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Jesus del Pozo – literally “Jesus of the Well,” and it’s his real name, to boot – has been blessed in recent times.
In 1988, the designer was awarded the Cristobal Balenciaga Prize by the Spanish government as Best Spanish Designer of the Year.
Last summer, he was one of three designers selected by Gruppo Finanziaria Tessile to launch its Neomode line.
In his first season in the United States under GFT distribution, his line was sold to Bloomingdale’s, Bagutta and Riding High, New York; Jordan’s, Seattle; Number 5, Provincetown, Mass.; Fred Segal, Santa Monica, Calif.; Shauna Stein, Culver City, Calif.; Buffalo, Tarzana, Calif., and Riccardi in Boston.
In Spain, Del Pozo is in the fashion forefront of a country so often described as hot that you expect to see smoke rising from his studio on Calle Almiranta, the same Madrid street where he was born and raised.
He’s being compared with Sybilla by the fashion press here, who suggest that del Pozo just might be the next avant-garde supernova to come shooting out of Spain.
Del Pozo shrugs off the comparisons. “We’ve both been around for a while,” he says noncommittally, though clearly he’s not distressed to be mentioned in the same breath as Sybilla Sorondo.
Sybilla, born in New York of Spanish parents 26 years ago, burst on the Spanish fashion scene with her first collection seven years ago. She won the first Balenciaga prize (for Best New Designer) in 1987, her reputation soared and she has been propelled out of Spain to Italy, where she now manufacturers and shows.
Her rapid trajectory from a Madrid studio to the international scene has inspired a whole generation of designers here.
Del Pozo has been around longer, beginning with a small men’s collection 15 years ago. He started designing for women, and little by little his men’s collection became vestigial and his women’s styles sprouted wings.
Trained in interior and furniture design, he is noted for his architectonic clothing, playing with line and volume for results that are simultaneously new wave and intensely feminine.
When he won the Balenciaga prize, his passion for the architectural possibilities of an excellent cut in a beautiful fabric prompted some fashion writers to compare him with Balenciaga himself, the greatest of all Spanish fashion heroes.
He describes himself as “very Castilian, austere, not at all baroque as the French can be,” adding, “I’m not interested in spangles, but in structure and volumes.”
“I always design with the same woman in mind,” he says, a woman he once described in a Madrid newspaper as someone “who is sure of herself, who has fought and had her own revolution.”
“This woman has to be many different things during the day. A good executive in the morning, a genuine lady at the table and a hot-blooded lover with her husband.”
This image of the superwoman who combines brains and sex appeal – not to mention good manners – has appealed to some of the best-dressed women in Spain, including elegant singer-actress Ana Belen, known for her serious roles and political commitment.
Although sales are still small – $3 million last year, according to Emma Fernandez, del Pozo’s sales manager – the designer gained an advantage over his competitors three years ago when Cedora SA began manufacturing and distributing his designs in Spain and the rest of Europe.
Del Pozo’s relationship with Cedora has allowed him to concentrate on what he does best and gives the economic freedom to experiment.
“Before Cedora, if I wanted to experiment, I couldn’t afford to waste 20 meters of silk. Now I work with a different point of view and in a more relaxed way.”
Of GFT, he says, “I hope the only thing that will change is that I will be able to do everything better. It will make everything easier so that I can concentrate on designing.”
Cedora continues to produce the line with GFT, taking on U.S. distribution through its Neomode line. “Our U.S. contacts were a bit timid last season (for spring),” says Fernandez, explaining that the agreement with GFT took some time to be signed and so sales of the spring collection were “a trial run” for the potential represented by the U.S. market.
“We are very satisfied with the response,” says Pablo de Echevarria-Navarro, director of Neomode in New York, noting that the goal was to promote del Pozo’s name rather than get big sales. With GFT acting as marketing representative in the U.S. and “nurturing” the designer, Echevarria-Navarro says, the hope is that the line will develop a following quickly. If it does, GFT will then take over production, he says, adding that he is consulting with Cedora on the growth of del Pozo’s business.
About his fall-winter collection, del Pozo says, “I don’t really know how to describe my collections in terms of theme, even at the end, when everything is designed. Let’s say that it is designed for an active woman who understands the luxury of being herself.”
