The Spanish writer Elvira Lindo has returned to the years she once spent moving between Madrid and New York, reflecting on a turbulent period that now reads, in her view, like an early draft of the present. In an extensive interview originally published by El País, Lindo revisits the columns she wrote between 2006 and 2011 for the newspaper, now republished under the title Don de gentes, and describes them as both a chronicle of everyday life and an “involuntary diary” of a world on the verge of transformation.
Those years, she explains, were marked by a constant oscillation between personal observation and global upheaval. Living half the year in New York and half in Madrid, she wrote weekly columns that mixed narrative detail with cultural commentary, focusing less on abstract opinion and more on the individuals she encountered. The result, she says, was a body of work rooted in storytelling rather than editorial judgment. “My opinion alone is not valuable,” she reflects in the interview, emphasizing her preference for grounding ideas in lived experience.
The columns, originally published in El País, captured what she now describes as a period when “macrohistory and microhistory” overlapped. On one hand, the financial crisis was beginning to reshape global economies; on the other, her personal life in New York provided material that felt intimate, fragmented, and often unexpectedly revealing. Looking back, she suggests that those texts already contained hints of the “polycrisis” that would define later decades, even if the full scale of that transformation was not yet visible.
Lindo notes that revisiting her own writing can be uncomfortable, but in this case she found herself largely satisfied. The texts, she says, retain humor and narrative energy, and reflect a moment when she was learning to observe the world with a more open and less predetermined gaze. Her time in New York, she explains, was formative in that sense: it taught her independence, solitude, and a kind of observational clarity stripped of inherited assumptions.
Yet that clarity also led her to challenge certain narratives about the United States that she had previously accepted. Speaking to El País, she expressed frustration with the idea of American democracy as inherently exemplary, arguing that such perceptions often ignore the persistence of structural inequality, particularly around race. She recalled how, through reading and daily observation, she became increasingly aware of how racism in the United States had evolved rather than disappeared, mutating from its historical forms into more subtle but persistent structures.
This shift in perspective, she suggests, resembles what is often described as a “woke” awakening, though she prefers to frame it in Spanish terms. For Lindo, the experience in the United States was not about adopting ideological labels, but about recognizing contradictions between constitutional ideals and lived reality. She also cautions against what she sees as excessive moral rigidity in contemporary discourse, arguing that punitive cultural dynamics can ultimately restrict freedom of expression rather than expand it.
One of the most striking threads in her reflection is her reading of Donald Trump’s emergence as a political figure. According to Lindo, Trump was not an abrupt anomaly but rather a product of deeper cultural and social currents already visible in American society during her years in New York. In her conversation with El País, she describes him as carrying “the anger of not having been accepted by New York’s cultural elite,” a group she says viewed him as vulgar or unsophisticated. For Lindo, this rejection and resentment became part of his public identity, shaped by the city’s own contradictions between sophistication and raw aggression.
She situates Trump within a broader urban context, noting that New York itself embodies extremes: cultural refinement and financial power on one side, and harsh inequality and social tension on the other. This duality, she argues, helps explain how a figure like Trump could emerge from a city that simultaneously rejected and produced him. She also points out that his political rise coincided with deeper structural crises already unfolding in the United States, including the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse.
That economic crisis, she recalls, was visible daily in New York long before it fully registered in Spain. While American society was already absorbing its effects, she observed a delayed recognition in Spanish public discourse, which initially clung to the idea of economic stability. The contrast between both countries, she suggests, revealed how unevenly global shocks are experienced and understood.
Lindo also connects this period to Spain’s later political awakening during the 15M movement, recalling how she followed events in Madrid closely from abroad and discussed them with her family. In her view, these movements were part of the same broader cycle of discontent and institutional questioning that had already begun to surface internationally.
Her reflections also draw on literary influences. She compares her New York writing to the work of American authors such as Nora Ephron and Fran Lebowitz, as well as Dorothy Parker, noting their sharp observational style. However, she emphasizes that her own perspective was different, shaped by the experience of being an outsider in the city. Where those writers often described New York as a familiar environment, she approached it with a sense of discovery and occasional estrangement.
Lindo also uses the El País interview to revisit her position as a columnist, a role she describes as both demanding and liberating. Writing weekly columns, she says, requires constant attention to the world and an ability to find narrative meaning in small events. At times, she admits, the pressure of deadlines leads to imperfect texts, but she believes the form itself demands immediacy and connection with readers.
In the broader media landscape, she reflects on how the rise of social networks has disrupted the traditional authority of columnists and journalists. While she acknowledges the democratization of opinion, she also warns that online discourse often lacks context and encourages reactive rather than reflective responses. For this reason, she has gradually withdrawn from active participation in digital platforms.
The conversation, as published by El País, also turns personal in its closing moments. Lindo recalls her parents as early readers of the newspaper, remembering a home video of her mother reading El País with great attention. She describes this image as emotionally significant, representing a generation for whom newspapers were not only sources of information but also tools of civic engagement. Holding on to her mother’s reading glasses, she reflects on the continuity between private memory and public history, a theme that quietly underpins much of her writing.
Through this return to her Don de gentes columns, Elvira Lindo offers not only a retrospective on her own career, but also a meditation on a period that now appears pivotal. As she sees it, the years between 2006 and 2011 were not simply a transitional moment, but a foundational stage in the emergence of today’s political, cultural, and technological uncertainties—an era in which, as she tells El País, “the seeds of what was coming were already being planted.”
