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Article Excerpt
From the early 1960s through the mid-1970s, even as tourism and capitalist reforms gave a much-needed jolt to the Spanish economy, well over a million Spaniards left their homes to work abroad (Hooper 20). Although emigration decreased sharply during the global recession of the mid-1970s--as inflation and higher interest rates curtailed job opportunities abroad--the net outward flow of workers from the Spanish economy persisted even through the Transition years. Yet, since Spain's incorporation into the European Union in 1986, and as economic and social conditions have become more favorable domestically, significantly fewer Spanish citizens have moved abroad to find employment. According to European Commission press releases, emigration out of Spain to other European Union nations fell from about 120,000 in the late 1970s, to only 2,000 to 3,000 in the early 1990s ("Migration"): a direct result of what was, in short, the most robust rate of economic growth amongst all E.U. member states during the early part of the decade (Hooper 57). Spaniards at long last possessed in large measure the means to stay put, to enjoy a higher standard of living, and even--in 1992 (with the Expo, the Olympic Games, and Madrid as European Cultural Capital)--to invite a few friends over to celebrate a kind of national make-over.
Since that time, the cultural profile of Spanish citizens and their creative production on the world stage has also been unmistakably on the rise: in cinema (Pedro Almodóvar, Alejandro Amenábar, and Javier Bardem are now household names well beyond film circles in Madrid and Cannes); in cuisine (fashionable Spanish restaurants have opened for business not just in world capitals, but in a host of smaller cities across Europe and North America); and in architecture (celebrity architect Santiago Calatrava in 2001 debuted his first building in the U.S., the Quadracci Pavillion of the Milwaukee Museum of Art, and by 2005 his plans for what would be the nation's tallest building, the Fordham Spire on Chicago's lakefront, were already under serious consideration by city planners). With respect to literature as well, it is evident that readers outside of Spain are showing greater curiosity as to what has been going on of late in the Peninsular publishing industry. According to Andrés Amorós, by 1994 the Spanish publishing industry had become the fourth largest in the world in terms of the volume of its exports (68). Latin American and progressively more U.S. distributors--chiefly, but not exclusively, in metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and Chicago--have begun to market contemporary Peninsular novelists beside such commercial luminaries as Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez. In fact, an April 2005 article published in El País claims that some twenty million euros worth of books--primarily in the areas of literature and art--were exported from Spain to the U.S. in 2004. Moreover, a colossal 294 million euros of exports were recorded to other European Union nations that same year: a figure, perhaps surprisingly, which was over thirty percent higher than sales to Latin America. With specific regard to the United States, these trends will likely intensify as Spanish-speaking populations continue to grow, to find broader access to higher education, and to diversify readership profiles in American literary marketing. On the supply side, both the Instituto de Comercio Exterior and the Instituto Cervantes have pledged funding and promotional support to the project of expanding Peninsular authors' market share in the U.S. (Ruiz Mantilla 44). Recent Peninsular literature in translation is likewise in greater demand than historically has been the case. As Amorós notes, there seems to exist "un fenómeno internacional de enorme curiosidad por lo que está sucediendo en España"--to such an extent, in fact, that modern canonical greats like Galdós, Clarín, and Valle-Inclán "tuvieron que esperar, para ser traducidos, mucho más que Mendoza, Muñoz Molina, [y] Vázquez Montalbán" (68).
While some forty to fifty million annual tourists have long flocked to the sand and surf of Iberia's shores, it is apparent that international consumer tastes with respect to Spain have become considerably more refined in the past two decades. In Europe, Latin American, Japan, the United States, Canada, and elsewhere, consumers now regularly encounter and, indeed, seek out markets offering a host of cultural products (filmic, literary, culinary, musical, and otherwise) which bear a virtual label--a kind of fashionable, progressive, and cosmopolitan mark of European Union Spanishness, as it were. But on the flip side of the coin, the question arises: is the Spanish public conversely seeking out contact with the cultural production of other developed nations? That Spaniards are now inundated, just as their American, Australian, British, German, French, or Japanese counterparts in the global economy, by multinational products and trends in fashion, music, film, and consumer technology is self-evident to anyone familiar with day-to-day life in Spanish homes and on the street. Yet, with their recently attained status as first-world consumers, and at long last able to enjoy a palpable degree of economic comfort, have Spaniards settled into a worldview somewhat unmindful of culture and society beyond their own coasts and borders? On nearly all fronts, the answer seems to be a clear "no" (and this has been especially true in the wake of the Madrid bombings of 11 March 2004). The Spanish media has an exceptionally active and widespread foreign press corps, and, in recent years, increasingly affluent Spaniards have sought out foreign travel destinations for both business and pleasure with unparalleled frequency. (1) To cite some relevant anecdotal examples, Iberia Airlines now serves two dozen American metropolitan markets (www.iberia.com), and some 337 Spanish companies have set up business in the State of Florida alone. The presence of these firms contributes to the largest population of Spaniards--at roughly 20,000 strong--currently residing in any single U.S. state ("President"). Evidence also suggests that the presence of Spanish undergraduate and graduate students in the United States is on the rise; in 1999, some 4337 students from Spain were enrolled in American universities, an academic population ranking fifth among E.U. nations: just behind Germany, France, the U.K., and Sweden (Crowley). Many doctoral students from within this same population, in addition to others educated in Europe, have also gone on to find academic employment outside of Spain and, in particular, at North American research hospitals, laboratories, foundations, libraries, and universities.
In spite of this evidence of globalization, all of which points to an extraordinary and unprecedented exchange of cultural and intellectual capital, the reality reflected in much Peninsular fiction of recent years is just that: fundamentally Peninsular. With notable exceptions, of course, the contemporary Spanish novel tends to deal with homespun issues, is set in definitively Spanish settings, and is typically populated by native-born characters. (2) Perhaps all too rightfully, in the wake of decades of a program of cultural...
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