Velours in cotton and silk figure in the collection, along with cashgora, a fabric made from the wool produced by a genetic cross between the cashmere-producing goat and the angora-producing sheep.
Although he used to consider color his weak point, he is now universally praised for his artistic shades. “I use all colors but I change shades, tones and combinations. My colors are never very bright; they’re sunbleached, as if they had been eaten up by the sun.”
For winter, he is painting his creations in a warm range from natural beige to dark burgundy with golds, toasts, reds and roses in between, offset by cool, cloudy blues and greens.
While other designers lean toward the simple lines and fragile colors of Spain, Jose Victor Rodriguez (Victorio) and Jose Luis Medina (Lucchino) embrace the exuberance of bullfights and flamenco, gaining an interested following at home and abroad.
Winners of Spain’s highest fashion award, the Premio Balenciaga, in the category of best designer for 1990, they have also recently been chosen to create the uniforms for Expo ’92, the World Exposition to be held here next year.
Although they joined forces in 1975, Victorio & Lucchino was strictly a local phenomenon until the early Eighties when they began to distribute their clothes around Spain. International sales did not begin until 1985, when they showed at the New York Pret. The designers now show at Cibeles in Madrid, Igedo in Dusseldorf, Mode Woche in Munich and the Fashion Coterie in New York.
“We are now up to about $5 million in annual billings and almost half of that is export,” says Medina. They sell to about a dozen countries, with Germany foremost among them and prospects for Far East sales improving.
Through U.S. representative Melina Vourlekis, the line goes to a handful of specialty shops including If in New York, Shauna Stein in Culver City, Calif., Modasport in Los Angeles, Gorsuch in Vail, Colo., and Sasha Frisson in Atlanta.
U.S. sales, hovering around the $150,000 mark, aren’t enormous but the designers are pleased at the American attraction to some of their bolder designs, such as a floor-length skirt with deep chocolate brown flounces from the winter 1990 collection. The line is produced by their company, Joluele SA through a group of cooperative workshops.
They would like to join up with a manufacturer and distributor who can take some of the burden off them. “That’s the future of all big designers at the right moment,” Medina says. “But we’re not going to get married to just anybody. We’re looking for the best manufacturer in the world.”
Although they are far removed from the fashion centers of Barcelona and Madrid, they say that living here allows them to remain more themselves, free from outside influences that might dilute the ideas behind their designs.
Seville gives them their palette — warm colors like chrysanthemum, sky blue, scarlet and white.
Their historical sense is keen, and immediately apparent from their office: It is in the house where the painter Velazquez was born. They have decorated their home with an extensive and imaginative collection of Spanish antiques.
History also permeates the names they give to their collections.
“We are trying to send messages in our collections,” explains Medina. “The last one was called `Tarsis’ after the ancient name given first to the Guadalquivir River and later to Seville long before the Romans came. In each collection there are historical elements that reflect who we are and where we’re from.”
They incorporate traditional crafts into their designs, like the crocheted fringes on their shawls.
“Some of these crafts are in danger of dying out,” says the more cherubic-looking Rodriguez, showing handmade lace that is used in their couture wedding gowns. “We’ve gotten together a group of older women in a village near here who pass on the techniques to younger women in workshops.”
The designers say they design for the Andalusian woman, passionate and temperamental, who enjoys dressing up an is aware of looking good. These are not stay-at-home clothes, so they appeal to women like socialite and party-giver Susan Gutfreund and Spanish aristocrats and jet setters like Carmen Rossi, granddaughter of the late dictator of Spain Francisco Franco.
The ideal fabric for achieving this effect, Medina says, is Egyptian cotton voile, supplied by a textile house in Barcelona. “We really love natural fabrics although we don’t reject fabrics like acrylic when we’re trying to do something sexy. But cotton voile is our overall favorite because it’s very subtle, transparent and very manageable when it comes to design.”
The lightness of the fabric is especially important to the designers. “When people see our clothes on the runway, they tell us that it makes them want to touch them because they seem to be flying, vaporous. That’s the feeling that we want to give in our clothing, that it is full of life both inside and out,” Medina explains.
These days the pair is bursting with plans: a lower-price women’s collection, a men’s collection, possibly one for children, maybe a lingerie line. A perfume is also in the works, probably to be launched in the next year.
“We’re not in a hurry with it,” says Medina. “We know what it will be called but we’re waiting for the right moment to do it.”
