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Vanesa Rodríguez-Galindo, "Madrid on the Move: Feeling Modern and Visually Aware in the Nineteenth Century" (Manchester UP, 2021)
00:55:01
An interview with Vanesa Rodríguez-Galindo
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Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
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Christophe Benietz
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:03]
Christophe Benietz
Hello and welcome to New Books in History, part of the New Books Network. I'm your host, Christophe Benietz, and I have the pleasure of speaking with Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo about her new book, Madrid on the Feeling Modern and Visually aware in the 19th Century, recently published from Manchester University Press. Welcome, Professor Rodriguez.
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Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Good morning, Crystal. It's good to talk to you.
- [02:29]
Christophe Benietz
Pleasure is mine. Professor Rodriguez teaches courses on modern Europe and cultural History at Florida International University in Miami. She's a cultural and visual historian interested in urban studies, print cultures in Spain and Latin America, transnationalism and Women's Studies. She holds an MA in Metropolitan History from the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and a PhD in the history of art from UNED. UNED, the Universidad Nacional de Educacion Adi Stancia in Madrid. Her book examines visual culture, illustrated print media and urban identities in 19th century Spain. It explores what being modern meant to people in their day and lives and reframes urban modernity from a global perspective. So please tell me about your project and your thesis and what is a global perspective? Because that is a new term for me.
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Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Yeah, well, the book tells the story of modernity and visual culture in Madrid during the late 19th century. And it charts how journalists and commentators and graphic artists articulated the relationship between the local and the global across Madrid's visual cultures. I explore, like you mentioned, themes like urban change, metropolitan identities and modernization through illustrated print culture. What is illustrated print culture? So I mainly look at illustrated magazines, illustrated periodicals that were very popular in the period, but also other forms of print culture like maps, guidebooks, or even postcards and reproductions of early photography. And the key to understanding the subject of the book is in that very long subtitle you mentioned, feeling modern and visually aware in the 19th century. And that's what the book studies. That's what the book does. It answers that question. What did modern, what did being modern mean to people in Madrid in that period? And when I, when I began this research, almost I guess over 10 years ago now, I realized that terms like modern, modernity, modernization were not really in use in that period and they were not used in the same way that, that we use these terms today. And this is why I felt that it was, it was necessary to, to ask ourselves, what did being modern mean to people? Mean to people then?
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Christophe Benietz
And so, yeah, I was going to say, could you tell us, for the, for people who might not know how Madrid did change at this time? Is it like places like the United States or England where people came to cities to work in factories and, and stuff like that? Or can you tell us what Madrid was like at the, in this period?
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Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Yeah. So Madrid during this period. So from, we're Talking about the 19th century, from the mid-1850s to, to the, to the turn of, of the century. Urbanization, technological innovations and, and the development of a new mass culture, reproduce, especially what I'm looking at are reproductions of images. The combination of these, of these factors, of these shifts yield new forms of, of spectatorship, of urban spectatorship and experiencing city life. So during this period, like you said, Madrid was similar to two other. Two other cities in, for example, Britain or France, it underwent an urbanization process. So a process of urban reform and expansion that was very common in European capitals and main cities in the 19th century as a result of industrialization. So we see that on the one hand, and we also see a population growth, right? It's during this period that people began to migrate from other surrounding regions to two cities. And Madrid also underwent this. This process of urban expansion and migration. And that really changed the urban landscape of. Of Madrid. So on the one hand, we have this population growth that was the result of. Of immigration. So we had migrants from different. From different regions in Spain, mainly the north and, and the south. And this changed the landscape in different ways. For example, there were shanty towns that grew on the fringes of the city. And these were the. The migrants, the workers who were coming to the city to find work. And at the same time, so we have that kind of spontaneous expansion of the city, but also a planned expansion. Those are kind of like the two sides of the same coin of urban growth. Right. And as for the planned reform and planned expansion, from the 1850s in Madrid, there were different urban projects that resulted from advances in engineering and, and technology as well. So, for example, we have the Canal Isa Segunda that brought waters, water from the gentlemen to Madrid, or one of the most important urban projects of the time, which was the remodeling of the Puerto del Sol, which is a central focal point in Madrid. Other urban projects included the Encante. Enchante means widening or growth. And that was a. A planned, an urban plan that was intended to expand the city in order to accommodate the growing middle and upper classes to residential neighborhoods near the city center. And this, in this way, the, the center that was. That was pretty congested at the time there would be. The idea was to free up that space. So this process of urbanization that occurred in Madrid in this period, it wasn't really significant in terms of. It wasn't unique. Other cities in Europe were going through the same process.
