the trouble is a lot of them are filthy.

Okay, “Nadie me quita lo bailado” in other words nobody can take away all the dancing that I’ve already done. It means it doesn’t matter what happens in the future, but my past life has been good, and nothing can change the fact however miserable my future life might be, nothing can change the fact I’ve had a good life up to now.

How do you use languages in your day-to-day life?

Well, languages are vital to me in my day-to-day life. I exist jointly in Spanish and English. I wish, like your students, I had learnt Spanish at school but alas in my day if you were good at languages they made you take your exams quickly so you didn’t have to do them anymore. So I did French and Latin to O Level which I took when I was 14/15, I think. Languages are completely vital to me. I also speak Portuguese which comes up when I want to report in or about Portugal and over the years, I have taught myself to read certainly French, Italian, and last year I was even studying Romani which is the language of the Roma people. Later in life I’ve become very interested in language and it’s become vital to me.

Of the co-official Spanish languages which one would you most like to speak?

I’d love to speak Euskera. I’d love to be able to speak Basque. I love listening to Gallego because I can hear the Spanish and Portuguese coexisting and I’m very used to listening to and reading Catalan. Ideally, I’d speak them all. I think Spain’s languages make the country much richer even though many Spaniards would disagree with me.

What have you found to be the biggest misconception about Spain?

There are probably two. One is a sort of warped view of Spanish history as bloody, violent, cruel, and nasty and that somehow that is a Spanish trait. Perhaps the other one is that you can come to Spain and speak English and expect everyone to understand you just by talking louder.

What is your favourite Spanish tradition?

Drinking in bars or having coffee in cafes which may sound banal but it’s very important.

What is the strangest Spanish tradition?

I’ve seen lots of very strange things, I’m not sure they’re completely Spanish in the wider sense but I think in Ghosts of Spain I describe a procession from a church in Galicia where people were basically carried around in coffins as part of some kind of ceremony of thanks for having their prayers for good health answered. It’s very strange. If I was going to choose a favourite, it would be rounding up wild horses in Galicia and Asturias.

You’ve written about Spain’s past, the International Brigades and recently a brief history of Spain. If you had unlimited time and resources, what other aspects of Spanish history would you like to delve into?

I think it would be fascinating to go back to Muslim Spain. We haven’t, and I’m planning to write about this, really had a conversation in Spain about transatlantic slavery which Spain started and finished. Where Spain accounted for 3x as many enslaved people shipped from Africa across the Atlantic as ever landed in the United States.

How is that not more widely known?

That’s a very good question, I’m planning to write about it soon. In the 19^th century more than 800,000 enslaved people were transported to Cuba, which of course was Spain. And if you look at the records for the number of enslaved people who reached what is now the United States the kind of accepted figure is around 430/440/450,000. Almost half as many as Spain, in terms of Cuba, in the 19^th century alone.

WJEC Theme 1: Being a young person in Spanish speaking societies (values, issues, employment).

Are there any values/characteristics you consider distinctly Spanish?

No, I think all values are shared somewhere with somebody else, so I don’t think there are values which are specifically Spanish. There are values that, if like me you are bought up being British, there are certain Spanish values which you think are great! They tend to revolve around family and sociability. Doing things in groups rather than as sad and lonely individuals.

What are the issues affecting young Spanish people? What’s do they care about?

I think largely they care about the same things as young people in Britain. They care about their own futures, they care about the future of the planet and perhaps what makes them different, on average, is that they probably care a lot more about family going up and down and across the generations, than your average British person.

What have you learnt about the role of the family in Spain?

I’m not sure whether learn is the right word here but put it this way I’m now very used to a society in which everyone naturally cares and minds about their grandparents or their cousins and their uncles and aunts. This actually fits the model of my own family anyway, because there are lots of British families like that too, but here it’s just a more general thing which is very lovely and creates a firmer social structure. Family in Spain is the safety net, we don’t have as advanced a welfare system as Britain or other parts of Northern Europe so family in that sense is also vital in the literal sense. You need your family to be able to survive and get through hard times. Everybody knows that and it seems natural and normal to them.