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The architects commissioned for Seville’s fair (the first universal exposition since Osaka’s in 1970) seem to concur that straightforward Modernism would be more resonant with the public than Post Modernism or Deconstructivism, the avantgarde movements of the intervening decades. This is not to say that Seville’s fair will be simply a rerun: High Tech, the Modern Movement’s godchild, will be a new (and lively) presence on the scene. It’s also a convenient mode for sponsors to affirm their faith in progress and foster good will among the millions visiting the fair.
Nicholas Grimshaw, a British exponent of High Tech, turned Seville’s triple-digit afternoon temperatures to advantage. Given his premise — that a glass box provides a gesture of welcome for the United Kingdom’s pavilion (2) — the mechanical trappings he overlaid are essential climatic responses. While critics may argue that the glass box is out of place in Spain, it would be unfair to dismiss this elegant structure as a misplaced building: Its mechanical systems substantiate Grimshaw’s High-Tech aspirations. Solar collectors on the roof will provide electricity to pump water for a cascade into an interior pool. Louvers on the north and south walls will deflect the sun’s rays, and the western wall will be a massive structure of sand-filled cells to absorb the heat of the afternoon sun.
Going a step beyond the transparent facade, Jean-Paul Viguier and Jean-Francois Jodry dematerialized the walls of the French Pavilion (3, 4): The main space will be a glass-paved podium sheltered by a broad blue roof and open on three sides. The architects’ motives were both climatic and ideological: The freely accessible square is a shaded respite and a metaphor for the egalitarian ideals that spread from France to the New World. Neo-Classical in inspiration, this pavilion evokes Boullee’s visionary designs: It is likely to impress, and perhaps inadvertantly, overwhelm visitors> a few human-scale references might be in order.
Science and culture, which Viguier considers essential complements of modern society, are the themes of the pavilion’s paired exhibit areas: Its Protocol Building, whose mirrored facade will overlook the plaza, will house displays on art and history. Below the glass pavers of the plaza, moving sidewalks will lead visitors through an experimental theater-in-the-round with mirrored walls that reflect an infinite array of images.
The United States Pavilion (5, 6) by Barton Myers Associates is a modest work of architecture — not in size, but in its measure of creativity. Devices typical of many pavilions, from water walls and moving sidewalks to vast awnings recur here without benefit of a strong design parti. Instead, one finds a series of windowless boxes arranged around three outdoor spaces in a manner better suited for an office park than the American world’s fair pavilion. A bit more exuberance and a more rigorous plan would have been welcome.
The Danish Pavilion (7-9) by Krohn & Hartvig Rasmussen Architects will be a minimalist sculpture that doubles as a building. A wall of arced sails, built of plywood, will furnish a powerful image evocative of Columbus’s ships as well as the Sydney Opera House. The curved profile has spatial dividends, too: it defines a soaring exhibit space within, comparable to a church nave or an airship hangar. The concave walls (which serve as movie screens) will be supported by trusses that lean toward an 8-story building for secondary exhibits and functions. Like some work by Saarinen, Utzon, and other midcentury Modernists, the Danish Pavilion’s initial impact is purely formal: Here, the steel structure seems to have followed, but not coincided with, the genesis of the architectural object. Unlike their High-Tech counterparts, Krohn & Hartvig Rasmussen give priority to the spatial enclosure instead of to the structure> they offer no sign of how the frame in the multistory building supports the tilted trusses.
Tadao Ando’s Japanese pavilion (10, 11), like an ancient wooden temple, will be a retreat from the mundane to the world of the imagination. While Ando’s reputation is predicated on his intuitive control of light and space with concrete (pp. 74-79 and P/A, Feb. 1990, pp. 83-97.) he seems equally talented in wood construction. Judging from Ando’s drawings and model, this pavilion will be more lyrical and figurative than his work in poured concrete. A monumental arched bridge, modeled on the taikobashi that traditionally marked a transition from this world to the next, will lead visitors to the uppermost of four exhibit levels. Translucent Teflon roof panels will filter light above ten clustered columns, each crowned by an enormous trabeated capital. Like the concave walls that are braced by tensile rods, the overscaled capitals keep the simple building from becoming a simplistic one> it is held taut by Ando’s subtle distortions of tradition.
