Cuarentena: Stories from Spain

March 9 th -14 th By Monday the 9 th , these early local warnings were seeping into “cancellations”.   First, a field trip for our 10 year old daughter on Wednesday the 11 th was postponed to June.   The trip included meeting students of another Montessori school in Valencia- which was seeing many more cases of coronavirus.   Next a “family in nature” day planting trees at our son’s high school,   scheduled for the 14 th is cancelled.   The trip was to a rural area, other than the bus, mostly outdoors, we weren’t quite sure it made sense to cancel, and we only understood later the risk factor of the bus ride.   Nonetheless, I had a medium size work meeting (30-50 people) on Wednesday from different work sites, this was not postponed.   I was going to get my bread and coffee, but much more attentive to whether the snack I ate had been on display long, where I put my lips on the coffee mug…etc.   the corona nerves were be...

March 8 th , 2020, In the midst of a large lunch at the affordable, though hurried, Basque restaurant in Zaragoza (Itziar),   I can see the news to my right.   Sitting there with my kids, and extended family, most of the meal is occupied by making sure everyone has their dish, has the portions cut right so as to ingest them properly, and eating quick enough before the waiters diced we’ve had enough time on that course!   We can’t here the news, but we see maps of Italy with huge swaths of the North of the country in red, and headlines below stating something to the effect of “16 million under confinement”.   Though serious, the news still felt far away, that this was something we did not need to worry about in a concrete way here.   I messaged with my cousins in Northern Italy to see how they were.   Other than staying at home they seemed fine, except the one in Milano where the situation was more dramatic. As the week between ...

These posts are a series of notes about the evolution of the coronavirus crisis form the vantage point of the goings on in Zaragoza, Spain.   As Spain becomes one of the centerpieces of this crisis for the moment (mid-March 2020) and one of the countries   of the EU to be hit the hardest (after Italy), we decided to take some notes on how this process unfolds ,especially with quarantine.   The idea is simple and limited.   A series of ethnographic style notes, when regular ethnography becomes difficult.   Trying to take notes on the forms of existence, on experiencing a “crisis” that feel distant and close, on reconciling peaceful moments with the family with concerns for relatives far away, on being socially and geographically isolated, yet bombarded incessantly with digital images, messages, requests, news, etc.   On new forms of sociality (and its lack) that merge in this place in this context. We have sense, as do many other people of course, that...