We study the film Volver by Almodóvar which features a very resilient strong female lead. In Ghosts of Spain you said you had questions yourself about how women had fared moving from post-fundamentalist Catholicism to a ‘live and let live’ liberalist society. What did you learn?

Well, that’s something I said 15 years ago but it’s very interesting actually I think Spain has had a massive social revolution over the last fifty years. Women in many ways have led that social revolution. You can see for example some very basic things like the employment rate of women comparing Spain to Italy. When Franco died, just before democracy came back, much fewer Spanish women were working than Italian women and now many more Spanish women are working than Italian women. What I’m not so such of is that men have realised. Women have soared ahead but that doesn’t mean that they’re now able to share all the other responsibilities of life that already fell in their lap like child rearing and running a house.

WJEC theme 3: Diversity and difference.

You once described yourself as an integrated outsider. Is your integration into the community, in Madrid, typical of other outsiders’ experiences?

Probably not in the sense that I have a public persona. I take part in television debates and on the radio, present books and give talks so in that sense it’s not very similar but I think on another level it is very similar for my generation of immigrant and British people, because that’s what we are we’ve migrated from one country to another, and we are immigrants in Spain. I can see that changing around me though, I can see Madrid becoming far more international. Many more people speaking English, many more people not bothering to speak Spanish and so it may be that generationally my experience is very different to anybody who arrives now.

Which group of people has the toughest time integrating into the community?

Anybody who is Muslim or black or comes from a culture that’s different or very different from Spanish culture. In that sense I’ve had it easy if not very easy. I’m not sure I’d say that Spain is a more or less racist country than Britain because I haven’t lived in Britain for a long time, but racism exists pretty much everywhere, and it certainly exists in Spain. Spaniards often like to claim that they’re not racist but that’s because they don’t stop to ask themselves what the different manifestations of racism are.

Theme 4: The Two Spains.

Which Civil War story has impacted you the most or for you is the most memorable?

Well, funnily enough you talked of your own family and people walking across the Pyrenees and I’ve heard many stories of families who had to do that. You can dive into the photographic archives and find very moving images of that happening. A friend of mine’s mother tells stories about walking across the Pyrenees in the snow, as a child, past the bodies of those who had died and frozen on the way. On another level, the whole story of the International Brigades I find fascinating which is why I’ve written a book about it but in many ways that’s not Spanish history it’s international history or British history or American history or Welsh history.

Are you able to demystify the Franco/Primo de Rivera/Falange relationship?

Okay, so there was basically a right-wing military uprising which was led by the military and one of those leaders was Franco and they needed to bring in everybody else on the far-right. They also needed some kind of ideology because they didn't have one. They were just reactionaries in the sense that they were reacting against a left-wing democratic government that they didn't like and which they thought would bring Marxism to Spain. So, looking for a sort of ideological underpinning of their new regime, they turned to the Catholic church largely, to nationalism and to the Falange which was the Spanish version of fascism.

Find out more about Falangism

You wrote “the events in Spain marked the definitive end of Francoism” in reference to the attempted coup in 1981 by Tejero. I recently came across a disagreement online between two people based on your statement. One said “The journalist is wrong: Francoism didn’t die that day. It has not been unrooted from the Spanish institutions of power”. Which got me thinking: is there any trace of Francoism left in modern day Spain?

Yes, because not all the laws have been rewritten and as the critical voice in that conversation knows most structures of power and influence don’t just disappear overnight, they have a lot of inertia attached to them so in that sense they’re right. Francoism will never be 100% eradicated not least because it was a kind of socially accepted phenomenon for a large number of Spaniards so in that sense it doesn’t disappear at all.

Many Spaniards will spend the coming centuries arguing over whether it was a good thing or a bad thing but in terms of being a threat to democracy and preventing Spain being a full and proper member of the Western Democratic Alliance I would stand by that statement and even amplify it to say it’s sort of the end Spain’s post-imperial chaos.