By the way, all is going well with my hard drive recovery. I went with this company, and they are pretty amazing.
 I hope that I do not end up in this pile. I have finally booked my trip to Barcelona for July 2 of this year. This is going to be absolutely fantastic. It has been a while since I have been to Spain, but I cherish my memories of it always. I am actually looking forward to the potential of going back for the running of the Bulls, which is taking place in Pamplona, of course.
I think most of although I am looking forward to getting out of this country, which is getting a little bit stale for me. I have always said that I have had European tastes and frankly the United States does get very tiring after a while. All the political stuff tends to get a little bit over the top and it is not something that you want to have to pay attention to all of the time. As an example, I am of course talking about the presidential election which is going to be pretty much a cluster of madness over the next couple of months. But, I am so excited about the ability to go to Spain and to be able to leave this all behind and leave behind my city and leave behind everything so that I can enjoy one of the best cultures in the world. I love you Spain.
Well, I configured it has come just at the right time because I am really getting to the point where I have gotten very tired of working at my computer. There is really nothing good about working on your computer all time, and I think it has been my recent stretch of working with my computer that has caused a massive hard drive failure that I am still recovering from. I have grown to hate this computer and I have always loved it because of course is one of my favorite things to use on a daily basis.
But now I find myself seeing you as an enemy and I look forward to being away from it for at least two weeks. I was glad that my boss gave me all of that time off because if he didn’t I probably would have quit anyway. That is how tired I am of the American life and how much I want the same for myself. I can just picture myself in a beret loving all of Spain. I know that it sounds pretty French, but I’m going to go with it.
Life is good for me right now and I’m sure that my Spain trip will make my life so much more exciting and real. I think vacations are meant to be experiences in which you take on other aspects of your life that you may not have thought about before. It will be good to leave behind the day-to-day mess that is my life. I’m not saying I’m having a troubled time, but I am saying that everything does feel a little bit the same all the time. I am hoping that Spain will change my life forever, much as it has done for so many people across the United States. I am coming for you Spain, I am coming for you.
Possessing a clear understanding of her partner’s subjectivities, Dorotea appeals to the traditional social codes of blood and lineage (Fernando is an Old Christian noble) in order to remind him of his social and religious obligations and to persuade him to fulfill them. She also employs legal codes pertaining to nobility and the male blood line to reassure him that her own lack of nobility–according to the traditional social structure and its discourses–cannot change or negate his nobility. In a typical performative move, however, Dorotea immediately displaces this argument (and her lack, both of nobility and chastity) with the contestatory code of virtue-as-work (and, therefore, Fernando’s lack of nobility and virtue). According to these incipient discursive norms, if the nobleman does not uphold his part of the contract, Dorotea, due to her works will be more noble than Fernando, as he can only claim lineage (they both can claim blood). According to this new social order, what counts as nobility is good works (and not only in the sense of a moral good), and it is now up to Fernando to demonstrate his worth.
In a final move, Dorotea ends her appeal on a legal note. If her wifely love does not move him, or if he does not value his own nobility, there is a simple and undeniable juridical reason that both assures her chastity and his sacred and legal role as her husband: Dorotea is–and was at the time of their sexual encounter–Fernando’s wife, and she has not only heavenly and earthly witnesses, but his signature to prove it. As Cruz astutely observes: “In a genial stroke of rhetorical irony and feminine vindication, Dorotea singles out her agency through her statement, ‘yo soy tu esposa,’ at the same time that [...] her spoken words abidingly unite the couple into one indissoluble being” (629-30). Paradoxically, it is the patriarchal role of wife that opens a space for Dorotea’s subjectivity and grants her the right to pursue Fernando and to make use of the privileges inherent in the subject position of wife. Dorotea’s final performance as the perfect wife is once again endorsed by all those present, including the curate, who counsels Fernando on Dorotea’s behalf to acquiesce and recognize her as both his wife and his social equal. The labradora’s superb performance narrows Fernando’s options to one: “en fin, [...] se ablando y se dejo vencer de la verdad” (1.36:382).