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Christophe Benietz
That really helps. Thank you for answering that. So you mentioned mass culture. Tell us a bit about the mass culture and who arranged it, or was it spontaneous and what were its aims and how did it look?
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Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Yeah, so when we think about mass culture, it's a term we use a lot nowadays, right? We think of mass culture, we think of television or cinema, or maybe now we think of the Internet and other entertainment platforms. But in the 19th century, we have this new form of mass culture, early mass culture. We could say that Is the illustrated press or the illustrated, let's say illustrated print media really. So there were technological advances in the printing industry that allowed for images and reproductions of images and words to be printed on the same page. And this really led to a growth in the print industry. And there were several illustrated magazines and satirical periodicals in Madrid in the late 19th century. And so along with this popularity of the printed image on paper, there were also other forms of printed images like pamphlets, broadsheets, posters. And these became very much linked to. To urban life. These images circulated within the capital. And not only that, many of these illustrations in magazines and as well as in other forms of print culture, they. They focused on the city and on city life. And in many ways, reproduced images and city life became tied. Tied to each other. It's also during this period that, that the. The law even contemplated just how powerful images had been become. They were almost as powerful as. As the printed word, even. So they kind of. They gained the status. Not so much of. They were considered artworks to a degree, but they gained the status of a vehicle of visual communication. So their informative nature was. Was emphasized. And in this sense, even as I said before what the. The law even contemplated, the need to regulate these images because. Because they. They were evolving and because they were. They were circulating within the public sphere.
- [11:36]
Christophe Benietz
Well, your book is a history of printed media. It's also a wonderful example of printed media itself. And it shows many of the changes on. Of the time on the page. So what were some of the messages, perhaps, if that's the right word or themes or what is the spirit of the kind of things people might read for the first time in the late 19th century?
- [12:01]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Yeah, well, depending. There were. There were different types of. Of periodicals. Right. So there were these lavish illustrated magazines that contained reproduction sometimes of artworks or of city views. And then we have. There are a lot of satirical. Satirical papers that were kind of a precursor to the comic strip. So these included vignettes, caricatures of social types of city scenes that were meant to be funny. So the kind of messages, for example, that we see in these illustrated periodicals is there's this idea of wanting to bring images of the world to the reader. So. So, for example, panoramic views in illustrated papers were really important. You can see in Madrid's illustrated papers panoramic views of Madrid, but also of other cities. And this interest in the panoramic view was very much the result of certain ideas regarding city space in the 19th century and New forms of visual spectatorship and even past Times like there were panoramas or cosmoramas. So there were different types of visual entertainment at the time and the press reflected that. So there were panoramic views that also allowed the reader to come to terms with this evolving cityscape and see images of both their city and other cities from, you could say, you know, the comfort of their, of their own room. And that was something new. This idea of bringing the world to the reader was, was a novelty. And in many ways editors, they capitalized on that. They knew that, you know, that was something that, that, that, that sold that, that readers wanted to see, they wanted to see these images of, of faraway places. So that's one of the, the messages. And we see that especially in the, for example, in the first issues of some illustrated papers they had kind of, the editors wrote a sort of a declaration of intent where they, you know, spoke of how important attracting the reader's eyes was to, to appeal to their eye. And they did this through images. So that's one of the messages that we, that we see. And then in Madrid's satirical press there was this, there was this because it was geared to. Well, the target was to make readers laugh really. So these kind of magazines focused more on modernization as well, but at the humoristic instances that could appear in public space. And these magazines were very much focused on interactions between men, between women in public space.
- [15:09]
Christophe Benietz
Who, who would read this? Would this be something for a urban and urbane professional or shop owner kind of person? Or would somebody, a factory worker in a shanty town look at these illustrations too? Does it democratize the mass culture?
