In 2011 he had half a shaved head and wore various earrings, he lived in Aranjuez and worked as a guide for the Telefónica building while studying journalism.
Ana Iris Simón (Campo de Criptana, Ciudad Real, 30 years old) was 19 when she "went up and down" from the south of the Community of Madrid, where she had grown up, to Puerta del Sol to join the protests and rallies of 15 -M.
Just 10 years later, last May, with her hair well-groomed, a polka dot skirt and a white blouse, the writer came again from Aranjuez to the capital to talk about politics at ground level.
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“I left Madrid because it was not my place.
I don't want to be a 30-year-old teenager. "
The writer who sang the forty
The appointment was at the Palacio de la Moncloa on the occasion of the presentation of the
Peoples with a Future
plan
, a project to reactivate rural areas that is part of the Spain 2050 program, and Ana Iris once again shook the waters by speaking “very clearly”, as she said, of the real impact that she observes globalization and depopulation have on the lives of many young people of her generation. The writer, then almost eight months pregnant, did not beat around the bush: she was envious of the life her parents led at her age, when they already had one daughter and were waiting for the second, they paid a mortgage on the house where they lived, they were owners of a car and a Themormix that her mother had managed to buy with what she had saved by quitting smoking. Simón synthesized the ideas from which he started at the
Fair
(Círculo de Tiza), his first book.
Published in October 2020, halfway between family memories and the essay on the precariousness that corrodes young people, it has been one of the great editorial successes of the year, and one of the titles that has generated the most debate.
“Today I see 15-M as a bourgeois movement, but then, with the bipartisanship and in the midst of the economic crisis, it was a question of proposing another way of doing things.
I think the axis is more between up and down than between left and right ”, he reflected one morning in early July at his house in the center of Aranjuez, in a block with a beautiful entrance with very high ceilings -” it is a second that seems a room ”- from which you can see the rooftops and a resplendent sky.
Diego and Sergio, two of the cousins of the author of 'Feria'.
Image from Ana Iris Simón's family album Picasa
Politics has never been alien to Simón, it could not be, and neither is the family, nor the La Mancha landscape.
She is the daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter of communists on her father's side, as she writes in
Feria,
and, on the maternal side, on the “magical realism” of her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother.
They are women from a family of market-keepers from La Mancha, a world perfectly connected to that described by Pedro Almodóvar in films such as
Volver
or
La flor de mi Secreto
, where graves are cleaned every year, kisses are loud and the neighbors sit in the fresh air. without this being associated with a label of "female care network", as the author ironically puts it.
It is no coincidence that Simón has a tattoo on his arm that says '
Made
in
La Mancha', that he writes about that grandmother who told him that when she died she would appear to him and he should not be afraid, that he speaks of older relatives hardened in the They talk to young nephews dressed in leopard shirts with painted nails or the porridge that their grandfather prepares for them. "Paris says that I am attached to the earth like a hobbit," she commented in a childish and frank voice. Hasel-Paris Álvarez is her partner and the father of her child - "Ana Iris and Hasel Paris, little names that those parents of the nineties used to use," he jokes. While she assures that there is much in her book that she took from him, her partner says that she writes "although with less success than my wife" and does not hide her pride when seeing her pose for photos.
In her living room are the light wood shelves, the PlayStation and Adam's rib plant, three essentials of any house of a thirty-year-old about which the writer makes her argument to declare that this modernity that many young people bet on, that they are fulfilling years in shared flats and chaining temporary contracts, has something of a scam.
"I have a lot to crack, but then ...", he says, pointing to the Play and the flowerpot.
“When we were little we complained about our grandparents' houses and now the young people's houses are the same, they could be in Arizona.
Today we believe we are special by being indistinguishable ”.
Image from Simón's album in which his cousin Hilario and his uncle Diego appear, in a May Day demonstration.
At La Sede, as the Simóns called grandfather's house, there were flags of the Cuban Revolution, China and Vietnam. In his there are also some Mao cups and, prominently on the shelves, a framed cover of the
Granma
newspaper
with Chávez and Fidel that his friend Tamara brought him from a trip to Cuba. “She is the daughter of street sweepers and has a
cum laude
doctorate
. For us, reaching the university was reaching the moon. I am very proud of my home and my institute, of the teachers who have inspired me. Public education must be taken care of ”, he points out. In this same room he works at his desk, these days between takes. She is fully recovered from childbirth and wastes joy.
Less than a year ago he settled in Aranjuez, after a long time in Madrid, where he chained jobs in magazines. In the first, in the magazine
Telva
, he says that he removed a lot of prejudices writing captions or about children's fashion. Simón feels that she has always been lucky. "Perhaps the dramatic thing is that someone who has gone through three ERE is somehow privileged because I have never been unemployed and I have never lacked work," he reflected walking through the streets of the center of Aranjuez and through the Jardines de la Princesa.
She is happy in this city that she came to as a child because her parents worked as postmen, in an office around the corner from her current home. In fact, his mother, Ana Mari, has stayed today with the newborn taking advantage of a strike that they do every day to demand better conditions. Ana Mari, as Simón says at the
Fair
, is beautiful and combative, fond of posting videos of the Correos en Lucha group on Facebook. He appears in the summer uniform of blue shorts and yellow shirt, pushing the newborn's cart.
Tamara and the rest of her friends and cousins and uncles and grandparents also go out at the
Feria
. "I am surprised that many readers have become so fond of my family and that many people are represented," he explains. He has written that his father transmitted the best thing he had to him: "The conscience of class." Simón claims that identification capacity that his book has for many readers: in its pages they will not find an aspirational mirage. “The social reality is there if you write about the experience of the daughter of a postman. It is about allowing those who read it to feel that their life deserves to be told ”. Simón did not opt for something safe and an opposition but for a creative profession, something that entails, today in a palpable way, a precariousness. Does the mortgage and the car and the Thermomix that she envies not go with that
security
afforded by certain jobs? "I think we all have the right to turn a vocation into a job and Madrid is full of kids who bet on it," he explains. "My father told me to study, that if I did not end up being the smartest cashier in the supermarket, and one day I thought that what had been the use of studying if I was getting paid or myself." The success of
Feria
and its transfer to Aranjuez have given it a break.
Simón, with his self-confidence and warmth, wins over whoever is in front of him.
She says that she "doesn't think much" about herself, and flies over the fights of the networks.
Small in appearance and wide-eyed, he is not afraid of political discussion or pointing out, because for something he has spent half his life talking and discussing these issues with his father, and exchanging articles and positions.
On the walk through the garden he talks about how, from the Marxist Research Center to the leader of Vox, many have wanted to join the
Fair
, “from all parties”, people from all over the world.
“They cannot accuse me of anything.
If they call me a fascist, they are telling my grandfather.
Look, everyone has a family, vote for whoever they vote for, and cry at funerals ”.
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