A common obstacle to effective sports writing is the challenge of capturing the excitement of the live moment as it unfolds on pitch, field, or court. The burst of emotion of the mass sports spectacle is easily lost when an author attempts to translate the experience to textual narration. In his 2016 short story collection, Once goles y la vida mientras (Eleven Goals and Life Goes On), the Spanish journalist and author Pablo Santiago Chiquero approaches this tricky literary terrain through an intimate examination of the personal power of soccer in everyday lives. By focusing on one particular historical football goal in each of his stories, Santiago Chiquero subtly examines the multiple facets of personal, collective, and counter-factual memory. The goals, dating from 1983 to 2013, serve as pretext for exploring why sport has been both criticised and celebrated as an “escape valve” for contemporary society. Santiago Chiquero’s stories demonstrate how a public event, such as a soccer goal, transcends the time and place of its occurrence and is recreated in personal memories in ways that both alleviate and enhance individual joy and suffering.
This article examines cinematic representations of the vast rural-to-urban migration that affected Spain in the 1950s. Madrid, which began its time as capital of Franco’s Spain as a city that had to be purged of its sins, became crucial to the hierarchical, centralized control of the nation, and thus was prioritized over the countryside and provincial capitals. As a result, the segmented, ordered space of Madrid’s urban planning was quickly overwhelmed by the number of arriving migrants who moved from the periphery of the nation to the periphery of the capital. Two films from opposite ends of the decade and of the political spectrum, José Antonio Nieves Conde’s Surcos/Furrows (Nieves Conde 1951) and Carlos Saura’s Los golfos/The Delinquents (), highlight the plight of both recent and more-established migrants to Madrid. The methods that the characters in these films use to gain access to the centre of Spanish social imaginary (i.e., crime and spectacle) are doomed to failure because they are inherently marginal activities. The films frame their protagonists’ movement through urban space to show that the economic modernization of the Franco regime in the 1950s failed to live up to expectations for improving the social well-being of the city’s inhabitants.
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