In the end, Dorotea’s performance of the discourses that were circulating in the economic, legal, and moral treatises of the day succeeds in constructing a viable subject position for the doncella enganada. In fact, her performance is sufficient to enable her to threaten Don Fernando with an intolerable subject position should he refuse her. Throughout her performances in the Sierra Morena and at Juan Palomeque’s inn, Dorotea deftly selects, combines, and recombines available discourses in order to resist her marginalized status as both a deceived woman and a member of the emergent middle class, the rich peasants who were buying their way into Spain’s titled class. A key component of her success is her self-fashioning as a member of this new productive class that arbitristas such as Cellorigo, Gutierrez de los Rios, and Guzman were advocating as Spain’s salvation from economic and political ruin. In this way, Dorotea embraces a symbolic national role and illustrates a strategy to redeem the nation’s idle noblemen. Her genius is that she manages the redemption of both self and nation without replicating the conduct manuals’ traditional limitations on women. By suggesting that it is this new productive class that will reform Spain, Dorotea constructs a female subjectivity that is based more on the contestatory virtue of works than the traditional virtue of chastity. This new model of feminine virtue allows women limited mobility in multiple modalities and is recognized by both the noblemen and the clergy present at the inn: Dorotea is ultimately celebrated for her wit, her words, and her works rather than her virginity.
In the reader’s first encounter with Dorotea in the episode of the Sierra Morena, she is already a dishonored woman according to the discursive codes of sixteenth-century Spain (1.28:274). Dressed in drag as a shepherd, she tells her male audience which consists of the curate, the barber, and Cardenio–of how she was publicly courted and eventually seduced by the treacherous Don Fernando, although not before she had secured his word that be be her “legitimo esposo” (1.28:282). Her situation, her attentive audience learns, was further complicated when the nobleman broke his clandestine marriage promise, left town, and decided to marry Luscinda, a beautiful noblewoman in a neighboring city. In that vulnerable moment of unviable subjectivity (no longer a virgin but also not Fernando’s publicly recognized wife), Dorotea made the decision to do something with what had been done to her, and she donned male clothing and left in pursuit of Fernando.
By her own admission, however, Dorotea relates that her first attempt to construct an alternative subject position as a shepherd has been a failure. In seeking to distance herself from the unlivable subject position of mujer enganada, her initial performance as a male shepherd trespasses the intelligible limits of normative subjectivity. Much like Alonso Quijano’s performance as the anachronistic Don Quijote, Dorotea’s drag performance is censured through a series of corporal punishments by the men she encounters when she is forced to abandon her search for Fernando and flee to the Sierra Morena. Both her servant and her new master eventually condemn Dorotea’s fraudulent gender performance through their violent attempts to rape her. Although she successfully fights off both assaults, she is at the point of despair when she is discovered by Don Quijote’s friends. Indeed, the sole reason that we hear Dorotea’s story is because the farm girl turned shepherd is once more betrayed by the embodied norms of femininity. Her gender identity is again revealed when, hidden behind a rock, the three men secretly watch the shepherd as “he” takes off “his” cap and shakes free “his” abundant golden tresses (1.28:275-76). The knight’s friends correctly read her gender performance as artifice and the despairing labradora acknowledges to her three spectators that “toda mi industria [...] ha sido de ningun provecho” (1.28:2.88). However, captivated by her beauty and intrigued by her disguise, they entreat Dorotea to relate just how she finds herself in such a place and position. Dorotea’s failed cross-dressing performance, therefore, highlights the paradoxical nature of agency: it is at the moment when we fail to perform the norm that we are either incited or invited to perform again. Dorotea’s newfound audience invites her to perform again, to narrate her self once more precisely because her performance fails when she is undone by the norms that construct the female body. (9)
Her second gender performance for Don Quijote’s friends reveals yet another paradox of agency: it is often the very norms that undo us as subjects in the first place that we must later use to construct an alternative subject position. From the very beginning of her Sierra Morena performance, Dorotea appeals to the discursive codes that have undone her: virtue (she is no longer virgin and not yet a wife) and lineage (she is a peasant in a world where nobility matters). She constructs a mobile subjectivity that allows her to claim multiple subject positions, all sustained through a complex weave of dominant and emergent discourses. Using both the traditional and contestatory discourses surrounding these subjectivities, the jilted farmer’s daughter now creates a multiple female subject position that is nonetheless intelligible within the dominant historical structure. Her self-introduction reveals both an awareness and a criticism of her socioeconomic status in early modern Spain.
