American problems are familiar in Spain

Dear Mr Bageant,

I am writing to tell you how much I have enjoyed Deer Hunting with Jesus, which I finished just this morning. I read the Spanish edition, Crónicas de la América profunda. 

I found your book by chance, thanks to a notice in my local library (the reason why I read in Spanish and not in English, although I will try to get in the original language and have a go at it again, it's really worth it). Here in Spain, the only picture we get from your country is through the movies and the television series. We eat your food, we wear your clothes and our kids copy the ways of the downtown kids in your country (talk about paranoia -- it's really disturbing to see a Colombian kid who has barely spent two months here, living in one of the slums in Madrid, Spain, and dressing and gesticulating as a bro in the hood), but there is a great deal we miss, because it is not the stuff of television.

Currently my country is going through a recession, although politicians are reluctant to call it thus -- the "r" word has been replaced by "desacceleration" (if such a terrible word exists in English) but we are broke anyway. Believe it or not, TV tells us that it all started with the subprime mortgages (globalization has its bad sides, too) and some of my countrymen have lost money in the downfall of Lehman and AIG. While reading about Tommy Ray in your book and the way he was given his mortgage, as well as how his mobile home started to lose value from the moment he signed the papers, I could feel my hair stand on end. No matter what our bankers tell us, it all felt so familiar, and there are so many people who managed to buy an appartment for 100,000 euros and now its value barely reaches 70,000. What I mean is that what you are have been going through it's all starting in Spain now. But, just like your own countrypeople, mine also place their hopes in cell phones, and videogames, and holidays and God knows what else.

I just loved the way you talked about your Winchester people, and it served me to stop and think about my own Vallecas people. I work in a high school located in such place, a district in Madrid which has enjoyed a certain recovery in the last years but that it still harbours a great deal of poverty, lack of prospects,  lack of hope. Many of my students just want to end school and find a third rate job with a relative as apprentice plumbers or carpenters, just when the building business and all its frills is going down the toilet. Others are already drop-outs, but the education system still keeps them in a sort of limbo until they are old enough to go out to the real world. They do gardening instead of maths. As you often say in your book, their vote is as important and valuable as ours, with our university degrees and our foreign languages and stuff.

I was lucky. I could study and go to college, get a good job pretty early in my life, get to travel and see other things, and meet other peoples, and when you do such things it often happens that you forget about a great part of your country, of your people, whose perspective is different, or limited. Thank God I don't work in a posh school.

It is not that often that one is given the opportunity to talk back to an author, even if by email. Thanks for your book, thanks for your insights, thanks for giving us food for thought, thanks for it all.

I do wish you all the best and I'll follow up the rest of your works.

From Spain,

Celia