Word: spaining
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...long ago, Lorena Dominguez looked forward to the future. She had a well-paid job at the Citroën automobile factory in Vigo, the town in northern Spain where she had grown up. She had recently moved in with her boyfriend Oscar, and had put her own apartment on the market. The two spent their weekends hanging out with friends in Vigo's lively waterfront cafés and were planning to travel this summer. It wasn't a bad life for the 23-year-old daughter of a longshoreman and a housewife...
Call it Generation Disappointment. As the recession tightens across Europe, the young are hurting disproportionately. Nowhere is that more obvious than in Spain where unemployment in the general population runs to more than 17% and one in three people younger than 25 is out of work. Many have no frame of reference for what is happening; they grew up with two decades of strong economic growth and the optimistic assumption that they would be better off than their parents, just as their parents did better than the generation before them. The realization that Nikes, Wiis and cell phones...
Until recently, Spain was one of the European Union's great success stories. In 1992, Spain's per capita GDP was 70% of the E.U. average; by 2006 it was 90% of that of the 15 pre-2004 members. Growth helped cut unemployment, which had hovered near 20% for decades, to 8.3% in 2007, and drew hundreds of thousands of immigrants to a country that had, in the '50s and '60s, sent its own desperate citizens abroad. (Read: "Bitter Harvest in Spain's Olive Country...
...dictatorship receded, new generations born under democracy embraced rising expectations, both material (by 2007, 81% of families owned their own home and 21% had a second one) and professional. "That was the major social change of the transition," says Cristina Bermejo, director of youth issues for the Workers' Commission, Spain's largest union. "Illiteracy had been a big problem in Spain since the civil war. But in the '70s and '80s, there was a reaction against it. Suddenly everyone, even factory workers, expected their kids to go to university and do better than they...
...idea of the changes that occurred in Spain, it's worth taking a look at Vigo, a city of 300,000 in the northwestern region of Galicia. Unlike other Spanish cities with their booming tourism and service industries, Vigo is proudly working class. But even here, on the docks and in the factories, the past few decades have brought unprecedented prosperity...