ABSTRACT
This essay argues for the centrality of spatial concerns in Hispanic Cultural Studies, especially how real-time transformations of the urban process and the built environment mediate cultural creations. It maintains that digital mapping tools can provide important information to substantiate these connections and establish a dialogue of equals with scholars in the humanistic social sciences when discussing the relationships between real and imagined spaces and places. Using a mapping tool designed in the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona, this essay analyzes novels by Ismael Grasa ( De Madrid al cielo, 1994) and Juan Madrid (Cuentas pendientes, 1995). As two of the few texts of the period that have working-class protagonists, the novels help form a context for the current spate of cultural creations dealing with precariousness and indignation that arose as a result of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the massive public acts of resistance that began to take place in 2011 in Spain. As such, they combat contemporary exceptionalism and establish the thread of historical continuity throughout cultural and political resistance to the abuses of capital.