The draft Democratic Memory law last year saw an amendment with the inclusion of the line “desarrollando en los libros de texto y materiales curriculares la represión que se produjo durante la Guerra y la Dictadura”. What do you think it’s necessary that Spanish school children learn about Franco?

The easiest answer is a lot because he is the key figure of Spanish history in the last few centuries. Because Francoism itself lasted so long that some parts of it became socially ingrained and because that’s what everybody’s grandparents lived through, so you’ll understand your grandparents and what their lives were like. I’ll go back to this theme that preoccupies me at the moment. Learn to see Francoism in a far wider lens that looks at Spain’s imperial history, Spain started falling apart at the beginning of the 19^th century and it took a century and a half, almost two centuries to digest that completely. A quarter of that space, or a fifth of it, is occupied by Francoism. In a way it’s a continuation of other moments of the whole process of post-imperial decline and reaction.

Can Franco be credited for doing anything which was good for Spain?

Yes, he can be credited with improving the social security network with the construction of social housing, with the building of damns and irrigation systems. It’s difficult to be in charge for 40 years and not do something useful but it’s important that people should be able to weigh these things and know that the purpose of Francoism, wasn’t certainly in the francoist minds, to make Spaniards miserable and keep them in poverty. Quite the opposite, just that they weren’t very good at it until about 1960. Spain’s economy did take off hugely after that. Some people will argue that Francoism was miraculous in that sense but actually if you stick on a graph with GDP per capita, in other words how wealthy individual Spaniards were compared to Italians or the Portuguese, you’ll see that actually from 1936 – 1975 Italians improved much more than Spaniards and also the Portuguese did so there was a Southern European boom in which Spain did worse than its neighbouring countries.  

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Taller de español | Londres | 24 de junio

I was recently asked if I could present at a teach meet in London by the Consejería de Educación en Londres. It’s been a while since I last presented in person so I’m quite nervous but it’ll be alright on the night. I am presenting on effective ideas for teaching literature and the film. The choice of workshops is amazing to be honest, it promises to be a very good day and I’m looking forward to meeting people I’ve admired from afar online.

If you’re interested in coming along then follow this link for the sign-up.

That’s all this week!

Ollie

❤️

Imagine a bonafide expert on Pedro Almodóvar answering a set of questions about Volver to help you better understand the film, the director and the socio-historical context of the film. Now stop imagining because what follows is exactly that and it’s full of amazing insight.

👋Welcome to Boletín, an English-language newsletter covering historical, cultural and topical stories related to the A Level Spanish course. These newsletters accompany a student worksheet which can be downloaded here. This week:

1. Contents of the Q&A.

2. Q&A with Dr Ana Sánchez-Arce.

3. Grammatical structures to be mindful of in edition 103.

4. Student friendly Q&A transcript and Boletín edition (paid subscribers).

Welcome to the 56 new subscribers since the last post! Also hello to future me (as I will be reading this every year for the foreseeable and so will my year 12s).

Boletín editions generally bring together three texts related to goings-on in Spain linked to the A Level specification but every now and then I will make a feature issue which is usually linked to either Volver by Pedro Almodóvar or La Casa de Bernarda Alba by Lorca.

This issue is for those teaching and studying Volver and is special because it’s the first Q&A I’ve ever done and it’s with the brilliant Dr Ana Maria Sanchez-Arce.

I thought I had quite good knowledge of Volver but Dr Ana’s insight is just mindblowing. I hope you enjoy it!

Check out Dr Ana's book!

In this Q&A we discuss:

• Almodóvar knowledge essential to understand Volver.

• The significance of the film title.

• The portrayal of Spanish society.

• Culture as explored in Volver.

• Traditional Spain.

• Female characters.

• Family.

• Maternity.

• The Easterly Wind.

• What we can learn about Spain via Regina.

• The city and the town.

You might want to get a cup of tea and a notepad for this one.

🎤A Q&A with Dr Ana Maria Sanchez-Arce

Hi Ana, firstly a massive thank you for agreeing to answer some questions about Volver. Just from reading the Motherlands chapter from your book I know how deeply you have researched Pedro Almodóvar and I’m so thankful for your time. 