BY THE BEGINNING OF the seventeenth century, it was obvious to those both inside and outside of Spain’s borders that the country was experiencing a profound change; and not for the better, by most accounts: there were a series of national bankruptcies, rampant inflation, a decreasing population, plague, the loss of the Invincible Armada, and revolts from various corners of the Empire. 91) Politicians, moralists, arbitristas (economic reformers; literally, projectors/project planners), and novelists were all putting pen to paper in order to discuss, analyze, and prescribe what they perceived to be Spain’s state of crisis and decline. (2) One of the most famous fictional texts to come out of this conflictive period is Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote de la Mancha. The two-part novel is a keen representation of the economic, social, and psychological displacement that was experienced by early modern Spanish subjects as a result of what Jose Antonio Maravall termed “the diphasic schema of a social crisis” (“From the Renaissance” 2). The phenomenon of displacement–conceptualized here as the movement away from a normative subject position to another, alternative subject position–could and did occur (both by coercion and choice) as people reacted to and dealt with the crisis and the absolutist State’s increasingly restrictive response to the expansive tendencies of the sixteenth century. Indeed, Cervantes’s novel is a sustained exploration of the displacement of Alonso Quijano as he attempts to distance himself from the restrictive subject position of hidalgo and create an alternative space in which he can construct himself as an individual. In other words, the normative role of hidalgo available to Alonso Quijano within the dominant discourses of Habsburg Spain (primarily, through blood and lineage) had ceased to produce what Judith Butler terms “a livable life,” a life in which the physical and psychic survival–or both–of the subject is possible. (3) Although Quijano is the wandering subject par excellence, he is not the only character in the text with the dream of distancing himself from an unviable subject position, with the fantasy of being something or someone else.
 Did Don look like this? Much like the famous hidalgo, Dorotea, the dishonored farmer’s daughter whom we first meet in part one, chapter twenty-eight of Cervantes’s novel, also seeks to fulfill her dream of escaping an unlivable subject position. Dorotea herself signals her displacement, which is to say the undesirable change in her subjectivity, when she describes her post-Fernando life as “la vida que ya aborrezco” (1.28:287; my emphasis). In Undoing Gender, Butler notes that once viability is no longer possible within the prevailing social norms, “then it follows that my sense of survival depends upon escaping the clutch of those norms by which recognition is conferred. It may well be that my sense of social belonging is impaired by the distance I take, but surely that estrangement is preferable to gaining a sense of intelligibility by virtue of norms that will only do me in from another direction” (3). Displacement, the chosen and/or coerced estrangement from a recognized subject position, is a survival strategy used by a marginalized subject in order to maintain a sense of self. As a literary concept, displacement can inform our understanding of the material and discursive conditions that both undid Dorotea and enabled her to construct an emergent form of the female individual. (4) Indeed, Dorotea’s presence throughout nineteen chapters of the first part of Don Quijote provides for a well-developed female character who shares a similar fantasy with the protagonist: she wishes to be something other than the ruined maiden that we find wandering in the Sierra Morena.
orotea’s dislocation from chaste maiden to ruined woman allows us to trace the material conditions and the discursive norms that were operating to construct the seventeenth-century female Spanish subject. Furthermore, a sustained analysis of her gender performances permits us to see the breaking points of those norms: the moments where they fail to constitute an intelligible subject, which is to say a subject who is recognized by dominant social norms. Unlike Alonso Quijano, Dorotea ultimately succeeds in locating a new subject position for herself due to her ability to perform the possible: to select, combine, and recombine available discourses in an innovative manner that is non-threatening and, therefore, recognizable, to the established social order. Her eventual success will depend partly on her ability to construct a viable identity from what normative codes had already labeled as an unchaste castoff–and partly on her audience’s ability (and willingness) to recognize her current performance. (5)
Following the theoretical framework for tracking the emergence of the individualized subject proposed by George Mariscal in Contradictory Subjects: Quevedo, Cervantes, and Seventeenth-Century Spanish Culture, I argue that Dorotea, like Alonso Quijano, employs a variety of early modern discourses so as to constitute a possible subject position for herself. By possible I mean that it allows her to avoid further physical and psychic harm and that it allows others to consider her life as viable within the sociohistorical structure of the text. Although Mariscal traces the multiple, and often contradictory, discourses implicated in the construction of the aristocratic male subject, my study continues the work of scholars such as Anne J. Cruz and Rosilie Hernandez-Pecoraro by focusing on the discourses surrounding gender and the female subject. (6) I posit that Dorotea’s success hinges on her decision to select and recombine two diverse discourses of the period: the popular conduct manuals for women and the economic treatises that were appearing in an attempt to remedy the ills of seventeenth-century Spain. Whereas her selection of conduct manuals–full of male-authored prescriptions for performing normative feminine subject positions–is perhaps an inevitable choice, her selection of economic discourses is more inventive. The pairing of the two is ingenious: just as “virtue” in the form of the dignity of one’s works was being used to contest the traditional values of blood and lineage in the normative discourses for men, this debate also had consequences for women–both historical and literary. Throughout her various performances, Dorotea’s combined iterations of the contradictory discourses of blood, lineage, virtue, and gender that were found in the conduct manuals and the economic treatises allow her to resist her triple-marginalization as a woman, as a non-virgin, and as a rich peasant. Her subjectivity, however, is not without Cervantine (Baroque) contradiction and paradox. In order to perform a possible life, Dorotea must be able to act, but she may only act within the parameters of her historical epoch. Her subjectivity (or sense of agency) is proscribed by her material conditions.
