In February 1981 I was a graduate student at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. 

It was an interesting time to be in Spain; the dictator Francisco Franco had finally died at the end of 1975, and after 40 years of suppression the country was quickly catching up to the rest of the modern world in things cultural and political. Of course the police, the army, and the hierarchy of the Catholic church, who had all helped Franco keep a lid on things, were not at all happy to watch the modernization process. The freedom of expression in the arts and the press, the creation of a constitution, the legalization of labor unions and political parties, including the Spanish Communist Party, the loosening of the centralist government and recognition of regional differences, and granting limited powers to the regional governments, all made the old hard-liners nervous. The increased activity of the Basque separatists, and the fact that the new King was booed and hissed on a recent visit to the Basque city of Gernika made the hard-liners angry.

I followed all of this from the “inside”.  Although I was in a Spanish University program with foreign students, mostly European and African, my real window on the culture was the fonda where I lived, a sort of rooming house that occupied the fourth and fifth floors of a building on a street named calle Princesa, an extension of the Gran Vía that leads to the area known as the Ciudad Universitaria, the university complex. My companions were students from all over Spain, and I had two roommates from León and Avila. Gerardo was studying English Philology, but he was always ready to slip out for a beer or a coffee. I do not know if he ever finished school; in early ‘82 he stopped going to class, blew all his rent money on lottery tickets, and got thrown out of the fonda. Maricio, from a tiny village in Avila, was a very serious student majoring in agricultural engineering. He went home on weekends to help on the family farm, and often brought back some good food made by his mother. Mauricio always studied and we were only able to get him out for a cup of coffee once or twice. Another boarder named Pedro Carrasco from Córdoba, a journalism major, was always ready to hit the street with us after dinner, served at 10 p.m. as is typical in Madrid. 

In Madrid the techno-pop music of a group called Mecano was popular, the early films of Pedro Almodóvar were shown at the Alphaville Cinema, and pasotas were seen everywhere. They were “hippies” of a sort, 10 years behind the rest of the world’s hippies and of a very definite Spanish “flavor”. Mostly they smoked hash and hung around the Malasaña neighborhood, adding some local color and causing the old conservatives to complain about their lack of shame and patriotism. About every other weekend I traveled up to the Basque country, which was much more politicized, and where Punk Rock was becoming popular.