I’m certain that teachers and students alike will be grateful for your insight! For those who aren’t familiar with your work I wonder if you could start by providing a little background to your interest in Almodóvar? 

Many thanks to you for taking an interest in my work, and for helping disseminate Spanish culture. I was always immersed in Spanish culture, having been born near Barcelona to a family from southern Spain. Paradoxically, I became more interested in Almodóvar when I moved to the UK. My housemate was doing a degree in Spanish at university and she and I watched Almodóvar’s films together. I realised then that Almodóvar’s existing reputation for apoliticism and postmodernism was not all there was to his work. His films talk to Spanish politics and history in an oblique way mostly although it is only in the last 15-20 years that they have become more overtly critical. My parents were born just after the Spanish Civil War, and silence has always been a big part of how they (and in turn my siblings and I) were brought up. The trauma of the war and subsequent dictatorship made repression the best defence against an authoritarian state and those who share their beliefs. I was never taught about the Spanish Civil War at school, or the dictatorship. So, I taught myself about all these things and my book on Almodóvar was my way to process all this information about my personal and national history.  

What would you consider essential to know about Pedro Almodóvar before watching Volver? In which ways can the film be considered autobiographical? 

This is a shrewd question. Almodóvar puts out the same story over and over again, which is mostly true, but also a way of influencing how people interpret his films. You could call this his ‘autobiographical legend’. He emphasises that he is from La Mancha, where Volver takes place, and that he moved to Madrid at a young age to be an artist/filmmaker and to work for the national telephone company.

To an extent, the characters of Volver have made the same journey from the village to the capital. The film is excellent at dissecting what is great about rural communities even though people cannot find work there any more since farm work has been mechanised. To be honest, people always lived badly in the country unless they had their own land. I know because that is the reason my parents moved to Catalonia in the 1960s. Almodóvar, however, was well educated and got a good job, whereas the characters in Volver reflect the fates of the majority of those who moved to big cities in search for work; endless toil and little money to show for it. Something that is also telling about Volver is the fact that men are mostly in the background.

The community represented is composed of women, with men being peripheral or dangerous. This is something that reflects Almodóvar’s childhood preferences and experiences. He felt at home among the strong women in his village, who gossiped with his mother and ran the households. He hardly ever talks about his father or male relatives, so that is a silenced aspect of his biography. One wonders what may be behind this silence, and the lack of fathers (which in Volver is turned into a series of dead fathers, fathers who are sexual predators).

The figure of the patriarch is particularly under scrutiny in this film, and of course as a gay man growing up in a machista society at the time when being gay was illegal, the patriarch (the ideal of toxic masculinity) was not just a threat to women but also to any who did not fit the ideal of heterosexual masculinity. 

Does the title of the film have any significance? 

Definitely. The title means many things and demonstrates the complexity of the story. Volver, to come back or to return home, is what the characters who left their hometown do and what the title song is about. It is the cry of those who left and spent their lives away from their communities (either as economic migrants or exiles). It is also a wink to the fake ghost story, as the mother comes back to life after pretending to be dead to evade authorities. These are the more literal meanings of the word, but there are other, figurative ways to look at it. The film explores trauma and the repetition of violence across generations. These are seen to be cyclical and thus come back periodically. Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) behaves in certain ways because of the abuse she suffered as a teenager. Her explosive character has much to do with her trauma and this, in turn, affects her daughter Paula. Thus, the actions of one man, Raimunda’s father, reverberate or come back to haunt the family for decades, even after he is dead.

There is also a sense that women cannot be free of these threats because of how the abuse is nearly repeated as Paco tries to sexually assault his adopted daughter, Paula. The silence around the initial violence enables this violence to continue for Raimunda, and to be extended to Paula. Thus, I link it to the trauma and censorship surrounding the Spanish Civil War and subsequent dictatorship, which enabled the continuation of violence, repression/silence and prevented healing.

