Views and Voices of the Working Class: Aída and Rosario

In 2005, Spanish television audiences saw the debut of the nation’s first spinoff, the sitcom Aída. The show featured the tribulations of its title character and her working-class family in their struggle to “llegar a fin de mes.” It seemed to promise a sensibility enacted in the US series Roseanne, where another eponymous heroine faced similar conditions with wit and verve. Aída became a tremendous hit for its network, Telecinco, but unlike Roseanne, its approach to the working class did not break new ground. Such a distinction belongs to another cultural product also appearing in 2005, Elvira Lindo’s novel, Una palabra tuya. Consisting of a first-person narration by Rosario, a municipal street sweeper, the novel delivers working-class credentials through an insider’s view and focuses on the physical conditions and labor of work, nonaestheticization and nonidealization of working-class life, and the consciousness of a multiple we voiced through the narrator’s I.