- [15:27]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Yeah, I would say these magazines, they were, they were mainly geared towards a middle class, middle upper class readership, a growing middle class readership. The Satir Lyrical magazines and middle upper class readership. However, it is true that we also see through in novels of the period how people of the popular classes were also using these, these illustrations that they could cut illustrations from newspapers or even prints and they would use these to decorate their, you know, their barren walls. We don't have documents of, of that. We don't have documents of, you know, the quarters where, where workers lived. But there are accounts in novels that show that the popular classes also had access to these, to these images in different ways. Of course.
- [16:23]
Christophe Benietz
You had an illustration that I remember noticing in your discussion about this new central space, the Puerta del Sol, and it was called from 1876. And it shows sort of this idea of many different social classes mixed sing together in the public square, in the central plaza of the city. And I remember, like, that was 1876. And I compared it back to looking at, like, a Gustav Caillebot rainy cityscape in the exact same time in Paris, where I kind of saw, like, people in top hats with umbrellas walking around. But I didn't see them mixing with the. With the commoners that much. And, you know, I don't know much about art history myself, but I had this feeling that there was a. A social mixing in this print. So I could be mistaken, but is that a fair guess?
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Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Yeah, it is. It does show that. Yeah, I know the. The illustration you're talking about. And it is. It is quite striking visually, because it shows the. I think it's Porta del Sol or something like that. So, you know, as the sun sets, which comes to say, when everyone is taking a walk, right? When everyone is going for a str. So what that illustrator did was show everyone going for a stroll. So you have different social classes, people being bad men in top hats, also women wearing mantillas. So all these indicators of different social class. Women walking together with the chaperone, others walking alone, possibly going. Walking home after a day of work. So the image is. It does romanticize, to a degree, that time of the day and what the square looked like. But I think what the illustrator was also trying to do was to give readers an image of the city, of the square in one single glance. And that's an important aspect to keep in mind when we think about illustrators during this period. They were artists, but they were also reporters. They were also graphic reporters. And there was a discussion in the press regarding to what degree what they drew was real and how real. How real it should be. We have to think that although photography. There are already several photographic studios in Madrid at this time, but photography could not yet really capture the kind of rapid movement that that illustrator, the hustle and bustle that illustrator was trying to draw. And so illustrators, their work remained important because they seemed. Many people, especially in these illustrated papers, editors believed that they were capturing a summary of reality, which is what that illustration is kind of, you know, trying to do, to capture all these social classes. Maybe they weren't in the square at that specific time, but they were transiting through that square. And that's what that illustration depicts. But at the same time, there was a debate about the Puerto del Sol, because in spite of the expansion that we talked about earlier, how you remember how the city. There were certain urbanization projects meant to empty the central areas, like Portales despite that, many people continued to walk through the square. There were businesses there and it continued to be a focal point within the city. And urban commentators or urban planners, they drew attention to this. That image also, it reflects that kind of the difference between practice space and plan space, right? One thing is what urban planners intend to do with their plans and something very different is what people actually end up doing, how they practice that space. So I think that image also, it also points to those two ways of living in a place, right?
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- [21:45]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
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- [22:25]
Christophe Benietz
Is it to be seen and to see and to just see what's going on? And are these people, especially the new immigrants to the big city, would they feel like they were madrileno or Would they feel like they were, you know, outsiders visiting or something like that?
- [22:44]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Yeah, I think definitely. Just the whole idea of seeing and being seen is fundamental in the 19th century and at a time when strolling becomes a pastime and a social necessity as well. So that illustration also, it also considers that aspect of seeing, of being seen, and whether these newcomers to Madrid, did they feel that they were Madrid? I'm not. I'm not sure about that. I don't know if I have the answer to that question, but I would say that the local identity of Madrid at that time was very much informed by these migrants coming to the city. Maybe. Perhaps the perception of local identity today in Madrid has been very much shaped by those immigrants who came in that period of time. And we see in the press there are a lot of references to two workers who came from Asturias or from Galicia and how they, you know, the kind of jobs that they carried out in the city. So there were references to that, how this new social fabric that was. That was shaping the city.
