“More Than a Trip”: Memory, Mobility, and Space in Un Franco, 14 Pesetas (2004)

Authors

  • Araceli Masterson-Algar University of Kansas

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/konturen.11.0.4821

Abstract

In Un Franco, 14 Pesetas (2004), Carlos Iglesias tells the story of Spanish migration to Central Europe during the 1960s through a fictional remembering of his family’s years as immigrants to Uzwil, in the Swiss eastern province of Toggenburg. His memories of the Swiss landscape, luminous, green, and open contrast with a grim, grey and enclosed Madrid, both origin and end of the six-year journey. This essay explores the interrelation between memory, space, and human mobility in Un Franco, 14 Pesetas. Through a journey of migration to Switzerland, Iglesias tells a story of return to Madrid, and unveils the contradictions of Spain’s so-called ‘economic miracle’ of the 1960s. Merging experiences of arrival and departure, presents and pasts, Iglesias’s film shows how immigration is rooted in space, and inseparable from economic, political and social processes that are historically specific.

Author Biography

Araceli Masterson-Algar, University of Kansas

Araceli Masterson-Algar is Associate Professor at the University of Kansas. She works on the intersection of urban cultural studies and human mobility. Her published research is largely on Ecuador-Spain migration dynamics, and specifically on the ties between transnational social processes, cultural production, and urban planning in both Quito and Madrid. Araceli has authored Ecuadorians in Madrid: Migrants Place in Urban History (Palgrave 2016), and co-edited ‘Migrant Deaths in the Arizona Desert: La Vida no Vale Nada (University of Arizona Press, 2016). She is Associate Editor of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies.

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Published

2020-12-09

How to Cite

Masterson-Algar, A. (2020). “More Than a Trip”: Memory, Mobility, and Space in Un Franco, 14 Pesetas (2004). Konturen, 11, 100–127. https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/konturen.11.0.4821