Lower-class girl aspires to write

"If I use the first person plural it's because the genealogy of the daughters of the Spanish periphery isn't writing itself," says journalist Noelia Ramírez (Esplugues de Llobregat, 1982) in Nobody was expecting me here, which is subtitled Notes on social declassingAnd she cites, among others, the Madrid native Alana S. Portero and its excellent The bad habitBecause this genealogy is being written by authors from lower classes who offer us their life stories, whether autobiographical or fictional, always rooted in reality.

When Ramírez—whose surname already betrays her immigrant origins, and with great pride—was a teenager, she dreamed of working sitting down, which meant not doing dirty work. Her father worked in a factory, and her mother, who valued economic independence and told her never to depend on a man, did jobs in the upscale area of ​​Barcelona. Hers is one of the many stories of "daughters of the green awnings of the outskirts and of Francoist 'developmentalism.'" Young women who are the first in their families to attend university and who access jobs their ancestors could never have dreamed of.

The declassing, a round trip

In recent years, his testimony has been enriching our literature; this living organism expands as the voices multiply. Finally, there are those who can give voice to those who have never had one. Ramírez reads Brigitte Vasallo —who champions the children of immigrants, the "charnegos"—and explains that, unlikeAnnie ErnauxShe doesn't write to avenge her race. "My trajectory as an intruder in a sphere that didn't seem made for my kind could be seen as class betrayal, but I've learned to see downward mobility as a round trip."

Drawing on her cultural references, she denounces the trap of social mobility through educational effort and the deception of meritocracy. She tells us about her attempts to assimilate at university, with classmates from diverse backgrounds who read Bukowski and watched Korean films. This is the same thing that happens, incidentally, to the protagonist of Ready, beautiful, clean, ofAnna Pacheco, one of the first books on this topic. It tells us that people who move in environments that don't naturally belong to them are forced to display extra charisma. A mechanism similar to the double effort women must make to reach the same places as men, but with a class dimension.

The author also experiences the feeling of imposture that Sara Ahmed speaks of, the moments of humiliation, and the ability to turn anger around: "Every time I've felt humiliated because of my origins has served to build me up," she writes. "From this anger and powerlessness, she creates them, from those done to me, from this. It has been a thought, writing this text made with raw emotion and somewhat as a form of catharsis. There are even moments when Ramírez, through her tone, evokes the King Kong Theory of Virginie Expensesbecause it reaches us and moves us.

Nobody was expecting me here It is a book that redefines social declassing and, likewise, demonstrates the right to write after learning to read "without books or stories like ours." But it is also a book about mourning the death of a mother from cancer. A mother who never went to school, who considered the kitchen her sanctuary, and who worked tirelessly so that she could one day publish this book.