- [24:09]
Christophe Benietz
You'll also explain the spirit of walking, of intentional wandering, the flaneur, or pasayante flanayar. Would you explain what is the. What you call on 134 Gastronomia de los Ojos, what's going on? And what is the spirit of walking around in the evening?
- [24:34]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Yeah, so, yeah, I spend a lot of time talking about walking.
- [24:38]
Christophe Benietz
Right.
- [24:38]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Strolling. Yes, it's something. It's something I like to do. So this whole theme of strolling, there's an archetype, a social type that you mentioned, the flaneur. He's a French archetype, and the flaneur was someone who walked the city and experienced urban life. And this figure was. Was. Was really developed by Bordelier, and. And he has a lot of influence in. In art history and material culture and urban history. And what the. What makes the flaner different from, say, the regular stroller is that he is anonymous in the crowd and that these. That, you know, he takes in his surroundings as a gastronomia de los ojos. As, you know, these visual stimuli become kind of like food for his. For his eyes. Right. And this. This model of flaneur has been contested by historians, by art historians. But what it does do is put. Put the, you know, the focus on this idea of walking and of really, you know, taking things in with your eyes. And what I realized was that in. In this. In Spain, there was this debate about the flaner and how he. How this person was different to, you know, Other forms of walking that already existed in Spain, like pasiar or callejer. And so we see this discussion about the, you know, some journalists are saying, do we need this new word? Is it different from the words that we already have? So they began to manipulate the word and say, well, it is different, so let's call it flaneard. So they, they, they Hispanicized the French term. And in the end, what, I mean, what that really, what they're really pointing to is that they, is that foreign influence was, was, was reaching Madrid in that time, but that there were also, there were already local practices in place that had to be considered. So this merging of the foreign and the local is, is very interesting. It's interesting to see how it played out and how journalists went about defining, defining that.
- [27:05]
Christophe Benietz
So that's a great topic too, of this top of, of your work. And it reminded me how much of the 19th century was very Franco centric, which is from a 21st century, you know, American point of view. Like, I forgot. Oh yeah, you talk about Paris's unrivaled presence in, in the culture. Tell us, tell us a bit about. Was everyone looking to France and Paris especially, and how did that play out for better or for worse, in, in the Madrid spirit, thought consciousness.
- [27:40]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Yeah, so you're right, France, it does, it pops up a lot in, in the book. And I think there are two reasons for that. On the one hand, France is in art history and in urban history, France and Paris especially, it's kind of seen as the benchmark of modernity because so many of these important cultural critics wrote about Paris and much of what we understand as modernity today is linked to Paris and probably artistic movements that we're all familiar with, like Impressionism. So I mean, when I started doing research on this, on this book, I thought, well, I need to situate Spain within that debate. Not so much to compare Madrid to Paris, but to acknowledge the influence of these authors on the work of historians on the one hand, but it's also important to, to see how 19th century people understood the influence of France on the other. So it's, you know, it's. On the one hand we see France is important in historiography, but when I started going to the sources, I saw that it was also, it was very important at the time. France was the urbanization process that occurred in France in the mid-1800s under Houseman was a model that or a reference at least for many other cities to follow. It was one of the first plans of planned demolition and construction. And and, and Spanish papers were looking towards France, looking to see how that developed and asking themselves if that would happen in Madrid as well. So what really caught my attention was that it wasn't so much that, that Spanish commentators were looking to imitate what was going on in Paris. Rather they were very aware of what was going on and they were asking themselves, well, what will happen here? How will that play out? Will we all end up being. Looking like Paris or will we, you know, will we do something else? To what degree do we need this level of, of new construction? So that's one of the reasons that, you know, France pops up, because of this model of urbanization that they're kind of exporting to in a way. And fashion, of course, and it's interesting to see that even other foreign fashions, like British fashion and British terms like anglicisms, they reach Spain through France. So that, that's the kind of, you know, circuit that, that existed at this, at this time. But that doesn't necessarily mean that we're talking about imitation.
- [30:26]
Christophe Benietz
Right.
