Strangers in a Strange House: Spanish Youth, Urban Dystopia, and Care Santos’s Okupada

Young Spaniards embody the nation‘s exuberance and freedoms in their renowned and at times infamous nightlife, and they are a highly educated and diverse workforce that represents the nation‘s future as an integrated European democracy with a market-driven economy. And while Spain does have the youngest population in Europe at the close of the 1990s (Allinson 265), the image of youth as a representative culture for contemporary Spain belies the demoralizing social and economic problems that Spanish youth face following the 1992 recession. Despite years invested in university educations and advanced degrees, young Spaniards face a frustratingly high unemployment rate, which at times reaches 30% (Rodríguez 21), and a dispiritingly impenetrable labor market without the ―enchufe‖ of nepotism. Spain has one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe among university graduates (Sánchez Juárez 33) and only 40% of those graduates hold jobs that reflect their level of studies and training, a disparity that for many young people that devalues higher education (Jiménez Barca). Those young people that do find employment lament the lack of equitable salaries as they face a de facto earnings glass ceiling of 1,000 Euros per month. This generation of ―mileuristas‖ express uncertainty about their future, a weariness of living day to day on limited incomes, and a disillusion with government to produce meaningful change. Moreover skyrocketing urban housing prices and the burden of a mortgage on limited incomes curb youth‘s emancipation from the family household until well into their thirties. Despite youth‘s continued cohabitation with their parents, ties to family are straining. Once glorified as a prototypical national institution under Franco, the contemporary Spanish family is fractured by divorce, parents‘ increasing time commitments to career responsibilities, and youth‘s desires for increased autonomy (Jones 388-90). The economic and labor realities that prevent young people from establishing independent lives for themselves bode poorly for the future of the family and indeed for the population in general considering Spain‘s steadily declining birth rates. The duality of the image of Spanish youth—as a vibrant national symbol and as a stagnating underclass—sets the stage for its problematic representation in literature.