I have never been a follower of European football, but I certainly do know quite a little bit about David Beckham and his team Real Madrid. I think I gained a lot of my information about football from a very short period of time when I was watching the Euro cup a long time ago. But I can tell you that it was something that I was very excited about and I have never felt that feeling about soccer fans. I know that they call it football in Spain, and of course that is a fantastic name for it. Europe tends to be right about a lot of these things when it comes to English stuff, so I can’t say that I’m surprised.
 Beckham in all his glory! Title For Controversy Sake Only!
I’m not trying to make the last line a bit of a disclaimer, but I am actually trying to make it a disclaimer. I know that sounds a little bit ridiculous, but the fact is that I know very little about football so I certainly am not one to talk. But I guess the fact that things are beginning to change around the Beckham family is probably a good thing. I had only seen Beckham play for Madrid a couple of times and I was really saddened when I heard he moved on to the Los Angeles Galaxy. In fact, I know very little about Los Angeles in general and frankly the only time that I ever spoke to someone in Los Angeles was when I had a problem with my computer and had to get a data recovery service out there perform mac hard drive recovery for me or there was no way I was going to get my files back. they did a fantastic job, and it was actually a lot cheaper than I thought it was going to be, but that was really my only Los Angeles experience, and that is pretty limited in general.
But I still think that Real Madrid has never been the same since they lost Beckham, and I believe that a lot of people who are huge fans of the team also believe this. But, I guess. The fact that he is a little bit of a soccer ambassador for America, which clearly doesn’t understand the sport in general. I think this is unfortunate because clearly it is good enough for the rest of the world, so why shouldn’t it be good enough for us?
The questions come day in and day out for me.
I you will need to always loving Spain even from the moment I was born. I know that I have read a lot of history on the Spanish Armada, and I’m not entirely sure if that is what convinced me of the glory of old Espana. Whatever this case was, I do know that I was taken from a very young age by this very beautiful country.
I think what surprised me and excited me most about the Spanish Armada was the fact that this was a massive army of people bent on taking over one of the largest powers in the history of man, that being the British Empire. I don’t think anyone really should’ve met with the British because it was clear that they had made that great island their home for years, and there was no way that anyone was going to take away from that. But, I will admit that it was pretty clear that Prince Philip had no choice at that point and obviously did when he could for Spain. I would like to blame the Swiss in the whole affair, but of course it is tough to do that because of course they are just mercenaries, as they have always been.
 Is this what the Spanish Armada looked like? I rather wish they would have been one of those fantastic battle that everyone talks about when they talk about European history, but it was pretty clear that it fell out very quickly. There was very little to this particular battle, and what turned out was that the Spanish basically ended up starving themselves on the way up to England. Let’s remember that this was the time of airplanes or motors, and sailing a ship took a long time, especially when the wind was against you, which it was for the commanders of the Armada.
Still, that a story always strikes me as both an exercise encourage an exercise in total madness. But then, that is exactly what intrigues me about the Spanish culture in general: is so much joy, though much pain, and so much madness that is a wonder to the whole. My recent trip to Madrid have been fantastic. I intend to return very soon.
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