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Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
It's more of a conscious awareness of these, of these processes and, and a creative resistance or assimilation sometimes. And which kind of ties in with what one of your earlier questions about, about, you know, what does global mean? Well, it's, it's, it's acknowledging, right, these global circuits, these, these flows between countries. That doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, we create homogeneous cultures, but there, there is this give and take. It's, it's a messy process of give and take, assimilation, resistance. And what is true is that when it comes to products and commodities, these things oftentimes they do follow, you know, capitalist circuits. We can't, sometimes we can't escape that the power of the market, you know, of what becomes popular fashion. But again, it's both the foreign and the local horses that kind of shaped mentalities and urban identities at that time in Madrid.
- [31:29]
Christophe Benietz
Yeah, and you call it a thorny subject. Do you think that people resented French influence or admired it or a little of both at the same time? And what, what would modernity be once you remove the French characteristics?
- [31:47]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
I was, I don't. That's a tough one, I would say. Yeah, that there was, there was some resistance there. I mean, there were proponents, there were detractors, but in the end, in the end, this was the window through which, you know, they were looking at the world. The influence was there. So what, what do, what do we do with it? And even if you do resist it, you're still responding to that influence in some way. You know, and if we take the French influence out of it, well, I don't know what would be. I don't know exactly what would be left, but that's, that's definitely another. Another question to ask for another book.
- [32:34]
Christophe Benietz
Fair enough. Fair enough. I'll ask you one more unfair question, and that's only because a few months ago I reread the Sun Also Rises, which is not in your period. It's from 1926, and it's very young, Ernest Hemingway's first book. And it's about an Anglo American coterie of decadent literary types who travel from Paris to go see a bullfight in San Sebastian in northern Spain. And what's interesting to me is how urbane and advanced their life in France is, not that, you know, and they sort of. They're. They're foreigners, they're English speakers. They kind of do whatever they want and then they go to Spain. And for him, it seemed to me, rereading this after a long time, that he. He was having a very romantic experience with sort of more quiet, more slow, more wild. And I don't want to say primitive, but that's the word I'm trying to avoid. Like Spain, like in its. In. In all the good senses, where you go fishing and you see bull fights and you sleep in the middle of the day because it's hot, and you drink wine out of wine skins instead of glasses and, and things like that. Is that sort of very Franco centric, very Anglo American idea that. That Spain is this romantic hideaway sort of backwater place with its, with all of its charms? Is that something that Spain is resisting at this time? Is that a thorny stereotype, you know, being. Being classified in that way already in the 19th century? Or is that just something he imposed in the 20th?
- [34:09]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Yeah, no, that's. That's really interesting, everything you said. And now it's true that there. This. This idea that Spain, you know. Yes, it is more primitive than its neighbors. I would say that it's not something that Hemingway just wrote, in fact, that it's this romantic idea of Spain was around for centuries before then even. And I read that book a long time ago. I read it in high school. But for me, it was fascinating to see how Hemingway depicted the Spanish, because as an American, I moved to Spanish, to Spain when I was 10 years old. So I was really interested, and I grew up between both countries, really, and I was really interested in seeing how Hemming. How a fellow American would depict, you know, Spaniards. And, And I was surprised by this romantic, romantic view of, of Spain with the bulls and all this. But at the same time, we have to say that this, this exists, right? These, these stereotypes, they, they, they become popular and they reach, they, you know, they, they have such reach because they, they do exist. So I think it's important to keep in mind that this romantic idea of, of Spain that Hemingway writes about was already present in, you know, 17, 18th, 19th century. Romantic travelers, they, they traveled throughout Spain, throughout the south. There was, there's even this book, an illustrated book by two French writers and illustrators, Doree and Davilier, called Biaje Bor Espana. And it was published in the 1860s. And for example, that book showed again, this romantic, this romantic view of Spain. And I think there are two important issues there, and the one is that, and you mentioned it, how these foreign imaginaries affected perceptions of Spanishness for Spaniards. Right? I don't talk about that in the book. There are other books that do a great job at explaining that. But what I do see is, and, and I do talk about this a bit. A bit is that there was an awareness of, you know, what others, what the, what other countries are saying about Spain. And I talk about a bit about this in the book how, you know, some editors were, they, they criticized the fact that foreign illustrated papers depicted a picture of, of modern Madrid, you know, like, as a place where, where there were bull fights and this sort of thing. So there was already in the late 19th century this awareness that, you know, we have, this is our reputation. To what degree is, is it fair? Is it not? And, and, and how do we. And another thing that springs to mind, this romantic view of Spain is the importance of myths, right? Of stereotypes, just how appealing they are, be it racial, ethnic, social typecasting and the importance of the romantic social type. It also reached the pages of illustrated print culture in Spain. And in the 19th century, even, you know, editors, they capitalized on this because it was something so easy to read. Right. And this was a mechanism to appeal to readers in Spain as well.