Volver keeps coming back to this collective trauma, but not in an obvious way. It is important that the sisters are seen cleaning their parents’ tomb (respect, memorialisation) despite what they think of them. Raimunda’s father’s crimes, like Franco’s, were swept aside and family history was buried with him. Paco, Raimunda’s husband who shares Franco’s first name, is not so lucky. His crime is instantly punished, and he is hidden and buried unceremoniously. This shows both continuity (patriarchal entitlement to women’s bodies, the legacy of the dictatorship) and change.  

For Almodóvar, the film also marks a lot of returns. A return to comedy, for example. It is also the film where Carmen Maura (Almodóvar’s most steadfast collaborator in the 1980s) comes back to work with him after a massive fall-out. He is also coming back to the theme of motherhood, and through the use of the mother in La Mancha, to his own mother. Almodóvar said that Volver was “a foolish and crazy attempt to bring my mother back from the dead, back to life” and an exploration of his childhood.” It is not just any mother that comes to life, but a mother who asks for forgiveness and tries to atone for her mistakes. 

How is Spanish society portrayed by Pedro Almodóvar in Volver and is his portrayal accurate? 

The question of authenticity is difficult to answer. There is a lot of local colour in the film. Part of its appeal for me is the use of (now quite old-fashioned) turns of phrase and props used. These bring me back to utensils and clothes that my mother’s and grandmother’s generation would have used. However, I would always caution about looking for accuracy in Almodóvar’s films because the behaviours and even the way things look have been manipulated to fit a particular aesthetic. There is a lot of excess, there is also a camp sensibility through which the stories are told, and there is a use of postmodern techniques (such as the fragmentation of the narrative, the way it refers to other films and songs to draw attention to its artificiality, etc) which are there to help us distance ourselves from the idea of reality. It is harder, I think, for non-Spanish viewers, who sometimes may assume that things may just be like that in Spain. The film warns against this in the reference to the windmills. There is a passage in Don Quixote where Don Quixote believes that traditional windmills are giants and tries to fight them, but other characters (and readers) know that he is deluded. The wind turbines are contemporary windmills, and we know from then that we are entering a fictional land, a land created in literature. That said, there is plenty of social critique in the film, particularly of how difficult it is to live for those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. 

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Which would you consider the more prominent aspects of Spanish culture as explored in Volver? 

There is a strong exploration of traditional Spanish culture. The most important of these aspects is the on-going culture of machismo and deep patriarchal structures that are still prevalent. The exploitation of girls and women is linked to how new media such as reality television exploits people’s misery for profit. There is also an exploration of how those who moved from the countryside to big cities fared, including the loss of community support and structures, and their attempts at replicating them. The scene when Raimunda calls on her neighbours for help is significant, for example. This is excellently linked to the different waves of immigration and cultural diversity in the outskirts of cities like Madrid. As Raimunda and her generation settle, others come after them, taking on even more precarious positions, worse housing and jobs. Raimunda’s neighbour Regina, who is a Latin American migrant working illegally as a prostitute and who Raimunda takes advantage of. The move to capitalism (including the large migrations from the country to the cities, and also from poor, mainly agricultural regions to more industrialised ones like Catalonia, the Basque country, and Madrid) is shown not to benefit working class people as much as it was expected. 

What do the female characters in the film reveal about Almodóvar’s attitude towards women? 

Volver is a film that shows three generations of women in one family overcome adversity and continue with their lives despite great challenges. Almodóvar has said many times how he has always found women to make extremely interesting characters, and how he is fascinated by the complicity and camaraderie between them. These are aspects of resistance in a society that oppresses women.  

How do the female characters show strength? 

The female characters show strength by continuing their daily lives despite adversity and trauma. All the female characters are struggling with something, be it old age (aunt Paula), illness, financial insecurity or trauma. Male characters, particularly Paco, also struggle, but Paco reveals himself to be weak in drowning in self-pity and trying to use sexual assault/control over the women in his life to make himself feel better. The female characters are not perfect (see, for example, Raimunda’s lack of patience and quick temper, or Irene’s rash decision to kill her husband), but are seen in the film to be willing to tackle their problems. They also demonstrate how brave it is to open up and be vulnerable, to ask for help. Paula does this, going to her mother for help. This is something that Raimunda learns to do throughout the film. The culmination of Raimunda’s journey takes place when she opens up to her mother on the bench, and when she decides to ask Regina for help. Raimunda does for her daughter what she never did for her younger self. There is emphasis on strength as derived from a group, from community whether this is family or neighbours. 

