Alfredo Valenzuela I Sevilla, (EFE) ”, the American Deirdre Mask, author of “El Callejero”, an essay halfway between reporting and sociological study, told EFE.
The worst thing about that situation is that, according to Deirdre Mask, a lawyer and writer who studied at Oxford and Harvard, having a postal address is one of the fastest and easiest ways out of poverty because “an address opens many doors ; it’s hard to do banking or get credit without an address.”
Lacking it “can also make it very difficult to vote or obtain identity documents. And for cities without direction it is difficult to impose fair taxes on their residents. And taxes are very important to make cities profitable places for business”, explained the author of Callejero, published in Spain by Capitán Swing.
The biggest surprise that his investigation has given him was verifying “how much people care about their address” and he says that in South Africa, for example, he found “a journalist who in his day worked as a lawyer for the Supreme Court and who He claimed that a case involving street names was one of the most contentious he had ever seen.”
Discussions about the street map around the world
“And in that case it was a court that had tried large-scale cases on apartheid, the death penalty and gay marriage,” he added, to insist: “All over the world people argue about the names of the streets, and that’s a fascinating subject.”
Asked if the name of a street can determine the race of its inhabitants, he has responded that it is not so much a question of determining as of “reflecting or suggesting the racial composition of the residents. Streets named after Martin Luther King, for example, are important streets in and for black communities in the United States for obvious reasons, and because white neighborhood dwellers long rejected that name for their streets.
Regarding the Spanish debate on the application of historical memory, he pointed out that “the result of the debates matters less than the fact that people talk about the matter. In many cases street names are a way of speaking locally about important and divisive historical moments that would otherwise be confined to textbooks or academic classrooms; these are issues that people should talk about, and street names offer a way to do that.”
history review
As for the difference between the streets of Europe and the United States, he has pointed out that “the most obvious, that of numbered streets -almost all large American cities have them in one way or another- also reflects rationality and independence over which the United States was founded.”
Regarding what was said in “Les Miserables” by Victor Hugo, a supporter of preserving all the names of the streets as such historical heritage and as a sign of assuming all history, Mask has responded that “history is not a sign on a street or a statue, so changing one of them doesn’t change the story.”
“Is naming a street after someone an honor? And if so, does that person deserve to be honored? Removing the name of the street does not eliminate the person or what happened, but it can change the way we frame that story”, she has concluded. EFE