- [37:43]
Christophe Benietz
Thank you. I think that was a brilliant answer for a very unfair question. I'm going to ask you one that is fair. Would you describe what is costum brismo and how it connects to nostalgia?
- [37:56]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Yeah. So costumbrismo is, it's a, I talk about it in the book, in, in the last two chapters. And costumismo was a literary, a visual genre that became popular in the 19th century, and it wasn't unique to Spain. Costumurismo depicted social types. So Cuadros de costumbes, sketches of Moors. And this kind of literature existed across Europe with different names. So, for example, a costumerista collection would consist of an anthology, a book with different chapters and different types. So for example, with street vendors, a water carrier, a seamstress. And each chapter would contain a brief description and usually an image, a sketch of this social type. These became very popular in the 1840s and 1850s in Spain and France and Britain and also in the Americas in the later part of the century. So the reason costumurismo became important in the late 19th century is that it kind of. It created, I would say it was very much linked to mass culture. And as you mentioned, costumbismo is usually viewed as a. It's been viewed as a nostalgic, conservative view of the past. Right, because it was a bit nostalgic. It implied looking at the past, looking at a bygone past. But at the same time, this visual language of the social type was very easy to read and it was therefore used in the press. It had the ability to function as a visual language that was easily understood. And this is of course, one of the key traits of mass culture, of being able to reach different types of audiences. And costumarisma at the same time had, you know, intercultural qualities that we associate with mass culture today. It was across different types of media, it was in the press, but it was also in musical representations and photography even. And another important aspect about costume was that these kind of social types, because they were grounded in this visual language that could be found already in the late 18th century, readers were very familiar with this kind of visual nomenclature. With the different indicators that this is a social type, this person is. You could identify the person's profession. We see these types in different illustrated periodicals across Europe at the time. It's interesting to see that this visual, we could say international visual language was being created. And while someone in Madrid probably couldn't, you know, catch the nuances of a type straight type, in London, that person could tell that this was the language of custom bis, or the language of the social type.
- [41:29]
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Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
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Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
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Christophe Benietz
I got you serum moisturizer or moisturizer serum.
- [42:39]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Let's get into layering.
- [42:41]
Christophe Benietz
My concealer is making me look worse.
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- [43:00]
Christophe Benietz
So like somebody in Spain might be a Picaro, but in France he's a Gavroche and in New York he's some kind of, I don't know, like newspaper selling huckster kind of kid sort of. And that exists everywhere.
- [43:17]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Right? So those, those kind of. Yeah, those visual indicators that they, they, they existed across in, in, in, you know, in cities with, with these, with this tradition with the, with illustrated papers and this tradition of, of, of the social type. And I mean this is really, you know, when you talk about it referring to the 19th century, it sounds perhaps very scholarly. But it's still, it's still around today. Right. And what comes to my mind is a blog that was very popular around 10, I guess it was 10 years ago now called Humans of, of New York. And it was a photographer who went around the city of New York and captured photographic. He made photographic portraits of the different peoples of New York and posted them on this blog that became very, very popular. And these were types really. But he didn't caption them. And I think that's what made, makes the difference when you don't pigeonhole someone. But at the same time it became obvious to me that that kind of formula, that visual formula, portraits of people that I recognize that I identify certain things in their background, it's easy to read and it's still appealing to us even, even nowadays I could, I very.
