I was born in Venezuela and grew up in Madrid. Shakira’s platform on “celebrated” Latin immigration describes my reality, that of Latin Americans with money who buy Salamanca and Chamberí. It does not describe the majority: those who clean our houses, who are denied an apartment because of their accent and a job because of their surname, sometimes by other wealthy Latin Americans. Madrid does not celebrate Latin culture; it celebrates money, agnostic of nationality. Saying otherwise is not optimism: it is privilege speaking about itself.
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Marta Munk de Alba. Málaga
Let them know
I walk the streets of Lisbon and visit the National Museum of Resistance and Freedom, and I think that in Madrid there is still no plaque in Puerta del Sol nor a museum that tells the horrors of the war and the dictatorship. Franco remains alive in that silence. Here they fight so that memory does not make them go back to before that April 25. Like our brothers, we must not forget that freedom should not be taken for granted. Teachers should speak firmly about what happened so that kids do not speak frivolously about what happened to us as a country; so they know that one day a rifle was given to their great-grandparents to face their own neighbors.
Joaquín Padrón Rodríguez. Madrid
The aura
The phenomenon of farming aura is news, in which young people perform actions and movements to show their charisma. The interesting thing about this trend is that it takes place in public space, sharing with other people, face to face. In recent years there has been an increase in absenteeism in Spanish universities, especially since covid. Various authors use the concept of functional illiteracy to refer to those people who have a degree but lack the necessary skills to analyze, understand, and apply that information in real life. Hence the need to start farming in the classroom: connecting with the experiential and the collective. Perhaps, by being a bit more sophists, classrooms would be filled, fallacies detected, and learning to ask questions achieved. And there, who knows, lies the aura of the University.
Cecilia Serrano Martínez. Logroño
Knowing how to be bored
I contemplate the waves of the sea without remorse, immersed in the extraordinary mood of boredom. Those who know say that knowing how to be bored is healthy, but when you are addicted to activity and movement it is not so easy. You sit for a while watching life go by and unproductivity hammers your guilt. Apart from Fernán Gómez, who claimed to be capable of doing nothing, it is increasingly difficult to find people able to go through that floating mental state with serenity. We live constantly arriving late to nowhere; out there everything goes so fast that stopping has become an act of rebellion. Nothing like boredom helps us to ponder the passage of time in its right measure. In these times, knowing how to appreciate the ebb and flow of the tide is simply a superpower within the reach of a few.
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Diego Martínez Castillón. Barbastro (Huesca)