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How is the traditional Spain represented in Volver? 

Traditional country life Spain is represented in the film as a culture that is being lost (see aunt Paula’s death) as people move to big cities. It is, however, not totally erased and we could speak more of change and adaptation to new spaces and circumstances. One could look at quaint customs such as the cleaning of graves or the wake prior to a funeral, which still happen in many parts of Spain (though not always in the ways shown in the film). I am more interested, however, in how these traditional beliefs and ways of living are translated to contemporary Spain. For example, how does Paula the born-digital teenager absorb and navigate these customs? How do the characters adapt what may be of use (community spirit, putting family first) to life in a capitalist society that puts the individual first? 

How important is family both in regard to the plot of the film and Almodóvar’s life? 

Family, with all its positive and negative aspects (the obligations and the ready-made support, the disagreements and unconditional love, the hidden violence of many kinds and the kindness that may sit within it) is central to Volver. It is also a metaphor for the wider family of the nation. I cannot speak for Almodóvar in terms of how central family is to his life. However, he has spoken many times of how central his relationship with his mother has been throughout his life. He also works with his brother, Agustín Almodóvar, to run the production company, El Deseo S.A. Almodóvar draws on his childhood and adolescent experiences to create new stories and fictional worlds. He also seems to draw on his family for this, for example by sometimes using his sisters’ clothes.  

How is maternity explored via the characters of Raimunda and Irene? 

Irene is the mother who cannot protect her daughter, the mother who is blind to the patriarchal structures until it is too late, but also the mother willing to defend her children even by committing murder. This is a very different mother from the stereotypes that previous Spanish literature and films had shown us, such as the mother in The House of Bernarda Alba, the castrating mother who is feared and rules the home according to patriarchal principles in stead of the father. Raimunda sees Irene as this traditional mother until Irene confesses her ignorance and crimes after she discovered what had been happening. Raimunda is acting as the mother she wishes she had had, protecting Paula. Yet Raimunda is dealing with her own trauma and this prevents her from engaging fully with Paula’s psychological needs, even though she provides and does everything she should. The film looks at mothers as imperfect but shows a more contemporary idea of motherhood, trying to move away from restrictive traditional stereotypes. 

I’ve always thought that Regina’s role is more complex than just an accomplice to Raimunda. What can we learn about Spain from Regina? 

Regina is an underdeveloped character which points to the diversity of Spanish society and the consequences of adopting a capitalist model. Capitalism depends on reducing costs and maximising profits, so Spain (and other countries) has drawn on cheaper labour from children in the past, and women who got paid less for equal work. As Spanish citizens start refusing to take on certain jobs because they are tough or badly paid, migrants have filled this gap. Regina is also a sex-worker, further commenting on the commodification of women’s bodies. I find it very interesting that you say that Regina is an accomplice of Raimunda. She clearly is, but she has also been misled by Raimunda, who has taken advantage of Regina’s trust in her. One could say that Raimunda is replicating Spain’s structures of oppression by placing Regina in this position. There should be a postcolonial reading of Volver along these lines (watch this space!). 

How does Almodóvar portray the Spanish pueblo and the city? 

At first it seems that the pueblo and the city are very strongly represented as opposing each other, as sparse vs bustling, with a reduced colour palette vs colourful exteriors and interiors. This is there, of course, but there is also a subtle undermining of these stark distinctions. As people moved from the country to the city, cities changed. Their expansion to accommodate these new, poor inhabitants is seen in Raimunda’s and Sole’s neighbourhoods, which are different from the city centre. In these peripheral neighbourhoods, small one-story houses (normally built by the people arriving in the city, without planning or sanitation in place until much later on) mix with more recently built high-rises to accommodate them. The architecture reflects migrants’ attempts to replicate the community structures of the pueblo and also how supposedly better housing (the high rises) created isolation. The pueblo is seen as being left behind as a space that cannot offer a life to young people. Yet at the same time some of them suffer from nostalgia, thinking of the food and family left behind. It is easy to idealise the pueblo when one does no longer live there. The city is seen as a place of opportunity, but this is also shown to be a bit of a mirage. Raimunda’s backbreaking job and struggle to make ends meet is significant. A good companion piece to Volver would be Almodóvar’s What Have I Done to Deserve This?!, also starring Carmen Maura. 