- [44:37]
Christophe Benietz
Much see that is there is this a time where Spain thinks of itself as a global empire? Because I study Spain in the 16th century. And I think that the sort of ideas about Spain that people struggle against is the, is the black legend where all of Spain's imperial projects were decried by Protestant rivals. As with all the terrible things that we have probably tacked onto empire. Looking back now, and I think in this point of view from Spain is that that's unfair. Is that still the Spain we have at this moment where, where there are foreign possessions or have they all been taken away? And Spain is just a, is just a country.
- [45:20]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
At the period we're looking at is, it's right before 1898, so before the loss of, of the, of the last colony of Cuba, right, Which is a very dramatic moment in the history of Spain. So we're looking at that, you know, moment right before, right before then. And I think that part of, as you mentioned, as historians, part of what we look at in Spain and what, I mean, what I've, what I find in sources like the press is that Spain is to a degree it's both. And I read this by, in, in an article recently and I thought it really explained, explained it well, you know, the, the position we, you know, how, I mean, how we look at Spain sometimes is that it's both periphery and, and center, right? Spain viewed as, Views itself sometimes as periphery, peripheral in Europe, but it was also the center of an empire. So reconciling those two, you know, those, those two identities is, is still very much part of how we study Spain today. And in the, in, in the press, in the, in the illustrated papers and the illustrated print culture of the 19th century that, that I look at, I kind of see a, I would say a, A self, I don't know if I want to say self centered Madrid, but to a degree a city kind of trying to figure out where to position itself not so much in this, you know, in this transition between center and periphery or, but more trying to position itself as a, as a modern city, as a modern city within Europe. So very much looking at Europe at the time and also acknowledging this decline that was obviously, that was, that was coming to an end. Really.
- [47:16]
Christophe Benietz
That's so interesting. What are, what are some of the favorite things you discovered in this 10 year process? Or what are some of the things that surprised you in your research?
- [47:28]
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- [47:32]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
What really surprised me when I, when I, when I started doing this research 10 years ago was that, and I think I mentioned this earlier, but that these terms modernization and modernity that we talk about all the time in art history and in material, visual History and material culture, that they simply weren't common in that period. And it made me realize how sometimes what we write is anachronistic when we're using terms that mean something to us today, but they just didn't mean the same thing back then. So I think that's. And that's kind of how I departed on this, how the project departed, going back to. Not the origins of the term, but trying to see what, you know, what these terms meant to people then. And I realized that I didn't want to come to a conclusion to say Madrid is modern or Madrid is not modern. That's not what I wanted to do. I just wanted to see what. Tried to figure how cultural producers were defining and redefining meanings associated to novelty. So that's one thing that. That surprised me. It sounds very basic, right? This term wasn't in use, but that was a discovery to me. And I found it, for example, in fashion magazines that were geared towards women and edited by women, and they use this term to refer to modernizing, to updating their garments. So I thought that was quite interesting.
- [48:58]
Christophe Benietz
And they said modernizing.
- [49:00]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
They said modernizing. Yeah.
- [49:02]
Christophe Benietz
I guess, because that also has mode, right, Fashion in it.
- [49:06]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Yeah, yeah. And it showed me that. I mean, it really shows that the way we think about modernized was obviously not when they thought about modernizing. It was really using something that you had and to try to refigure it and do something else with it. So that was something interesting that I saw Another. Another discovery. I'm not sure it's a discovery really, but that I found was when I started this research, I was looking at the papers, physically going to the archive and looking at the papers going through microfilm. And it took a long time. That's how we did research not so long ago. And in the period of time I was doing reading and compiling, doing word searches and compiling my own, you know, databases. And. And in that fraction of time, towards the end of the. Of my research, many of these periodicals became digitized. So it really. I mean, from, you know, doing this painstaking kind of archival work to finding all this on. To finding all these sources online, I kind of lived through that, you know, through that shift throughout the research. And that was. It's. It's good and bad. Right, because it makes you go back, you rethink what you. The work you've done so far, and you realize how much more you could have done had you had access to all. To all that information. So I'd say those are two. Those are those Are the two, the, the two aspects that come to mind?
- [50:47]
Christophe Benietz
Well, it might be better that we don't because, you know, a book is never finished. It's only abandoned and at some point you have to, you have to stop it.
