4 - The Second Generation: Disappearing from the Map? Xesús Fraga, Xelís de Toro, Almudena Solana

Summary

I argued in the previous chapter that the works of Díaz Pardo and Durán, emerging out of the crisis point of transition from dictatorship to democracy, establish a set of geopoetical co-ordinates and reading strategies that bind London into the fictional foundation and geographical imaginary of modern Galicia. In this chapter, I investigate how these co-ordinates are transformed as they are passed down to subsequent generations of migrants for whom the memory of the crisis is distant, its traces barely legible. We saw how the continued reverberation of the foundational moment is captured by Manuel Rivas in A man dos paíños/La mano del emigrante, written at two decades’ remove from the crisis, but still intimately marked by it. The texts I am looking at in this chapter are written two, even three decades into democracy, and their perspective is not that of the original postwar migrants, like Díaz Pardo's Carmela, Durán's Fermín and Lucrecia or Rivas's Castro, but rather of those carried along in their wake. Each is voiced by a protagonist who migrated as a child: Xesús, the narrator of Xesús Fraga's short story collection A–Z (2003), was born in London, but returned within a few years to Galicia, while the protagonists of Xelís de Toro's teen novel Os saltimbanquis no paraíso (Jugglers in Paradise, 1999) and Almudena Solana's Spanish-language novel Las mujeres inglesas destrozan los tacones al andar (English Women Ruin their Heels Walking, 2007) left Galicia as children and have lived in London ever since.