Check out Dr Ana's book!

Does the easterly wind have any significance over than reinforcing the superstitious nature of the Spanish pueblo? 

The easterly wind is a great addition to the film, reflecting the reality of La Mancha’s harsh weather and providing a surrealist touch to the film by taking its effects to an extreme. Of course, it can be read as superstition if the film is interpreted as realist. However, it is a wonderful metaphor for the unbridled passions and silenced events that the film reveals. The wind takes us again to the windmills in Don Quixote, and the blend of realism and fantasy. It also alludes to another great genre that has had an incredible influence in Almodóvar’s work, melodrama. There is a film by Douglas Sirk, Written on the Wind (1956) where the wind is the expression of the characters’ pent-up emotions. I would say that Volver offers a Spanish version of this.  

At the end of the film Irene watches television whilst caring for Agustina. The black and white scene she seems to enjoy watching is given prominence. Why did Almodóvar select this scene for Irene to watch? 

This scene makes an intertextual allusion to Visconti’s Bellissima (1951) explicit. Bellissima is a neo-realist film about a mother’s obsession with making her young daughter into a film star and the neglect of the daughter. This is a theme that runs through Volver as Irene helps Raimunda enter a singing contest. The focus on girls and women’s beauty is seen as a way of complying with patriarchal expectations that women be beautiful and available for men to (ab)use. The scene in Bellissima quoted at the end of Volver seems an oasis of peace for the little girl, a bedtime moment with her father away from the mother’s frantic schemes. However, a contemporary, post-modern sensibility and the fact that Volver is about sexual abuse in the home manage to make the scene more sinister that it perhaps seemed in 1951. Why does the father kiss the little girl on the lips and, more importantly, why does he ask her not to tell her mother? The mother in Bellissima is similar to Irene in that she looks after her neighbours for money, administering injections and other care. Irene, however, does this for free and hiding her presence, as a way of atoning for not seeing the abuse her daughter was suffering and for leaving Agustina without a mother. Both mothers in Bellissima and Volver are blind to their daughters’ fate until it is too late. Raimunda is also characterised like the mother in Bellissima, but Raimunda manages to break away from this role by placing her daughter at the centre of her life, however imperfectly she does so. 

Does Volver contain a wider message? 

Volver is first and foremost a fantastic, imaginative story told in a technically outstanding way. The film encourages reflection on trauma and how this can be passed on through generations and on how this may relate to historical trauma as well as personal trauma. It also sheds light on how Spain has changed since becoming a democratic country in many ways, whilst some things remain stubbornly similar. However, it works beyond the Spanish context as a film about mothers and daughters, sexual violence and healing, families and communities more widely. 

That concludes the Q&A!

A massive thank you to Dr Ana Maria Sanchez-Arce without whom this issue would not have been possible.

Things you should definitely do:

1. Check out her book The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar now in paperback here.

2. Follow and thank her on Twitter.

3. Leave any follow up questions/feedback in the comments. I’d love to know if this came in useful.

Structures/vocabulary to look out for in edition 103:

• Volver a + infinitive - to do again/once again

• Hasta que + subjunctive

• Al + infinitive - on/upon

• Sino - but rather

🔍Grammar to look out for in edition 103:

• Present tense irregulars

• Direct Object Pronouns

• Imperfect tense

• The past perfect

Thanks as ever for reading, you can download the accompanying student worksheet in the usual place.

Ollie

❤️

📁Student friendly transcript and Boletín edition.

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Volver Q&a With Dr Ana Sánchez Arce

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