- [50:56]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Yeah.
- [50:57]
Christophe Benietz
So what's, what's, what's next for you? What kind of other projects are, do you have in your, in your mind and in your heart?
- [51:04]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Yes. So I, building on, on the book, I, I just finished a, a piece on, on, on the term high life, which I talk a bit about it in the book, but I expanded that research and I'm really interested in how these terms, you know, how they traveled across different countries, across national and cultural borders. So I'm looking at that term high life and how it was used in Spain, but also in France again in Britain and Even in the U.S. i'm sure, you know, if our listeners drink beer, I drink beer. Highlight beer is, is an American type of beer. So that, and that we only drink.
- [51:52]
Christophe Benietz
Cruz Campo from Seville. That's all we drink.
- [51:57]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Yeah, Highlight became, It was a 19th century marketing term anyway, so that's something I'm looking at and, and I've found it to be fascinating really just to, you know, to look at the, the, the, the different connections that, that exist between, between different cities in the 19th century and, and another project I'm working on is, is postcards which I also touch upon in the book. I, you know, when I was doing the research, I gathered all these postcards and I couldn't, you know, they couldn't be part of the book. It was just too much. But I, I put it on the back burner and, and that's my second, you know, main research project now. Collections of, of postcards. So I'll be looking at similar themes but, but this very fun media that, you know, that these were images that people could touch, they could manipulate, they could write on, they could collect, they could put on their walls. So kind of like the, some people think the, the Instagram of, of the time they became a postcards were a fashion, they became collecting them, became a trend, exchanging them. So I think there are lots of similarities with, with our, you know, how we, how we look at digital images today. And, and I feel that any, you know, in order to be enthused by a research project, it has to connect with our, with our present concerns in some way. So that's my second, that's my second project there.
- [53:24]
Christophe Benietz
Do you, do you have feelings about whether this is lost to us or whether it's alive and well, for example, you are in Chile. I am in California. Last time we spoke, you were in Florida. Two days ago, I interviewed a guy in Hungary, so I'm very local. But on the other hand, I don't feel like I go for walks to look at people, or at least I haven't since I was in college. Sometimes I go. My wife and I go and eat and we look at people. Or sometimes I go to a farmer's market and I see some people. But is this lost or is it fine in the digital age, or you have any feelings?
- [53:59]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
I think nothing. Nothing beats social interaction. Maybe I shouldn't say this. I should not. Not. You know, we. Now we live with. With COVID Yeah. Yeah. So that's another thing that's changed, right? Yeah. But I. I guess I think we need to continue. I think people watching is. It's not only entertaining, but it also. It gives you a sense of belonging. Right. Of kind of knowing how you relate to other people and learning about our environments and how different people interact with their surroundings. But at the same time, we can't escape the power of the Internet of being able to. You're in California, I'm in Chile. Being able to do that is just amazing. In a way, it reminds me of the 19th century when, you know, people were talking about, what do we do with these images? How do we regulate these images? They're traveling from Madrid to Paris and we can't control them. I think we feel kind of that way now. Right. How can we control this immense public space that we have? I don't know. I guess we'll just figure it out. Everyone does at the end.
- [55:18]
Christophe Benietz
That's a very good point. We talk about the same thing in the 16th century with the printing press. And then look at this. This out of control. And look at this Protestant Reformation, and look at this. And I think we're at the very beginning of the technology. And I'm sure many people will write dissertations about this time.
- [55:37]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Absolutely they will.
- [55:40]
Christophe Benietz
Is there anything else we should talk about that I have forgotten?
- [55:45]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
No, I think you. I think you covered a lot. It was a great conversation.
- [55:49]
Christophe Benietz
Yeah. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Vanessa, for this. This very interesting book and for our listeners, a book that really. It's really nice to look at. It's. It's an. It's a very illustrated book because it's about print culture. And it's a delightful, delightful read. Full of expert knowledge, but very available to the generalist. And thank you so much for being part of New Books Network.
- [56:14]
Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Thank you. Christoph.
- [56:28]
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Christophe Benietz
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Professor Vanessa Rodriguez Galindo
Individual start.
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